Jeremiah 31:31-34

Resources

1. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence & the Sacred, p. 155; Williams' comments on the prophet Jeremiah are on pages 144-145 and 154-156.

2. Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, p. 118.

3. More generally on the prophet Jeremiah, see Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 177-184.

4. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon from October 21, 2001 (Woodside Village Church).

Reflections and Questions

1. There's a lot of talk about forgiveness, which has been a matter of much debate in our culture to begin with. Should those who have been grievously harmed -- survivors of sexual abuse, for example -- be expected to forgive their offenders? Can white colonialism be forgiven for slavery or its genocide against native peoples? (See Walter Wink's recent book, When the Powers Fall: Reconciliation in the Healing of Nations.) And how should our forgiveness of each other be distinguished from God's forgiveness for us? Can we truly be expected to forgive as graciously as God forgives?

With much debate of the subject, one of the most rejected phrases currently is the maxim "forgive and forget." When one comes to the point of forgiveness and reconciliation, it does not mean forgetting the offense. It means forgiving and reconciling in spite of the offense.

I think that a Girardian view on the matter would support the latter position. James Alison speaks of The Joy of Being Wrong; in other words, joy comes precisely through not forgetting but through knowing how much we are forgiven as we come to see the depth of our sin. Gil Bailie has been especially clear in emphasizing the fact that aleitheia, the Greek word for "truth," literally means to "stop forgetting." Part of the delusion of our sinfulness is to help us forget the resentment and violence that stands at the center of both our fallen selves and our sacred cultures. The cross becomes our means to stop forgetting. It is the truth that sets us free (John 8). It is why Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. All other religions and philosophies, including Christianity to the extent that it becomes a religion of the sacred, are part of the cover-up. Yes, they can come to have many positive aspects of creativity and community, but these very positive elements can be the central means for covering-up and keeping us in the delusion that we haven't hopelessly fallen into resentment and violence. That is why the resentment and violence never completely leave us, but continues to jump up and bite us, in spite of our valiant efforts at thinking ourselves civilized, cultured, and full of "creative spirituality." The only way out of the "eternal return" of the resentment and violence is to stop forgetting. The only way is through the Cross.

The question, then, is whether Jeremiah might have slightly missed the mark, slightly overstated the matter, by making forgiveness a matter of God's forgetting. God's remembering our sin no more might be a powerful way to state the matter of forgiveness, but does it end up being misleading? Does Jeremiah's theology of forgiveness in 31:31-34 conflict with Jesus' liberating truth in John 8, where Jesus won't let the Jewish leaders forget that we have followed a father who is the essence of the Lie and a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44)? In fact, as Jesus stands before Pilate, about to be sentenced to the Cross, he once again states his mission: "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." (John 18:37) In other words, Jesus came into this world that we might finally stop forgetting. No, forgiveness doesn't come through God's forgetfulness; it comes through God's gracious love that both leads us into stopping to forget and, in doing so, helping us to finally begin to get beyond the resentment and violence. It comes through the Son who can speak a word of forgiveness even from the Cross, not in forgetfulness of it.

2. Since writing the above reflections on forgiveness, there have been at least two further significant insights. The first involves Jesus’ speaking a word of forgiveness from the Cross. It might be significant to note that Jesus does not directly forgive his persecutors. He doesn’t say, “I forgive you.” He prays, “Father, forgive them...” As human beings, there are times when we might have trouble being able to directly forgive our persecutors. At those times, can we at least come to turn it over to God? It might even be to confess to God that we cannot forgive them, while allowing for the possibility that God might be able to and want to.

There might also be something about the indirectness of Jesus’ prayer for forgiveness that is more gracious to those who are in position to receive it. James Alison, in his recent book On Being Liked (ch. 3, “Re-imagining forgiveness: victory as reconciliation”), speaks about how sometimes a direct forgiveness can be used as vengeance, or at least taken that way. There are situations in which it is very difficult to say a direct “I forgive you” without seeming smug or condescending, even if we are genuine about it. What’s worse is that we can often actually intend it as a smug and condescending statement -- in which case, it has become an act of vengeance, not forgiveness. So perhaps, as his persecutors stand mocking him, Jesus’ prayer to God is, at that moment, the most gracious way that he can speak a word of forgiveness.

3. The other important insight around forgiveness for me has come from those who talk about nonviolence as radical nonretaliation. This raises the question for me, “What is the opposite of forgiveness?” Isn’t it vengeance? And so isn’t forgiveness, first of all, an act of nonretaliation in a situation that usually calls forth vengeance? To forgive is to relinquish the desire for retaliation and vengeance. And so there is an important respect in which nonviolence and forgiveness are the same thing. They both involve radical nonretaliation.

