Anthony Bartlett – Forging Ploughshares

The Sign Given in the Temple: Sacrificial Violence is Ended

When asked for a sign, Jesus says he will only give the sign of Jonah, but then in the Temple incident, when asked for a sign, he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19). Both signs refer to his death and resurrection, though in the Temple Jesus uses the active verb “destroy” to indicate the manner by which he would die. Both incidents are surrounded by violence: the violence of the sea, the violence of the Temple sacrifices, the violence of Nineveh, the violence of the Jews and Rome, and it is this violence in both the sign of Jonah and in the Temple incident that accounts for his death. The sign of Jonah entails the anger of Jonah toward his enemies, duplicated in the Pharisaical anger turned on Jesus (see here), the same anger directed at protecting the Temple, which will kill Jesus.

Jesus is like Jeremiah, who predicted the destruction of the Temple and whose life was then threatened: “When Jeremiah finished speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak to all the people, the priests and the prophets and all the people seized him, saying, “You must die!” (Je 26:8). In this sign, Jesus ties his death to the threat he poses to the Temple, and all that it represents. His claim of the Temple being a “robber’s den,” is not so much that bad people have corrupted a good system, but as in Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Temple itself is behind the robbery. The English word “robber” may not capture the meaning of léstés, an armed thief who steals by use of threat of violence. Cleaning up this system, is more than getting rid of the money changers. God, in Jeremiah, claims the institution is a den of “robbers” (7:11) and that setting up this system of sacrifices was not his idea: “For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Je 7:22). It is not that the moneychangers are charging unfair rates, but the Temple is incurring a violent debt and making thieves of all involved in its operation. God describes it as a place of institutionalized murder, oppressing “the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and shedding “innocent blood in this place” (7:5). The issue is destruction of the entire system, which Jesus intimates in saying “destroy this Temple,” and in describing its end.

As God says in Isaiah, “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle; And I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs or goats” (Is 1:11). God hates the system: “I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, they have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Is 1:14). He equates the system with murder: “So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you; Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood” (Is 1:15). We may tend to read these verses as saying they are killers in spite of the Temple, but what is described is a system that is inherently violent, obviously in the slaughter of animals but also in promoting scapegoating sacrifice. “Bring your worthless offerings no longer, incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly” (Is 1:13).

Jesus disrupts the sacrifices in the Temple, (echoing Jeremiah that it is a den of violent thieves), as the institution is robbing people of their life. It shelters murder and violence as part of Jewish identity.[1] The driving out of the animals is not simply concerned with money, but is a symbolic ceasing of the sacrificial economy; a momentary saving of the animals from slaughter as a metaphorical end to the murderous system. During his action in the Temple, Mark says “he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mk 11:16). Some translations call this “merchandise” but it is not items for sale but the items necessary for the sacrifices as in Hebrews 9:21: “all the vessels used in worship.” According to Anthony Bartlett, “In short, there is a whole paraphernalia necessary for the conduct of sacrifice – shovels, barrels, buckets, bowls, pans, trays, censers, etc. These would have been used to ferry wood, ashes, oil and grain offerings, grain cakes, and the animal body parts remaining in sin offerings, peace offerings/thanksgiving offerings sacrifices (cf. Leviticus 2-7).”[2] Jesus was disrupting the entire system of the Temple, of which the money changers were one small part. The sellers and consumers, patrons and priests, or all that are involved are interrupted. He symbolically halts the entire system, and in his person he makes it obsolescent. He predicts this will cause his death, but that is part of the point, so as to expose the violence at the heart of the system; the violence that killed him and which he defeated in the cross and the resurrection.

The driving out of the animals puts a direct focus on the sacrifices but all understood the animals are symbolic. The sacrificial victims Jesus is driving out of the Temple represent his sheep, delivered from sacrificial violence. In Matthew Jesus seems to accentuate the point, healing “the blind and the lame” who came to Him in the temple” in the midst of this incident (Mt 21:14). These are oppressed by the Temple system, but Jesus opens a new way for these “sinners” the Temple did not pretend to help. “All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (Jn 10:8–11). Jesus implicates all who were previously shepherding Israel: “All who came before Me are thieves and robbers.” His is a universal statement, but of course the bandits (those who would “kill and destroy” the sheep), along with all the patrons are saved from the robbery of this death dealing system. By the time John writes, the Temple, along with its sacrifices and priesthood, are long gone, but all understood even in the synoptics, Jesus had provided a door out of the sacrificial economy and entry into an alternative Kingdom. The Sheep Gate into Jerusalem accentuated the purpose of the Temple to sacrifice, and Jesus opens a new sheep gate: “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep” (Jn 10:7). This shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, driving them from the deadly system to which they were subject.

