Acts 2:1-21

Resources

1. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong. If we were to raise the question "Why is the Church necessary for salvation?", the Pentecost text and Alison's treatment of it could provide a good start on an answer. In the interpretation of original sin guided by mimetic theory, personal fallenness is related to living in a fallen state of human community. The mimetic rivalry that grips each person's life feeds off of the scapegoating mechanism that grips human community, and vice versa. Thus, for a person to experience salvation there must also be a re-socialization that begins to find freedom from the powers of the scapegoating mechanism. As part of Alison's brilliant laying out of original sin in light of mimetic theory, he devotes a chapter to what he calls "ecclesial hypostasis," a living under the power of community formed around the forgiving victim, Jesus Christ, as opposed to living under the power of the "an-ecclesial hypostasis," or life under the Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism, as Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls it.

Alison makes use of the Pentecost story, as remedy to the Tower of Babel story, as a gathering of what has been scattered. In this vein, he also cites Luke 11:23: "He who does not gather with me scatters." (Note: Gil Bailie in his taped lectures on Luke uses the gathering-scattering motif a great deal in his interpretation of Luke's gospel, especially over the last several tapes in the series. Link to a word study on "Gathering and Scattering in Luke.") Alison concludes:

In the account of Babel ... God is still a continuation of the 'envious' God of Genesis 3:22. In Jesus' phrase, however, the essential evangelical work of anthropological demythification has been carried out: it is God who founds, and human beings who scatter. Thus the representation of Pentecost as the undoing of Babel is not only a fulfilment of the prophecies that God would gather his scattered people together (see Deut. 30:3; Jer. 31:10; Ezek. 11:17; 28:25). It is a decisive recasting in anthropological terms of human foundational order: the real foundation is God's foundation of the new people of Israel in Christ. It was not that God had scattered the people of Babel, but their foundational order, one grasped at avidly so as to avoid being scattered (Gen 11:4), was in fact cast in the mode of human scattering. All human societal foundations are futile exercises in the production of a fragile order. The only real foundation is the one given in Christ's gathering. Behind the New Testament reworking of biblical images there is a quite specific understanding of the universal futility of human social order that is being overcome by the revelation of the true foundation. (p. 167)

In order to understand the positive sense of the self-giving up to death of Jesus, the apostolic witness makes use, in different places, of four quite distinct stories from Genesis, all of which are interpreted in the light of the Cross and Resurrection. To illustrate the sense of Christ's death, he is shown as moved by a self-giving which is the undoing of Adam's appropriation of divinity to himself (Paul's argument about Adam's desire in Romans 5-7, and the illustration of Christ's self-giving in Philippians 2). He is shown as undoing the order based on fratricidal murder from the beginning (John's reference to 'Your Father...' in Chapter 8, and the development of that in 1 John 3). Baptism into Christ's saving death is shown to be the real sense behind the story of Noah's Ark (1 Pet. 3:20-21). Finally Christ is shown as undoing the scattering of all humanity following on the attempt to appropriate human unity by human effort alone at Babel (Luke's presentation of Pentecost in Acts 2). That is to say, four quite distinct moments of Genesis, relating to desire, to murder, and to foundation of sociality, are shown to be capable of a strictly christological interpretation. Any symbol, then, of human origins that is capable of conflating these moments within a strictly christological interpretation has the advantage over other putative symbols of being exactly in line with the risen Christ's own hermeneutic of scripture as explained on the road to Emmaus. It is precisely because it permits the construction of such a symbol that mimetic theory recommends itself in this context. (pp. 245-246)

In the christological re-reading [of Gen. 11:1-9], it is man who scatters himself, not God, because of the inherent futility of any building of social order at the expense of the victim. In between the original scattering and the christological gathering we have a Jewish re-reading of the scattering derived from their understanding of being gathered together out of the Babylonian Empire. The "confusion" of tongues (Heb.: balal) is an etymological joke at the expense of the arrogance of the imperial Babylonian attempt to dominate the earth, and the unfinished tower is a mocking look at one of the huge Ziqqurats which had the pretension in Babylonian religion of uniting heaven and earth. Once again, we have an original tale of cultural scattering, a Jewish re-reading of this, and a christological re-reading of the Jewish partial demythologization. This Christological re-reading gives us back a plausible account of the theological elements proper to the original scattering seen in the light of the death that made possible the un-scattering. (p. 252)

Reflections and Questions

1. In teaching the Spring Term 2000 of the intro religion class at Carthage College, I heard from the students often, in one form or another, the question, “Do you have to go to church to be a good person (their version of being saved)?” Many of them wanted to answer "No" to that question in order to justify themselves, and a distinction was often made between being "religious" and being "spiritual." The latter was seen as a matter of personal freedom and a way to being a good person without institutional religion.