Romans 3:19-28

Exegetical Notes

1. The Greek dik words abound in this passage, appearing 10 times: once for the adjective hypodikos (v. 19, most often translated as "accountable"); 4 times for the verb dikaioō (vs. 20, 24, 26, 28, most often translated as "justify"); 4 times for the noun dikaiosynē (vs. 21, 22, 25, 26, most often translated as "righteousness"); and once for the adjective dikaios (v. 26, most often translated as "righteous"). Thus it is difficult to translate all these dik words in a way that makes clear they are all related. There are those who choose "righteousness" for the noun dikaiosynē and then "make right" or "declare right" for the verb dikaioō, the latter more often being translated as the crucial Reformation term "justify." So another choice for dikaiosynē to be consistent with "justify" would be to translate it as "justice." Louis Martyn in his groundbreaking commentary on Galatians chooses an older option in English, "rectification" and "rectify."

My preference is to translate all the dik words with the root "just," making the noun and verb "justice" and "justify," respectively. The adjective dikaios is simply "just." More difficult is the adjective hypodikos, "accountable." To keep the "just" root word, I would suggest the phrase "brought to justice," or "under judgment." Note: the rather common Greek word adikos, often translated simply as "evil," in keeping with my practice here would be translated as "unjust" -- which it usually is in its only occurrence in Romans, at 3:5. (Misleading in this regard is to translate adikos as "dishonest" [NRSV] in Luke's parable of the dismissed steward, Luke 16:10-11.)

2. ho nomos, "the law," and ergon nomos, "works of the law." In Paul's own Aramaic/Hebrew tongue he would be speaking here of Torah, which is more than mere "law," especially in our now secular understandings of the word. Prior to modern secularism, Paul's understanding of "law" was entirely religious. In fact, in many respects Torah for him simply meant the Jewish religion. He may have been using ho nomos in a manner more generally than Torah, but certainly Torah represented for Paul the full stature, the epitome, of human law. And remember, again, that law in the ancient world was bound up with religion.

Similarly, for "works of the law." Paul is talking about religious practice. In the specific context of Romans and Galatians, we see Paul's argument against a 'Judaizing' Teacher in Galatia and Rome as specifically against making Gentile converts to take up all the practices of the Jewish religion, such as circumcision for males, and following all 613 commandments of the Torah. When he poses "faith" against "works of the law," he is therefore posing a faithfulness which follows Christ to the cross in transcending human practice of religion. The problem all along with human religious practice is that it, too, has been enslaved under the powers of sin that divide us, working against God's original intentions for Creation to be in harmony. Paul in Romans 3:19-26 is thus posing the cross as an event which transcends human religious practice to become the source of the unification of all things against a decay under the powers that separate us (Romans 8:18-39).

Louis Martyn in his Galatians is again helpful. He refers to the cross event as "apocalypse," God breaking into our human realm and setting a "cosmic antinomy," a divine instance of anti-law. In the introduction Martyn considers the charge of Galatians being anti-Judaic and writes, "For without exception, in the passages listed, as in others, the ruling polarity is not that of Christianity versus Judaism, church versus synagogue. As we will see repeatedly, that ruling polarity is rather the cosmic antinomy of God’s apocalyptic act in Christ versus religion, and thus the gospel versus religious tradition" (p. 37). In other words, the Reformation was off-track to the extent that it used Paul's message as one of Christian grace versus Jewish works in its own attack on Roman religion, unwittingly reinforcing anti-Judaism. Martyn is posing to us that Paul's view of the Christ event is that it is supposed to carry us beyond all religion, precisely to the extent that religion has been oppositional -- i.e., part of the problem, not the solution. Martyn writes,

With the advent of Christ, then, the antinomy between apocalypse and religion has been enacted by God once for all. Moreover, this antinomy is central to the way in which Paul does theology in Galatians, not least in connection with one of its major themes, rectification. As the antidote to what is wrong in the world does not lie in religion — religion being one of the major components of the wrong — so the point of departure from which there can be movement to set things right cannot be found in religion; as though, provided with a good religious foundation for a good religious ladder, one could ascend from the wrong to the right. Things are the other way around. God has elected to invade the realm of wrong — “the present evil age” (1:4) — by sending his Son and the Spirit of his Son into it from outside it. This apocalyptic invasion thus shows that to take the Sinaitic Law to the Gentiles — as the Teachers are doing — is to engage in a mission that is marked at its center by the impotence of religion.

We sense, then, the reason for Paul’s certainty that neither Christ nor Abraham is a religious figure, but we also see that, in Paul’s view, the antinomy between apocalypse and religion militates against the emergence of religion within the church. And for that reason the church is not a new religion set over against the old religion, Judaism. (p. 39)

In short, Martyn confirms what we are saying about Paul meaning "religion" when speaking about the "law" -- no where more clearly than in describing the effect of Gentiles giving in to the Teacher:

When Gentiles turn to the observance of the Sinaitic Law after having been baptized into Christ, Paul says that they embrace a form of religion that is for them indistinguishable from the pagan religion into which they were born! For this step removes them from Christ (4:8-11; 5:4). Quite specifically, then, for Gentiles Law observance is nothing other than a religion — as opposed to God’s apocalypse in Christ — and therefore enslaving. (p. 39)

To better convey what Paul meant, as a pre-modern person without the secular separation of law from religion, by ho nomos and ergon nomos, I recommend translating these terms as "religion" and "religious practice."