Halting the sacrifices, also entails an implicit political dimension involving Rome. When Israel decided to cease offering sacrifices in the Temple on behalf of the emperor in 66 AD, according to Josephus: “This action laid the foundation of the war with the Romans.”[3] An army, the size of the Roman Army that eventually destroyed the Temple, would have been necessary to permanently halt the sacrifices, but Jesus symbolically accomplished the same thing. The disruption produces a sacrificial crisis, of the sort which would eventually consume the Temple and Israel. The priests and Pharisees foresaw this possibility, which was behind their decision to kill him: “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (Jn 11:48). Jesus death would not ward off Rome’s eventual sacrifice of Israel in its own sacrificial economy, and Christ is aware he is potentially unleashing unprecedented violence: “The whole of archaic humanity, and one thousand years of intense Jewish religious history culminating in the present crisis of Roman occupation, would have risen up against him.”[4] The Jews momentarily forestalled the all-out violence by collaborating with Rome in Jesus death, but eventually a new round of sacrificial violence would consume the Temple, but Christ had made provision for a new Temple and a new, nonviolent, way of being human.

Combined with the imagery of the triumphal entry, it is clear the violent world of warring kingdoms, attached to Israel and the Temple, is being halted by a new kind of king and kingdom: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zec 9:9). This is not a king prepared for battle, but one equipped to end the sacrifices of war, religion and violence. He is described as (ani) humble, poor or oppressed. Elsewhere such a one is a victim of murder: “The murderer arises at dawn; He kills the poor and the needy, and at night he is as a thief” (Job 24:14). The humble are the victims, not the victimizers; one who must give up his coat as part of a pledge, and likely homeless and without another cloak (Deut 24:12-13). This humble and meek King does not come to sacrifice, but to halt violent sacrifice: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; and the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; and His dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zec 9:10). This is the imagery Jesus is purposely echoing in his entrance into Jerusalem and the Temple.

This is also why John the Baptist marks the end of this violent type kingdom: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Mt 11:11–12). John is the last in the line of those who, like Elijah, possess “the kingdom in a way that is alien to the kingdom itself.”[5] The violence of the kingdom, the sacrificial economy of the Temple, the warring destruction of Israel, was not the kind of kingdom God would establish. This violent sort of kingdom is finished with Jesus: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” (Mk 11:14). The fig tree representing the Temple is dead and finished. As he says right after the Temple incident, the Temple Mt. is subject to being cast into the sea, and the disciples can already live out their faith, in its absence (Mk 11:22-26). As Bartlett points out the two incidents are tied together in a mutual explanation: “It is much more intelligible to hear him referring exactly to this event, using the withering of the fig tree as a parable of what will now happen to the Temple and its sacrificial order.”[6] The fig tree will bear no more fruit, the Temple system is finished, and can now be discarded into the sea. “The mountain Jesus is speaking of is the temple Mt., and the movement is entry into a fulness of forgiveness, no longer dependent on the ritual of sacrificial violence.”[7]

Jesus is himself the alternative to the Temple, exposing its continual blood sacrifice and ongoing violence, made evident as that which sacrifices Jesus. He is sacrificed in an effort to preserve the Temple and its deadly economy, and in the process he displaces sacrificial religion. The sign of Jonah and the sign of the Temple, stand against the scapegoating sacrifice of Nineveh and scapegoating Temple sacrifice. Jesus knew that halting the sacrifices, would produce the sign of Jonah in his murder, the destruction of the Temple of his body and his resurrection, defeating this order of violence and sacrifice. Just as Jonah is three days in the earth symbolically delivered from death (sheol), Jesus, the destroyed Temple, is three days in Hades or Hell, cleansing the world of hellish violence and providing resurrection life, free of sacrificial violence in a new Temple order.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 167.

[2] Bartlett, 166.

[3] Josephus, Bellum Judaicum II: 408, cited in Bartlett, 142.

[4] Bartlett, 146.

[5] Bartlett, 155.

[6] Bartlett, 163.

[7] Bartlett, 162.

The Sign of Jonah as the Major Semiotic Shift of Scripture

“An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet” (Matt 12:39).