In response I tried to get them to seriously engage Emile Durkheim's answer, writing early in the 20th century (1912). Defining religion in the opening chapter of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [a recent translation by Karen E. Fields, The Free Press, 1995], he said that “the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church; it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing.”  But he rather prophetically goes on to notice a new trend:

What remains are the present-day aspirations toward a religion that would consist entirely of interior and subjective states and be freely constructed by each one of us... It is possible that this religious individualism is destined to become fact; but to be able to say in what measure, we must first know what religion is.... (p. 44)

My Carthage College students would seem to be evidence that the trend Durkheim prophetically pointed to has taken hold. I tried to challenge them with what might be at stake with the social/community aspect of religion. Durkheim helps us to see that all religions prior to our time have emphasized the social/community aspect.

While Durkheim's work is prophetically descriptive, Girard's work is generative in its explanation of religion. It suggests to us how these things come about. I think that mimetic scapegoating theory can help us find an explanation to both elements of this issue: why religion has previously been social and why it has recently become more individual.

The origins of religion are rooted in the need to not have community collapse under the chaos of escalating mimetic violence. Religion was born to save human communities from disintegrating. The scapegoating mechanism which underlies all religion and culture substitutes lower doses of sacred violence in the face of the threat of all-consuming profane violence (to use Durkheim's primary duo of sacred and profane).

Yet the religious use of violence is still violence. In former ages religion has been reasonably successful in veiling its violence qua violence. Sacred rituals of sacrificial violence were seen as simply that, i.e., sacred rituals of sacrifice. They were not perceived as violence in the fashion that we now do today. So why the change? Why has the sacredness of this violence been unveiled such that we simply see it now as violence? That's what this evangelical anthropology is all about ... to help us understand this vital question. The Cross of Christ, beginning with the tearing of the Temple curtain at the moment of death, has let loose its unveiling power. And the Paraclete (see the gospel reflections below) has continued the work of this unveiling over the next two millennia to the point that the average person now clearly sees and experiences the violent aspect of religion as violence.

With the violence unveiled, what alternative does the modern person have to find peace in community? They turn inward, trying desperately to settle for an internal, individual peace. Especially in light of the continuing violence between the great monotheistic religions and cultures, many are returning to polytheistic "spiritualities," to various forms of neo-paganism.

The question I continued to pose to my students, though, is this: can we ever ultimately attain peace if it is only an inward, individual peace? Doesn't social/community peace end up being essential to one's inner peace? That's what's at stake in going to church: peace. We can't have it without finding how to live with one another in love. I believe that, at the same time that mimetic scapegoating theory (a latter-day work of the Paraclete) helps to continue the Cross's work of unveiling religious violence, it can also help to resharpen for us the gospel's alternative that took hold in this world on Pentecost.

2. In 1997 I preached on what it means to be a prophet (link to sermon entitled "Where Everyone's a Prophet...and Everyone Profits"). Peter's sermon text from Joel speaks of the Spirit being poured out on everyone so that they can be prophets. This has provided a great temptation throughout Christian history to emphasize some sort of ecstatic experience as the meaning of prophethood. "Speaking in tongues" is held up as the model for being a spirit-filled prophet. But, when we read the gospels carefully, what is the NT re-interpretation of what a prophet is? Mimetic theory helps to make the NT interpretation of prophet clear: being a prophet means to take the perspective of the victim, if not to actually become a victim yourself. It is to speak to one's community from the only standpoint which has the true power to unify, the position of the victim. With the scapegoating mechanism, the victim also provides the means of unifying, but only when the victim remains silent, and so it is a corruptible and false unity. Only when the voice of the prophet is heard from the position of the victim can the Holy Spirit work to build a true unity, a Holy Communion. Such prophecy manifests the Holy Spirit that was poured out on Pentecost when the potential victims, the disciples of Jesus, came out from hiding and preached to the people of the one whom they crucified but whom God raised.