3. Vs 22: "the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." This is a key instance in which wording from St. Paul is translated as "faith in Jesus Christ," a good Protestant rendering that emphasizes our having faith in Christ. But the most reliable writings of Paul never use the most common Greek word for "in" (en). Eph 1:15 and Col 1:4 use the preposition en for "faith in Christ," but the Pauline authorship is contested. Most often in the uncontested letters of Paul, he uses a genitive construction pisteos 'Iēsou Christou (e.g., Romans 3:22, 26; Gal 2:16, 3:22; Phil 3:9), which can be translated either as "faith of Jesus Christ" or "faith in Jesus Christ." The former is the more typical way to translate a genitive construction, but the latter is the way that all modern translators choose to translate this particular one. A similarly structured genitive construction is used by Paul with regards to Abraham in Romans 4:16 and to the gospel in Phil 1:27, and the translators switch back to the usual way: "faith of Abraham" and "faith of the gospel." (It wouldn't make sense to say "faith in Abraham"!)

Among those who corroborate a reading against the current trend in translation is N. T. Wright in the New Interpreter’s Bible (Vol. 10):

This righteousness, this world-righting covenant faithfulness, has been revealed “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.” Though the phrase could mean “through faith in Jesus the Messiah,” the entire argument of the section strongly suggests that it is Jesus’ own pistis that is spoken of and that the word here means “faithfulness,” not “faith” (see the NRSV note and the secondary literature referred to in the Overview). This is not to say that Jesus himself was “justified by faith.” Nor does Paul envisage him, as does Hebrews, as the “pioneer” of Christian faith, the first one to believe in the way that Christians now believe (Heb 12:1-3). Nor is his “faith” a kind of meritorious work, an “active obedience” to be then accredited to those who belong to him. To be sure, Paul would have agreed that Jesus believed in the one he called Abba, Father, and that this faith sustained him in total obedience; but this is not the point he is making here. The point here is that Jesus has offered to God, at last, the faithfulness Israel had denied (3:2-3).

A further reason why pistis 'Iēsou Christou here is likely to refer to Jesus’ own faithfulness is that, if taken instead to refer to the faith Christians have “in” Jesus, the next phrase (“for all who believe”) becomes almost entirely redundant, adding only the (admittedly important) “all.” The train of thought is clearer if we read it as “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all who believe.” This then corresponds closely to the reading suggested above for 1:17: from God’s faithfulness to answering human faith. (It is also very close to Gal 3:22, where similar discussions have taken place.) [p. 470]

St. Paul: ¹⁹We know that whatever religion says, it speaks to those who are under religion, such that every mouth might be silenced, and the whole world might come under God's judgment. ²⁰ For “no flesh will be justified before God” by religious practice, for through religion comes consciousness of sin. ²¹ Now, then, apart from religion, the justice of God has been disclosed, and is attested by Scripture: ²² the justice of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who trust. For there is no distinction, ²³ since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴ they are now justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God intended to be the source of unification effective through faithfulness in his blood. God did this to show God’s justice, because in divine forbearance God granted amnesty for sins previously committed; ²⁶ it was to prove at the present time that God’s justice is itself just in the very act of declaring everyone just by the faithfulness of Jesus.

Teacher: ²⁷ Then what becomes of boasting?

St. Paul: It is excluded.

Teacher: By what religious practice?

St. Paul: By none, but rather by a new spiritual faithfulness. ²⁸ For we hold that a person is justified by a spiritual faithfulness beyond previous religious practice.

1. Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (see my review on the Amazon.com page). This is now the definitive book that must be contended with regarding any crucial interpretations of Romans. Campbell has four chapters, roughly 135 pages (601-735), covering Romans 3:21-31, as the heart of his argument that it is time for heirs of the Reformation to give up their Justification theology. Chapter 17, "The Deliverance of God, and Its Rhetorical Implications," argues that dikaiosynē in Paul means liberation, deliverance, rescue, rather than a forensic imputation of rightness or justification. Paul's Gospel is about creation being delivered from the powers of sin and death, powers that work against harmony, through an unconditionally gracious rescue operation by God's faithful Messiah -- instead of an imputation of "justified" graciously stamped on a "totally depraved" humanity. The latter Justification theology either devolves into a conditional grace based on the faith of the believer, instead of being based on the fidelity of the Messiah to his rescue mission, or it ends up wandering down the Calvinist path of double predestination, conditioned on God's election of some but not others. (Luther seemingly chose the path of mysticism, refusing to go down the path of double predestination due to the mystery of God's grace. Campbell instead chooses the Luther who centers his theology on a God who delivers the ungodly [Rom 4:5; 5:6] -- in other words, all of humanity -- as the Luther of unconditional grace. The other Luther reads Romans 1-3 in a flawed way that wanders down the path of conditional grace -- short of double predestination.) Either way, the primary interpretations of Justification theology mean a conditional grace instead of the unconditional grace that the Reformation thought it stood for.

2. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (Anchor Bible Series). If Campbell is correct that Paul is arguing against the same teachers in Rome as in Galatia, then Martyn's groundbreaking commentary on Galatians is a valuable resource to understanding Romans. Martyn helps us to understand Paul's relationship with the Teacher, both agreements and disagreements. He argues that Paul and the Teacher are together on emphasizing God's action in Jesus Christ through the cross and resurrection as an apocalyptic event, an in-breaking of God's saving action into our sinful human reality. The differences between Paul and the Teacher don't appear until the situation of mission to Gentiles -- when the difference appears of the Teacher assuming that converts must convert religions, becoming Jewish, and Paul doesn't. It becomes more clear, then, that the Teacher's position is one that Martyn calls forensic apocalypse, a salvific act conceived in terms of the law -- a justification that is imputed, to use the Reformation language. Whereas for Paul the cross and resurrection reveal what Martyn calls a cosmic apocalypse: God acting to save us from powers of sin and death that enslave all that is human, including the law, including religion.

Martyn's differentiation between forensic apocalypse and cosmic apocalypse has implications for Reformation theology that can't be overstated in their importance. For hasn't the Reformation largely ended up essentially taking the position of the Teacher instead of Paul?! The Lutheranism that I've grown up with stresses a justification that is imputed only -- namely, forensic. It has seen Paul vs. the Teacher in its own rendering of faith vs. works, that the Teacher taught a Gospel based on works in the sense of outward deeds. The Reformation thus ultimately framed the difference in terms of inward belief vs. outward deeds.

But Martyn argues that this is based on a misunderstanding of both Paul and the Teacher whose difference must be parsed in terms of apocalypse, namely, in terms of how far-reaching God's saving act in Jesus Christ goes. Protestantism, in misunderstanding Paul's use of the key terms, has settled precisely for the Teacher's apocalypse as forensic only, an imputed righteousness that gets us to heaven after we die but is limited when it comes to talking about sanctification in this life. According to Martyn, Paul's cosmic apocalypse, then, and Paul's use of faith vs. works language, is not about our inward belief vs. outward deeds. It is about Christ's faithfulness -- a relationship to God that is more immediate than what religious practice has facilitated -- in bringing about a cosmic rescue from the powers of sin and death that even rescues "works" itself -- "works" being shorthand for Paul's longer "works of the law" which is really about religious practice. In other words, God's cosmic salvation from the powers of sin even includes religion.

To get at this insight we have to somehow get outside the embrace of religion, which is why Paul always goes back to Abraham. For him Abraham represents a point before religion, the law, when salvation begins simply as a relationship with God, a faithfulness, "faith." Thus, Paul's argument against the Teacher is not about inward belief vs. outward deeds. It is about whether one has to convert religions to access this salvation because it is a salvation that includes all religions, even Paul's own Jewish religion. "Faith" represents a relation with God that is more immediate than what religious practice, "works," has been able to accomplish. The Christ event represents a going outside of religion, taking upon itself the curse of religion, to reconnect us to God in a way that saves us from the cosmic powers of sin and death that have enslaved even religion.

In short, the Reformation has completely missed the boat and simply given us another version of the deadly, divisive sinfulness that thwarts God's original intention of harmony and oneness for the cosmos. It divides us on the basis of inward belief vs. outward deeds and then eternalizes that difference into the ultimate division of heaven and hell. According to this anti-Gospel, only the correct inward beliefs, about things like Jesus' divinity, gets one into heaven; and salvation has nothing to do with outward deeds. In short, this Protestant version of the Gospel is every bit as forensic as the Teacher's Gospel. And so it falls into its own version of thwarting God's cosmic intentions of unifying the cosmos in the face of its sinful divisions. It is an anti-Gospel, another religion that divides, with the same deadly consequences as other religious practices before it. (Check its historical record in this regard!!) According to Paul's argument against the Teacher, we don't need another version of religious practice that simply repeats the sin on another basis. We need a reconciled relationship to God based on a faithfulness that transcends religion and thus has a potential to save even our religion.

In other words, it is time for the Reformation to finally take place! Not a pseudo-Reformation that leads us into another anti-Gospel, another means to divide us. It is time for us to embrace the faithful spirituality enabled by Jesus Christ and the continuing work of the Holy Spirit so that we finally begin to live into God's intended harmony for the cosmos. (As mentioned above, we need to precisely take on the task which Brian McLaren begins to lay out for us in Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?.)

3. Gil Bailie, "Paul's Letter to the Romans" audio tape series, tape #3.

4. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 80-81.

5. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, p. 118, as an example of God's forgiving love revealed to us the resurrection; p. 126, 135, in elaborating the Pauline witness and the transformation of God's wrath; p. 155, in elaborating the Pauline understanding of desire; p. 181, in commenting on the universality of sin.