Taking into account the context of Jonah, contrasting particularly with Nahum, and then accounting for Jesus’ direct and indirect references to Jonah, what unfolds in the Gospels is not just another sign but a semiotic shift, in which one order of signs and meaning is displaced by another (the sign of Jonah). Jesus’ singular sign is not the sort his hearers will recognize as such, because it is a sign of a different order; not another miracle, but a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The immediate contrast posed in Matthew is with the expected sign of an “adulterous generation,” judged by the men of Nineveh who “repented at the preaching of Jonah” (v. 41). This generation will also be judged by the “Queen of the South” who “came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon” (v. 42). There is a new order of wisdom, greater than Solomon, in the sign of Jonah. It exceeds the imagined wisdom of this crooked generation and even exceeds the pinnacle of Hebrew wisdom. The sign of Jonah taken up by Christ, in Anthony Bartlett’s description, “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[1]

Jonah, like Ruth, stands against the prejudice and exclusivity of the Jews in its story of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh (the capital city of Assyria, the foremost enemy of the Jews), but it is also a reversal of the Hebrew view of God, in which God punishes the wicked and rewards the good. No one, in Jewish estimate, could exceed the evil of Nineveh, and yet in the book of Jonah, God cares for the Ninevites in the same way he cares for the Jews. Jonah counters the theodicy typified by Deuteronomy, that taken up by the Maccabees and inherited by the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, in which rewards and punishment can be traced in the rise and fall of nations. The problem is Jerusalem is threatened by Assyria but God would save Nineveh, the capital city of this enemy. To accentuate the problem the pagans, in Jonah, are more responsive to God than God’s prophet (serving perhaps as a typical Jew).

Having received his call to preach to Nineveh, Jonah flees toward Tarshish, the Timbuktu of his day beyond any known outpost of Israel and its God, and in the opposite direction of Nineveh. We only learn at the end of the book that he is fleeing, fearful that God would have compassion on the Ninevites (4:2 echoing Exodus 34:6-7): “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.” Jonah fears Nineveh will repent and God will relent in punishing them; an unusual problem for a prophet. Where Abraham argued that God should not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, cities which received no prophet, Jonah wants the opposite response, which is probably the prevailing Jewish attitude, and seemingly a parody of this attitude (captured in Nahum). When the city repents, Jonah becomes downcast and angry (4:1), echoing the attitude of Cain before he kills his brother (the same word). The murderous anger of Jonah reflects a deep-seated violence which explains his original flight.

In response, “The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up” (1:4). According to Bartlett, “The scene is reminiscent of creation itself where ‘a wind from God swept over the waters’ (Gen. 1:2). We are in the realm of primordial divine action, and in the biblical repertoire of signs the violence of the storm must echo Genesis, including the episode of the flood.”[2] The pagan sailors cry out to their gods, and question Jonah, urging him to pray: “So the captain approached him and said, ‘How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish’” (Jonah 1:6). While they are willing to scapegoat Jonah by throwing him in the sea, he makes for an odd scapegoat in his willing and detailed instruction: “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you” (Jonah 1:12). The sailors display an uncommon decency, doubling down in their efforts: “However, the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them” (Jonah 1:13). They even offer up a prayer to the Lord, seemingly having converted to the religion of Jonah: “Then they called on the LORD and said, ‘We earnestly pray, O LORD, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O LORD, have done as You have pleased’” (Jonah 1:14). The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance.

Jonah is angry at God’s mercy and would prefer to see his enemies suffer rather than have them repent and be saved. According to Bartlett, “Jonah fulfills textually and emotionally the very same character as the violent storm and the evil it brings about. The text has doubled back on itself, returning Jonah to the same murderous state he embraced when he was thrown into the raging sea – and beyond that to the very first murder of history, thus once more knitting together the themes of human and cosmic violence.”[3] The king and the Ninevites and God all turn from the violence, but the violence endures among the Jews. In identifying with the sign of Jonah, Jesus understands the poor light this shines upon the Jews’ murderous attitude toward him, but it is precisely this violence that constitutes his death and resurrection as the sign of Jonah. He brings the resolution missing in Jonah and the Jews.

Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21). The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in a storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.

This Jewish understanding, on the order of the friends of Job, pictures the world as a closed system in which those who do good prosper and those who do evil are made to suffer. In this equation, good nations and individuals should thrive, and those that are wicked should suffer and be defeated. A “sign” in this closed system would accentuate the values of this system, by heaping miraculous favor on the chosen or by furthering the suffering of the wicked. A sign might be on the order of Joshua at Jericho, where the walls come tumbling down allowing the genocide in which “both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys,” were meant “with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:17–21).

