Subject: Notes toward a grand synthesis...(1)
Come. Suffer my wisdom (1). (Don't worry--there may not be a (2)--And ignore this if you don't have a taste for this sort of thing...
After reading a bunch of books in desultory fashion, I have cobbled together some working ideas for a worldview that I would like to be true--& I would like some of them to be more true than others. Unfortunately, I lack the time, energy, and capacity for systematic scholarship to do them justice--but then, I prefer mercy to justice.
Rene Girard: Like many French intellectuals he gets aholt of a bone of idea, sometimes even a good one, but then won't let go for dear life, ever, sometimes reducing that bone to powder. His idea that the social bonding that enabled the initial formation of society was the result of a scapegoating mechanism seems to me to have a certain intuitive truth. But he goes on to argue that it accounts for everything--myth, religion, language, law, gambling, transactional economy... Why not say that absent the inhibitory mechanisms to dampen intra-species aggression and violence, that the scapegoating mechanism provided an initial breathing space for more or less rational social institutions to take root so that thereafter the necessity for scapegoating was vitiated. In fact, one of the functions of those primordial social institutions (that would later become a legal system), was/is to hold the scapegoating mechanism in
check--granted not always successfully.
There is also in Girard and most (but not all) Girardians, an unseemly anxiety about "victimizing the victimizers" that tends to push their thought into what I think are conservative and even reactionary political realms...I admit it's a lot more fun sometimes to think about punishing Evildoers than it is Doing Good & I would dearly love to see George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the dock at The Hague, but the point of that would not be to make them suffer, but to administer sanctions that would clearly communicate that what they did was Wrong...
Bruce Chilton subsumes the category of sacrifice (and the sacrificial victim) as a side effect, as it were, to a a broader psychosocial (if that's the word) mechanism than that of scapegoating; to wit, a primordial desire of human beings to be in harmony to the universe as expressed most fittingly through the most basic of creaturely functions--that of eating--taking part of the universe into oneself and having the universe become part of oneself & also by implication establishing oneself as part of the universe. To put it more concretely, human beings have an impulse to get closer to the gods by having meals with them & those meals thereby become sacred. Some of the edibles are set aside for the gods ("first fruits," for example) & this practice is the ancestor/exemplar of the idea of sacrifice--& sacrifice thus easily segues into place as part of Girard's "scapegoating mechanism."
One Good Thing about Girard, though, is that his analysis and exposure of the scapegoating mechanism undercuts, refutes and destroys the doctrine of the Blood Atonement. That Jesus died for our sins has always been a completely unintelligible notion to me ever since I began thinking about it at the age of 13 or so.
Girard's position (and mine), broadly speaking, is that the death of Jesus at the hands of a violent system that runs on death and the threat of death, may have been inevitable, but it was not NECESSARY in the sense that God required it in order to legally discharge human beings from the consequences of sin.
I would gloss this question further by saying that Jesus is the fullest expression of that aspect of God that which is most intellible to human beings qua humans. As such, Jesus is Perfectly Human--although not a Perfect Human--Jesus would not be human if he were perfect in the sense usually meant by theologians. The difference between Jesus and other human beings is, metaphorically speaking, quantitative rather than qualitative--Jesus possesses such an abundance of the humanness that God would prefer that it becomes a quantitative difference large enough, as Marx would say, to become qualitative. Jesus did not occur in a historical vacuum either. He happened because of a long process of tutelage between God and the people of Israel. Other peoples may have been candidates but it so happened that the Jews, as it were, got there first.
(Other peoples gave rise to prophets and seers who brought to light other aspects of the deity and the cosmos and answered other questions human beings put to the cosmos and the deity(ies). As John Cobb and Wilfred Cantwell Smith have indicated, different religions are different answers to different questions: The Buddhist and Hindu question is something like, What is the nature of existence?
The Abrahamic religions are more focused on the question that runs something like, What is the nature and destiny of my personal individual historicity in the context of my society?)
(What could follow at this point is my ideas about the meaning of the Incarnation & its salvific effects (if any). That is the discussion in which I want to argue that the Incarnation is in some non-trivial sense true and imporant and at the same time repudiate supercessionism, i.e. the idea that only Christianity is true and is the only path to salvation. Before I can do that, though, I think I have to run on a bit about the nature of God and the origin and significance of evil...which I will probably do...)
R.