Reflections and Questions

1. In 2012 the central task in preparation for preaching was work on the above translation. Then came the main image to use: a baseball locker room covered in plastic for the champagne celebration but not getting used because the game to eliminate the other team is lost. (My beloved Detroit Tigers were on the verge of being eliminated in the World Series.) Or for the election season: the image of gathering on Election Night to celebrate with friends but your candidate loses. This is how I would characterize our Reformation Day celebrations for me these days, because I see the victory that was supposed to happen as not yet having happened. When we correctly understand what Paul was saying in Romans (and elsewhere), then Reformation cannot be about other ways of dividing us as human beings -- for example, into those who follow true religion vs. those who follow false religion, with one's ultimate fate in the afterlife hanging in balance. Reformation needs to be about a faithful following of Jesus in the way of healing our divisions. This way can still be rejected and thus be a means of division. But at least we need to get to the point of understanding the Gospel as the invitation to be healed of our divisions. Christ came and let himself be pushed outside the bounds of all religion, cursed to death by them, in order that he might in the resurrection become the source of reconciliation. As Louis Martyn maintains, the "cosmic apocalypse" of the cross is not the beginning of a new religion. It is a healing reconciliation with the God whose Oneness can make us One. As Paul shockingly puts it in Ephesians 2:15, "Christ has abolished the law [recall my translation above as "religion"] with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two." How can we have missed the point when it is stated so clearly and boldly?

The resulting sermon is titled "Celebrating the Victory of Faith." I also wrote a newsletter column the day that might be titled "Fulfilling the Reformation." Together they might be considered as a manifesto of where I hope the church to be headed. If I was running for bishop in the ELCA, they pretty well describe my vision for the Reformation church.

2. I believe (see "My Core Convictions," IV.2) that translating pisteos Christou only in its objective form is a mistranslation of Paul which has led to a new works righteousness of Protestantism, based on the work of our believing: my act of believing becomes the only work that counts for salvation. On the contrary, I think that Paul is saying in this passage that righteousness comes from neither what we do or what we believe (which is, after all, still something we do). Righteousness comes solely through Jesus Christ, both from what he did and from the relationship with God which he faithfully lived out. I think that Paul's short-hand way of saying this is pisteos 'Iesou Christou, "the faith of Jesus Christ." When we translate this phrase as "faith in Christ" it too easily becomes a matter of our being saved by virtue of what we believe. When we translate it as "the faith of Christ" the emphasis more properly remains on Christ, instead of on us. What saves us is Christ's faith, which is commuted to us through the Holy Spirit so that his faith might live in us. It is his faith living in us that saves us and makes a new creation. Christ's faith living in us definitively affects both our doing and believing.

3. Mimetic theory accounts for this difference in interpretations through its Trinitarian pattern of relationships. Modern, romantic theories of relations see only the subject-object split. Personal states of being, such as beliefs, are thus simply a matter of each person's control in relationship to the object. We either believe in Christ, for example, or we don't. Strictly personal choice.

Mimetic theory, on the other hand, sees personal states of being, such as desire or belief, in terms of the triangle of relationships between the triad of: subject -- model/rival -- object. We come by states of being such as belief via the Other. So the question is not simply a matter of choosing between beliefs; it also involves being in relationship with the right model of belief. For St. Paul this meant faith in Christ, i.e., being in relationship with the right model for one's whole life, for one's very being. The genitive construction pisteos Christou can thus be interpreted, under the light of mimetic theory, in both the objective and subjective modes at the same time. Christ can be both our model for faith and the object of our faith at the same time. With the dualistic interpretation of subject-object, the depth of relationship is lost, and it simply becomes a matter of my believing (subject) in Christ (object). I no longer fit Christ's faith into the web of relationships as the essential key to my being able to come to faith in Christ in the first place.

This is what has happened, I think, to the Christian faith, especially in its Protestant variety (ironic, then, that this passage is a centerpiece for Reformation Day). It has lost its depth and breadth and become, like everything in the modern world, simply a matter of personal choice. My believing in Christ becomes its own form of works righteousness, something I must do to earn righteousness from God. Mimetic theory can provide the corrective to our understanding of faith, I think, just as its has done with desire.

Link here for a sermon that makes use of these insights, entitled "Saved by the Faith of Jesus Christ."

4. In 2003, Reformation Sunday followed Proper 24B and its Gospel Lesson of Mark 10:35-45. I followed up a sermon critical of traditional atonement doctrines (“A ‘Who Dunnit’ with a Gracious Twist”), in which I started to debunk the notion of a wrathful God, with a sermon on the whole of Romans, to the extent that I backed up the previous sermon with Paul’s reinterpretation of the “wrath of God” in Romans (using a handout “A Re-Formation of Faith”). For a more complete exegesis of the "wrath of God" in Romans, link to the climax of Part II of "My Core Convictions." For more complete reflections on the popularized versions of atonement, link to "The Anthropology of René Girard and Traditional Doctrines of Atonement"

Themes around atonement and the "wrath of God" were tied together by one of my favorite stories, Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s story about his son stealing comic books (see The Manger is Empty, chapter 17, “Matthew, Seven, Eight, and Nine”). It is the story of a three year drama of trying to get his son Matthew to stop stealing comic books -- to which the final resort had been a spanking, a measure so drastic for Wangerin that he had needed to leave the room and cry. Matthew didn't cry; he cried. Matthew did finally stop stealing from that day onward, but it wasn't because of the law. Here's Wangerin's conclusion to the story that so perfectly fits this day of marveling at God's righteousness revealed as mercy instead of the law:

What wasn’t true, however, was how I thought the change had occurred in my son. I thought it was the spanking. I thought the law had done it.