What is the NT interpretation of "prophet"? Luke, who wrote this passage from Acts, is perhaps the clearest on this matter. I began the sermon with the rather dazzling picture of prophecy in this Pentecost passage, getting all of us excited about that, and then asking what is Luke's overall picture of the prophet. I basically moved, then, into a short bible study on the Lukan picture of prophecy. It begins with his crucial introduction of Jesus' ministry in Luke 4; Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah about the pouring out of the Spirit to bring good news to victims; he follows it with a discussion of the prophet Elijah coming to the side of a poor widow during a time of famine and finishes with the remark that a prophet is never accepted in the prophet's hometown. The response of the crowd is to instantly make a prophet out of Jesus (in Jesus' own terms, not theirs) by unsuccessfully trying to make him a victim of their lynching.

The next crucial place is the sermon on the plain (6:20-26), where the beatitudes and woes might be seen to be a further commentary on the Luke 4 passage. In the latter, Isaiah 61 speaks of the prophet's good news to the poor and other victims; these beatitudes of Luke 6 basically repeat this same good news to the same group of folks. And the climax of both the beatitudes and woes definitively lays out the role of the prophet: "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets... Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." (Luke 6:22-23, 26). There is also the lament over Jerusalem (Luke 13:33-34): "'Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"

Finally, there is that quintessential Girardian text (which Girard himself remarks on, for example, in Things Hidden, 166-67) among the woes to the Pharisees (Luke 11:47-51):

"Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. So you are witnesses and approve of the deeds of your ancestors; for they killed them, and you build their tombs. Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,' so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation."

3. In his excellent commentary on Luke-Acts (The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts, Fortress Press), Robert C. Tannehill corroborates my reading of prophet. He essentially lays out much of the bible study on Luke's understanding of prophet. In bringing his argument to a conclusion, Tannehill couples his findings on prophetic destiny with another important Lukan theme: the necessity of a suffering Messiah. Here is what he has to say:

A reminder of the previous discussion of Luke 24:26 ("Was it not necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things?") may suggest why it would seem natural to include Jesus' death in God's "fixed purpose and foreknowledge" [Acts 2:23]. His death was no surprise to God, nor should it be to those who meditate on the pattern of prophetic destiny that the narrator finds in Scripture and recent history. The destiny of God's prophets includes suffering and rejection, for they must speak God's word to a blind and resistant world and must bear the brunt of this resistance. (p. 37)

4. Another possibility is to explore the image of fire for Pentecost. The most common religious significance of fire has been the sacrificial fires of sacred violence in ints plenitude of forms.  Is the image of hell fire the standard bearer for all these forms?  I explored this question in a sermon entitled "Fire of Love."

5. In 2003 I was getting near the end of an interim ministry which was building a positive spirit towards a specific strategy of urban ministry, and getting ready to call the next pastor to that ministry. The sermon made use of the fire image to ring out the message, "Let's Get Fired Up!", reflecting on both the Pentecost story and the Tower of Babel to support the prospect of reaching out into the neighborhood.

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Resources

1. "Paraclete" is a key in this passage, and I refer you to the Girardian reading of Paraclete that was explicated in the notes on 1 John 5 for Easter 6. In addition to Girard's The Scapegoat, which is quoted at length in the Easter 6 reflections, a more complete bibliography on a Girardian reading of Paraclete includes: James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, p. 233; Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 73-74, 130, 190, 226-227 (link to excerpt "The Spirit," VU, pp. 225-228); James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred, pp. 185, 208, 238-239, 258. I have also put together a page on "The Anthropology of René Girard and the Paraclete of St. John."

2. This passage is the heart of all those Girardian readings that make use of the Johannine theology in concert with mimetic theory. I can provide a listing here once again: Girard, Things Hidden, Book II, ch. 4, and The Scapegoat, ch. 15; James Alison, Raising Abel, ch. 3, and "The Man Born Blind from Birth..." in Contagion (Spring, 1997); Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, chs. 12-13, and his tape series on John, tape 10 (link to my notes / transcription of tape 10); James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred, pp. 204-210.

Reflections and Questions

1. I find John 16:8-11 especially powerful: "And when the Paraclete comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned." One could unpack a major re-reading of Christian theology in light of mimetic theory through these four verses (see Gil Bailie's treatment of this passage in Violence Unveiled, pp. 226ff., linked in excerpt "The Spirit").

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