The Scandal of the Gospel

Over at Connexions Kim Fabricus posts an excerpt worth reading from my favorite author, James Alison from Alison's book Faith Beyond Resentment.

You can read the post here:James Alison on a closer look at the Gospel Scandal. A small snippet:

In fact, the obvious reading of the gospels suggests that the real scandal is the possibility that when God himself becomes present in the midst of a particular human group, those who are scandalised are not scandalised by the heaviness of his demands. On the contrary, they are scandalised by the fact that God himself does not fit into the scheme into which, according to them, God should fit. It is not that God is too sacred for ordinary people to be able to bear it, but that he is so little sacred that religious people find it impossible to bear it.

James Alison, Faith beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2001), p. 178.

James Alison on Forgiveness

Quotation of the day on forgiveness by one of my favourite Girardian theologians:

..this is what acting out forgiveness in the world looks like: it looks like knowing that you are dealing with dangerous people, who are more than likely to be deeply destabilized by your innocence and because of that to seek to lynch you.

I also recommend the Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary website from which this quotation is taken.

A Sonrise Story

I have just come across the sermon entitled A Sonrise Story by Paul J. Nuechterlein which does an excellent job of explaining how Girardian non-violence fits into the story of salvation.

Not a sermon I could preach to my congregations! Nevertheless, I think it explains some Girardian ideas in a more accessible way than either Girard himself or most Girardian theologians.

I particularly like the explaination of mimetic theory at the beginning of the sermon. Nuechterlein manages to explain mimesis in a way that I've been striving to do for awhile.

Grace

I loved this take on Grace from James Alison*:

Gratuity is experienced as the lack of retaliation where some sort of retaliation is to be expected, and then as the giving of something unexpected. This surprising nonreciprocation is what pulls the person experiencing it out of the reciprocating mode-of-being and enables that person to begin to recieve and then transmit love as something simply given.

To me, this explains why Grace can never be limited to a select few and why God can never be violent.

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*Alison, James, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter eyes, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1998.

Universal Suffering

A lot of the time, the theological reading I do touches something deep within me and theology becomes a way for God to speak to me and to guide me on my journey. I don't often blog about these things because, in the West, we seem to separate "theology" from "spirituality"; the Eastern Church doesn't do that but sees all theology as having consequences for our "spirituality" and vice versa.

Anyway, I've decided to try to blog a bit about God speaking to me through theology. I've been going through James Alison's "The Joy of Being Wrong" with a fine toothed comb, so yet again, God has been speaking to me through this book.

I was lucky enough to go on retreat today and yesterday, and one of the images I brought with me into the retreat is Alison's idea that Christianity is not about who is in and about who is out because God revealed himself to us in Jesus - who became the innocent victim of human sinfulfness. If God is encountered in the innocent victim rather than in the victorious victimiser, then God is accessible to all people. This is how Alison see's St. Paul's road to Damascus experience.

This led me to meditating on Christ on the cross. God incarnate, freely gave himself to be killed by the human lust for violence. The God who we are called to pacifically imitate gave upself up to our rage, a rage born out of the fact that we think we can be God better than God. In our sin, we do not want to imitate God, we want to be "ourselves" and "have control" over our own lives and so we must kill God. In giving himself up to death at our hands, God overcame death through his resurrection. Sin and death no longer have dominion, but rather holiness and abundant / eternal life have dominion. Through Christ, we are now free to become that which we were originally created to be.

During the retreat, another retreatant spoke to me about finding God in death and darkness. He wanted to go one step beyond the idea of being able to see a green shoot in the midst of death and darkness, but rather to actually find God in the darkeness, without the green shoot. If God in all things, as I believe God is, then surely God must be present in the darkness even if we cannot perceive God.

It seems to me that "death and darkness" are part of universal human experience in the same way that the suffereing and death of an innocent victim is part of the universal human experience. However, it is huge leap of faith, I think, to be able to find God in the darkness without a green shoot there.

My fellow retreatant's word to me has touched me deeply, although I am not in a dark place at the moment. I feel that God is slowly teaching me to have faith in His presence everywhere, and showing me that everywhere means everywhere.

Thanks be to God!