The law can do many things, of course. It can frighten a child till his eyes go wide. It can restrain him and blame him and shame him, surely. But it cannot change him. So it was with Israel. So it is with all the people of God. So it was with Matthew. Mercy alone transfigures the human heart -- mercy, which takes a human face.

For this is the final truth of my story:

Years after that spanking, Matthew and his mother were driving home from the shopping center. They were discussing things that had happened in the past. The topic of comic books came up. They talked of how he used to steal them, and of how long the practice continued.

Matthew said, “But you know, Mom, I haven’t stolen comic books for a long, long time.”

His mother said, “I know.” She drew the word out for gratitude: “I knoooow.”

Matthew mused a moment, then said, “Do you know why I stopped the stealing?”

“Sure,” said his mother. “Because Dad spanked you.”

“No, Mom,” said Matthew, my son, the child of my heart. He shook his head at his mother’s mistake. “No,” he said, “but because Dad cried.”

Hereafter, let every accuser of my son reckon with the mercy of God, and fall into a heap, and fail. For love accomplished what the law could not, and tears are more powerful than Sinai. Even the Prince of Accusers shall bring no charge against my son that the Final judge shall not dismiss. Satan, you are defeated! My God has loved my Matthew.

Do you know why I stopped the stealing?

Sure. Because Dad spanked you.

No, Mom. No. But because Dad cried. (pp.131-132)

5. Often times, our version of faith means believing the right things about God, in other words, having correct theology. I recall my own Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod roots and subsequently times at table with LC-MS colleagues, whose brand of Lutheran fundamentalism make what I consider the Protestant brand of works righteousness patently obvious to me. They are not supposed to even pray with fellow Christians unless their theology is deemed pure (i.e., clean as opposed to unclean, sacred as opposed to profane, in other words, the same old religion of the Sacred). Correct theology may not as obviously be a “good work” we have to do, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be fooled by that. And correct theology doesn’t even meet any practical needs of salvation -- unless it is that brand of salvation I’ve come to reject, that God punishes to eternal damnation those who don’t believe in Jesus Christ. God in Jesus Christ is saving us from our violence, not divine violence. And, meanwhile, correct theology doesn’t feed a starving person. In my book, it is a pale, hideous form of “good work” that often ends up distracting us from doing the truly good work of serving the least of our brothers and sisters. The latter are the good works which are properly fruits of the righteousness graciously given us through Jesus Christ.

Is there a role for correct theology? Yes! If it helps lead us into a relationship with the nonviolent, loving God of Jesus Christ. Or, in the case of René Girard, it was correct, evangelical anthropology that helped lead him into that relationship -- though it wasn’t that alone. See an account of his conversion in The Girard Reader, pp. 283ff.

6. The Philippians 3 text (which appears in the Year A lectionary shortly before Reformation Day, Proper 22A) contains what I think is the most obvious instance of incorrectly translating pisteos Christou. Consider 3:8-11:

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ (pisteos Christou), the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

7. Another passage that has connected for me with Reformation Sunday during Year A has been Matthew's parable of the Vineyard Growers (see Proper 20A). Here's a parable from Jesus where grace and work are seamlessly woven together. We can hardly imagine a more gracious ending: those who work the last couple hours of the day are paid the same life-sustaining daily wage as those who worked the whole day. It is a picture so gracious that it scandalizes us. But notice just as prominently the theme of a call to work. Jesus begins the parable: "For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard." The kingdom of heaven is a call to work! And the parable never mentions the vineyard owner needing more laborers. When he goes out into the marketplace throughout the day to hire more workers, the text doesn't tell us about his need for more workers. No, it tells us about the worker's need to work; he notices their idleness:

And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, "Why are you standing here idle all day?" They said to him, "Because no one has hired us." He said to them, "You also go into the vineyard."

Link here for a sermon on this theme of work, entitled "The Grace of Work."

John 8:31-36

Resources

1. John 8 is a crucial Girardian text, especially vs. 44: "You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." This one verse indicates a distorted, Satanic desire that has issued in murder since the beginning of (human) time. One will find that almost every Girardian book that deals with scripture will reference this passage in the context of the Johannine insight into (to use Robert Hamerton-Kelly's phrase) the Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism. So beginning with René Girard himself: Things Hidden, p. 161; The Scapegoat, p. 196. In his most recent book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, gives another expansive reading of this text which I give as an excerpt here, pp. 38-43 of chapter three on "Satan."

