Theologian's Corner

- by Jedi Jah

Since the RSOL Digest has seen fit to dedicate space to a "Philosopher's Corner," I would like to think there might also be room for a "Theologian's Corner," and I offer this reflection to start it off. In the same way that philosophy consists simply in our reflecting on our experience of what it means to be human, so what we call "theology" is really nothing more than our struggle to understand and express any experience we may have of transcendence, of going beyond the human, without becoming less human. Those of us who are Christian tend to experience such transcendence as somehow divine, and we use traditional Christian categories to describe it, but there can equally be Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, or Hindu theologies, to name only a few, and all of them can contribute something to our understanding of the Ultimate Reality that grounds our universe and our selves.

I am moved to scribble the present reflection because a lot of the theological reading I have been doing lately leaves me ever more convinced that the revelation we find in the Bible can help us understand better what is happening in our country with regards to sex offenders and other persons who are being persecuted with such relentless and fanatical zeal.

Over the last few decades an especially interesting strain of Christian theology has been inspired by Rene' Girard, a French thinker who studied the key role played by sacrifice and scapegoating in the historical development of culture, society, and religion. In his later works Girard became convinced that the biblical revelation - tentatively in the Old Testament and more clearly in the New - exposed the ancient and persistent practice of scapegoating for what it truly was: the merciless sacrificing of basically innocent persons for the sake of the larger society's social cohesion.

Mark Heim, in his book Saved from Sacrifice, does an excellent job of relating the thought of Girard and other key thinkers in this area to what is happening in contemporary society. The basic idea of Christianity, according to these scholars, is that God, by identifying wholeheartedly with the rejected and crucified Jesus, becomes himself the victim of human scapegoating, and by so doing he completely confounds the whole sacrificial process. In effect, he throws a monkey wrench into the works and renders it useless. The divine abolition of the sacrificial process becomes manifest in the resurrection of Jesus, which gives rise to a new community where there will be no scapegoating, where human beings will not be sacrificed for the sake of others. In Heim's words:

"In seeing Christ on the cross, in the light of the resurrection, believers see what has happened... and not just to Jesus. What is revealed is not only the enormity of such violence against God, but the evil of our longstanding scapegoating against each other. We can no longer say we know not what we do. And when this abyss opens before us, the order of magnitude of this sin appears virtually unlimited. It is the dimensions of grace that bring home to us the real nature of wrong. We see that Jesus does not deserve to be on the cross. That allows us to see that those we put on the cross in the same place Jesus occupied, for the same socially unifying purpose, do not deserve the scapegoating at our hands (whatever their real sins may be)."

What is happening with sex offenders in contemporary America (as with so many "lepers" in times past) is scapegoating: that is, certain persons (often the "majority") decide to portray others as irredeemably evil, so that they themselves can somehow feel "good" and "virtuous." The tragedy is that the more loathing people feel toward themselves, the more they will resort to scapegoating in order to escape from the pain of their self-contempt.

Throughout his book, Heim describes how the sacrificial system works and how it maintains an amazing consistency across cultures and across epochs. As you read the following passage, understand that in our times "sex offenders" are truly the equivalent of the "sacrificial victims" mentioned there, those who are charged with crimes that "always outgrow their actual offenses and capabilities."

"God accepts to be a victim of our original social sin, to step into the place of the scapegoat, and to do what no human being can do. Humans fitted to the role of sacrificial victim are inflated beyond their true stature. The crimes they are charged with always outgrow their actual offenses and capabilities. They are held responsible in a wildly disproportionate way. And every victim proves inadequate, in the sense that even when sacrifice works, it works only temporarily and requires repetition. If the victim were truly responsible, then eliminating the victim would truly solve the problem. Just as the sacrificial subjects are not really adequate to the condemnation they receive, so they are not adequate to overcome the powers that converge against them. They do not have the means to prove their innocence of the outsized charges. They cannot resist the judgment of a unanimous community. They cannot change the script of their own deaths that is written after them, in which any protest is erased."

I am convinced that there is an unrelenting unforgivingness in our modern society that is antithetical to everything that is Christian. No matter how much they may quote the Bible or call on the name of God, those who are advocating ever more repressive sex offender laws are betraying the heart of the Christian gospel. There is no doubt that the Christian churches over the centuries (and the rulers they have backed) have engaged in horrendous scapegoating and have sacrificed countless victims, but that does not invalidate the central Christian message of a crucified Messiah. The great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was intensely anti-Christian, but he understood better than most believers what was the core of Jesus' mission in life. He wrote: "That pseudo-humanism that calls itself Christianity intends precisely to forbid that anyone be sacrificed."