The Second Step: the Revelation of God as Love
It is not only that the living God is pruned of violence, by an act of negative theology, as it were. There is much more. In John 3:16 we can read a real step forward:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.This means that the apostolic meditation about the utterly living God revealed by Jesus and his resurrection had been able to reconsider what had been going on in Jesus' death. If we look at that death in the light of the violent god, we see a blasphemer who is killed so as to satisfy the law of god that whosoever acts thus must die. However, if God raises up this man, then the first step is to recognize that the violence against that man was human and not divine -- the separation of God from violence -- the second step is to see that the disposition of that man to allow himself to be killed was not accidental, but a deliberate plan of self-giving to make it possible for us to believe in the utter vivacity of God, and thus to begin to live, ourselves, outside the dominion of death. That is to say, we can see a positive intention of love in the way in which Jesus gave himself up to death; and that positive intention of love is described by saying that God gave his only Son.
Now, this "giving his only Son" is not an idea pulled out of a hat. It is, itself, the demythologization of a story from the Old Testament: the story of Abraham who was prepared to give up his only (legitimate) son to God, by sacrificing him. But look at what has happened meanwhile: in the first story God is a god who demands sacrifices from humans, including the one sacrifice which really mattered, even though, in the story as we have it in Genesis 22, God himself organizes a substitute for the sacrifice. In any case, we still have a capricious deity. What we see in the New Testament, completely in line with the change in the perception of God that I've been setting out, is that it is not humans who offer a sacrifice to God (by, for instance, killing a blasphemous transgressor), but God who offers a sacrifice to humans. The whole self-giving of Jesus becomes possible because Jesus is obedient to God, giving himself in the midst of violent humans who demand blood, so as finally to unmask and annul the system of murderous mendacity which the world is.
Once more, if you think I'm making this up, everything which I have been saying is beautifully and exactly resumed in the first epistle of John. There we see what the message is, the nucleus of the Gospel:
This then is the message which we have heard of him (i.e., Jesus), and declare unto you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)That is: what Jesus came to announce was a message about God, and God's being entirely without violence, darkness, duplicity, ambivalence or ambiguity. This message is then unpacked by the author in the following verses, and then he gives us the famous summing up of where this process of the changing perception of God has led to:
...for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, that God sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)Here we have the element of the discovery of the absolutely vivacious and effervescent nature of God leading to the realization that behind the death of Jesus there was no violent God, but a loving God who was planning a way to get us out of our violent and sinful life. Not a human sacrifice to God, but God's sacrifice to humans.
John illustrates the process pretty clearly, but somehow I'm making it easier for myself by jumping directly to the end of the process, skipping over some of the more difficult passages in, for example, the Pauline writings. So we'll take a quick glance at some of those, especially from the early stages in the process of demythologization, within which process the Pauline language is situated.
In the first place, Paul is pretty clear that the central message is that of the Good News with respect to Who God is, God's absolute lack of ambiguity. To this he refers when he says at the beginning of Romans (1:17) that the Gospel reveals that God is righteous. He continues by pointing out that the effect of this revelation of the goodness of God is simultaneously to make apparent the injustice of humans, who by their injustice keep truth a prisoner to injustice, and this is described as the wrath of God. That is: the wrath of God is not understood as something which God does actively, but is rather the condition of human involvement in the murderous lie, which John also underlines. In case this is not grasped, it is worth remembering that Paul understands that to talk of the wrath of God in an active sense is merely a human way of speaking (cf. Rom. 3:5), whose real content is purely human. On all the other occasions that the term "wrath" appears in his writings, it appears as the impersonal term "the wrath," and not the wrath of God. (2)
The content of this wrath is, as I have suggested, purely human. God is described as handing us over to ourselves: this is the content of the wrath. But this term paredoken -- (he) handed over -- is very important in early Christian discourse, since the only really important handing over which took place was God's handing over of Jesus to us. In Romans 4:25 we are told that God handed over Jesus, and once again in Romans 8:32. That is to say it is God's handing over of Jesus to us which defines what "the wrath" is: the wrath is the type of world in which Jesus was borne to death by sinful humans who could not receive the truth. It is the giving, the divine handing over of the Son which reveals what the wrath is. This somewhat difficult argument becomes a little clearer if we remember what lies behind Romans 8:32:
He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all...Many commentators imagine this to be a reference to the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, which we saw when we were looking at John. However, there the key word is only begotten, where here the key word is his own Son, as though there were some possibility that he might hand over someone else's son. In fact there is a passage in the Old Testament which is precisely to do with the handing over of someone else's son. (3) It is found at 2 Samuel 21. David discovers that the cause of a famine was Saul's murder of some Gibeonites, for which their relatives require a blood revenge. So, David asks the Gibeonites what it is that they want so as to satisfy their just demand for vengeance. They demand that seven sons of Saul be handed over to them so that they may hang them up before the Lord, and David hands them over. That is: David was able to satisfy the anger of the Gibeonites by handing over somebody else's sons. The comparison with Romans is exact: God is not like David, who handed over someone else's sons to the Gibeonites to satisfy their wrath. God handed over his own Son, in this way forever revealing his goodness and generosity. Once again the notion of sacrifice is inverted: it is God who sacrifices to us, and we who demand sacrifice, not vice-versa.
Well, the purpose of this is to demonstrate an earlier moment in the same process which we saw in John. Let us not imagine that this process was easy. Paul, as the good Pharisee which he was, had an immense respect for the truth of the scriptures in which he had been educated. He could not throw out without further ado a whole style of discourse about God. What we see instead is the slow way in which irony subverts the meaning of words from within. It's something like this: the first step, as is proper to any profoundly conservative religious tradition, is the maintenance of the language of the tradition, but giving it a different sense by means of an ironic juxtaposition, which is what we see here. When it becomes clearer what this means, there is a move to the second step, which is to let that language fall away altogether. This is the process we see in Paul and then in John. First language is kept and ironized. Then when this language can be abandoned without fear of scandalizing people, it is replaced by a new, simple and positive, discourse. So, God's wrath, a real concept in the Old Testament, becomes God's wrath, an ironic concept whose content is purely human violence, and then this is reduced to "the wrath" by itself. Finally the language is abandoned as it becomes clear that violence is always and only human, and that God has nothing to do with it, and so we end up with the sort of language we see in the Johannine texts.
It is worthwhile stopping to consider what we've just said, since if
we don't, we'll skate too lightly over an important point. John says that
God is love, and we all parrot this somewhat easily, which leads to no
end of banalities and flights of sentimentalism in our approach to matters
religious, except when we become all serious and moralistic, and remember
that God is just, and punishes, and so on, so we expel and punish as if
the Gospel had never been preached. Well, it's not like that. The phrase
"God is love" is not one more slogan which we can tack on to the end of
other things we know about God, and which we can brandish when we feel
like it. It is the end result of a process of human discovery which constitutes
a slow and complete subversion from within of any other perception of God.
That God is love is a certainty achieved in the degree to which it came
to be discovered that God has nothing to do with human violence and death,
and as it became clear that God has so little to do with those things that
he was capable of subverting them through Jesus' being expelled as a sinner
so as to show that the goodness and justice of God have nothing to do with
our fatal and expulsive notions of goodness and justice. The perception
that God is love has a specific content which is absolutely incompatible
with any perception of God as involved in violence, separation, anger or
exclusion.
Notes
2. The translators of the RSV have personalized orgé, wrath, wherever possible, with no textual justification.
3. Here I would like to acknowledge my debt for Robert Hamerton-Kelly's exposition of this text in Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 78-79.