2. James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment; the most recent, and most expansive, reading yet of John 8 is offered as chapter 3, "Jesus' Fraternal Relocation of God," pp. 56-85. I think it stands up there with Alison's reading of John 9 as groundbreaking theology. Link to an excerpt of this chapter on John 8.

3. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 220-233; "The Gospel of John" audio tape series, tape #1

4. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence & the Sacred, pp. 204-210

5. Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, pp. 157-163; Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, p. 148 (where he takes on the view that John 8:44 is an example of how Christians denigrate the Jews).

6. In March of 2001, I was at a conference with a presentation on the Historical Jesus Movement, and John 8 actually came up as an obvious example of anti-Semitism in the Gospels. I wrote a response, which is posted on this website as "A Girardian Take on the Historical Jesus Movement."

7. James Alison, Raising Abel, pp. 63-65; The Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 119-125. Particularly poignant, I think, is Alison's reading of John 8 in his section in RA entitled "Jesus' Creation of Divine Paternity for Us" (pp. 63-65). It also provides a good follow-up to what was emphasized last week in Year A about our rootedness in death; or to the discussion of being God's children in recent weeks for Year B. Another way of putting the matter is by realizing our paternity in a murderous Satan as opposed to the God life. The question which Alison poses in this section is: of which god are we children? The idolatrous gods of death, represented by the devil, or the true God of Jesus Christ, the God of life? Alison writes:

If we begin with a general notion of God, and understand that it so happened that Jesus called this God his Father, then we would have an image of someone who was insisting, rather pretentiously, that he had a special relationship with someone who is, in principle, equally accessible to all. This makes him rather like teacher's pet: someone rather despicable in the eyes of everyone else. Well, this is the inverse of what happens in the way in which Jesus speaks of "my Father," and says things like, "no one comes to the Father but by me" (Jn 14:6).

Jesus starts from a completely different position: that there is no general notion of God that is in principle accessible to all, but that the available notions of God are pretty much false, and not only false, but also fatal. This position is amply illustrated in his discussion with some Jews who had believed in him in John 8, where he compares two different sorts of father: his Father and the father of his interlocutors. These notions of paternity are radically and incompatibly different: one notion is that of a father who, however unblemished his pedigree seems to be, in practice leads his children to lying and killing. Jesus links this father to the murder of Abel by Cain (Jn 8:44). We might call him the father of the founding murder; traditionally he is known as the devil, and the devil understood not as a mythical figure, red, with horns like the Greek god Pan, with a trident in his hand "all the better to roast you with," but that much more worrying figure, a satanized god, someone who seems to be God but is in fact an obstacle, an accusation, the whisperer behind the lynch. Jesus is saying, in reality, to his interlocutors: the God who has been revealing himself to Israel during all this time is not the one who you say; your interpretation and use of God turn him into Satan; only my interpretation of him is faithful to who God truly is.

Jesus affirms that his Father is unknown and impossible to know except through him, and not because he's being pretentious, or teacher's pet, but because the secret of that satanized god is death: while people are still formed by a world which begins and ends in death they have no way of knowing a God who has nothing to do with death. Only someone who does not know death can begin to make accessible who that God is. So Jesus, at the same time as he makes possible belief in the utter vivaciousness of God, also creates the possibility of God's paternity among human beings. Before Jesus' self-giving it was effectively impossible that we be children of the Father, that is, moved from within by one who is self-giving love, because we were locked in to death. The possibility of coming to be children came about not through some general decree of adoption, but through a creative act that demanded a mise-en-scène, a particular human acting out.

I want to emphasize this once more: Jesus didn't come to tell us that God is our Father. That is excessively banal. He came to create the possibility that God in fact be our Father, or rather, that we should really become God's children, which is, in every case, something strictly impossible for humans to be naturally, since we are all enclosed in a mistaken identification of God with an ambiguous or satanic figure. This is what John understands when he talks of "the world," "the prince of this world" and so on. He is talking about life under the paternity of the murderous lie. If you read Jn 15:18-16:4 in this light, it may make more sense than before: "the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think that they are offering a service to God, and this they will do because they have not known the Father nor me" (Jn 16:2-3). There we have the two different sorts of paternity set out with absolute clarity: the paternity which kills and persecutes so as to serve "god," and the paternity which is shown in the self-giving in the midst of violence as a witness to the complete vivaciousness of the God who knows not death.

Now, this puts into question any universal notion of God, with respect to whom we can agree in polite conversations, with little phrases like: "after all, we're all God's children." Of which god are we children? This can be deduced from our practical behavior: the revelation of God's complete aliveness is the same thing as the making possible the practical living out of a way of bearing witness to that vivacity, the style of life of a witness, or, in Greek, a martyr, a style of life that is always prepared to run the risk of being expelled rather than participating in any human solidarity in expulsion. It seems important to emphasize this since, if we don't, we may have too familiar and domesticated a notion of God, which will make it difficult for us to wake up to the strangeness of the fact that it needed someone to die to make it possible for us to understand how different our real Father and Creator is. There is no access to him except from within that process of self-giving. (pp. 63-65)

Reflections and Questions

1. We’ve already mentioned the Greek word for “truth,” aleitheia, meaning literally, “stop forgetting.” Also important is the Hebrew word often translated as “truth,” emet. My Bibleworks computer program (highly recommended!) helps me discover that “truth” is no less than the fourth meaning of emet. Placing the pointer/cursor over the word emet, it instantly gives me the following from Whittaker’s Revised BDB Lexicon, p. 54:

1. reliability, sureness. 2. stability, continuance. 3. faithfulness, reliableness: (a) of men. (b) an attribute of God. 4. truth (a) as spoken. (b) of testimony and judgment. (c) of divine instruction. (d) truth as a body of ethical or religious knowledge.

2. Then again, perhaps this Hebrew meaning of “truth” can help revitalize our Western use of “faith.” Our reflections on Romans 3 lamented our impoverished sense of faith. Our sense of faith has become more like our sense of truth: faith is the ‘science’ of believing the right things about God, of having a correct theology. What if it were the other way around, that we let the Hebrew meaning of truth revitalize our sense of faith? Or the Hebrew sense of faithfulness revitalize our sense of truth?

3. One of my favorite stories about truth is the 1981 movie “Absence of Malice.” A newspaper reporter (Sally Field as "Megan") poses her sense of truth against a wrongly implicated man (Paul Newman as "Michael") whose sense of truth has more to do with faithfulness in relationships. Megan and Michael subsequently fall into a romantic relationship that breaks off again when Megan goes back to being a reporter with Michael, and the have the following conversation:

Michael: You wanna know the truth? O.K., you wanna ask me as a person, I’ll tell you. You ask me as a reporter, I’ve got no comment.

Megan: That’s not fair!

Michael: Not fair to who? Wait a minute. You don’t write the truth. You write what people say. You overhear. You eavesdrop. You don’t come across truth that easy. Maybe it’s just what you think, what you feel. I don’t need your goddam newspaper to decide what they’re gonna do with me, or who I am.

Megan: Then you tell me: Who are you?

Michael: You mean you’re not sure yet?

4. How has the scientific experience of truth been so productive when bracketing out God? And how is the scientific experience of truth related to truth as faithfulness in relationships? Girard has suggested a connection in one his best quotable quotes:

The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text. The modern Western world has forgotten the revelation in favor of its by-products, making them weapons and instruments of power.... (The Scapegoat, pp. 204-205)

And the impetus behind such faithfulness to persons is the Good News story of Jesus Christ, who himself became one of those blamed and sacrificed -- only to have God, in the ultimate (eschatologically speaking) act of faithfulness, raise him from the dead. To those to whom he appeared as the Risen Lord, a new impulse, a Holy Spirit, was let loose into the world which empowers disciples to get behind that supposedly righteous sacrifice and find a different way to Holy Communion, a different way to staying together faithfully in community without having to resort to violent expulsion. (See also the sermon “Healing, Pt. III: ‘Peace Beyond Our Fear and Hope Beyond Our Sorrow.’”)

We haven’t even begun to ponder the second part of the quote from Girard, concerning the effects on science of having forgotten the spirit behind its existence. I’ll leave the reader to ponder that weighty question.

5. In #8 under “Resources” above, we raised the question, “Isn't the matter of truth first and foremost a matter of the true God?” On Reformation Sunday that is still the question for me as I yearn for a Reformation in the church that answers that question in a most decisive way. Luther tried to show us a God of mercy in Jesus Christ, as opposed to our idolatrous god of wrath (e.g., the one still plaguing us in substitutionary doctrines of atonement; link to "The Anthropology of René Girard and Traditional Doctrines of Atonement"). And he did so in facing the kind of violence from the church we truly need to come to see and understand. Yet somehow we still largely missed it. We have missed the crucial choice between our gods of violence and the God of love in Jesus Christ. We continue to use our god of violence to justify our doing violence. We have continued to miss the fact that God in Christ is saving us  from our violence, to the extent that we still make the faith about Jesus saving us from God’s ultimate violence of a place we call hell, that holding tank for eternal divine punishment.

That is why I am so unabashedly evangelical in these pages about the opportunity I believe we have in finally having an evangelical anthropology to go with our attempts at evangelical theology. It is the key to at long last experiencing Reformation. Girard’s work can help lead us into a more focused understanding and faith around what I think should be a matter of ultimate concern: human violence, and its cause in fallen human desire. Since the foundation of our worlds, we have fallen into idolatries that aid us in veiling our full responsibility for violence. We heap the mimetic violence of our communities onto our scapegoats, all with sacred justification.

Violence is the quintessential matter of life and death. It is what forever threatens to break apart human community such that we fail to survive. God in Jesus Christ comes into this world to invite us into the realm of the only ultimately victorious power over that of human violence: the faithfulness of an unconditionally loving and forgiving Creator-God.

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