Instead, Jonah depicts not only the people but all the animals putting on sack-cloth, fasting, and repenting (Jonah 3:7-8). It depicts God’s great compassion, a counter-sign to that of the flood, which brought total destruction to “animals and creeping things and birds of the air” (Genesis 6:7). Jonah cares more for his plant, providing him shade, than he does for the multitudes in Nineveh (Jonah 4:9) to say nothing of “the many animals.” For him, Nineveh’s evil should evoke divine wrath, as in the flood or at Jericho, but God fails to destroy Nineveh, the very people oppressing the Jews. God tries to evoke a bit of empathy from Jonah, noting that a plant, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow” (4:10) does not really compare to “that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals” (4:11), but the response of Jonah is an open question.

Jesus also elicits the sympathy of the Jews (in the same conversation he raises the sign of Jonah), using sheep to challenge their legalistic attitudes surrounding the sabbath: “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” (Matt 12:11–12). The Pharisees do not want sheepish signs, any more than Jonah wants a compassionate God. They need a sign on the order of Elijah’s fire from heaven, consuming their enemies. Fire from heaven burning up Romans, Samaritans or sinners, might be a good sign, but the sign of Jonah is precisely not a furthering of the scapegoating of Jewish enemies; rather it is an exposure and displacement of scapegoating sacrifice. It is counter to the Deuteronomic guilt, in which calamity is caused by human guilt, and in which God’s vengeance follows fixed laws, and by which he can thus be manipulated to achieve a calculated end. Jonah’s anger at the compassion of God is on the order of Jewish anger at Jesus’ compassion for sinners, for the lame and the sick. Neither Jesus nor the God of Jonah meet Jewish expectations.

Jonah, a parody of the typical biblical prophet, serves for Jesus as a parody of the Pharisees. Like Jonah, they are displeased and angry at Jesus, precisely because he is making a mockery of their narrow views of God. Jonah gets so angry he wants to die, not because God is vengeful, but because he is loving (Jonah 4:2). The Pharisees, like Jonah, would prefer unrelenting anger to unrelenting love and neither wants a God who will extend his love into the depths of hades, or who will take up the cause of all of humanity as the “suffering son of man.” The Pharisees want a real sign; in the same way Jonah wants the destruction of Nineveh, so Jesus evokes the end point of Jonah’s and Jewish violence, in that both overlap with death and hades: “just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40).

Jonah equates his journey to being trapped in the grave or sheol: “Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, weeds were wrapped around my head. I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, but You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God” (Jonah 2:5–6). Jonah metaphorically goes to hell in the belly of the fish, which delivers him to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria (Jewish hell on earth), not for vengeance but for repentance. Though Jonah may not repent of his hellish attitudes, Nineveh repents of its violent evil, and Jesus, like Jonah, descends to sheol, he preaches to the dead (I Pet 3:18-19; 4:6), he harrows hell, and this is why the sign of Jonah is a non-sign for the Pharisaical. It is a discontinuation of one order of signs, and the establishment of new order of meaning. The orders of heaven and hell, punishment and revenge, fixed rules in which evil and good can be clearly sorted are thrown into question.

Jonah is ironic, rule-bending and rule-breaking, and is in some estimates a mocking jab at the narrow minded, vengeful understanding of God on display in the book to which it is adjacent, Nahum. Nahum has a very different understanding of God and of the deserved destiny of Nineveh. “The oracle of Nineveh: The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. A jealous and avenging God is the Lord; the Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserves wrath for His enemies” (Na 1:1–2). Jonah and Nahum, back-to-back, portray opposite understandings of the character of God and the plight of the wicked. In Nahum, a closed system of scapegoating justice, requires annihilation of the enemy: “He will make a complete end of its site, and will pursue His enemies into darkness” (Na 1:8). Rather than harrowing hell, God is hell for the enemy Nineveh: “Who can stand before His indignation? Who can endure the burning of His anger? His wrath is poured out like fire and the rocks are broken up by Him” (Na 1:6). Nahum presents a glorious image of the destruction of Nineveh, the sort of sign every Jew might expect: “Woe to the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage; Her prey never departs. The noise of the whip, the noise of the rattling of the wheel, galloping horses and bounding chariots!” (Na 3:1–2). These people will get what they deserve because God is a known quantity, a warrior God, fighting on behalf of Judah. “Horsemen charging, swords flashing, spears gleaming, many slain, a mass of corpses, and countless dead bodies—they stumble over the dead bodies!” (Na 3:3).

This is not the sheepish God of Jesus and Jonah, but one who delights in the destruction of the wicked. Where Jonah pictures the possibility of repentance and salvation for the worst of sinners, Nahum closes this possibility: “There is no relief for your breakdown, your wound is incurable” (Na 3:19). This God delights in the smashing of the head of the infants (3:10), and there is no danger this God will relent in his anger until Nineveh is completely destroyed: “And the LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. In whirlwind and storm is His way, and clouds are the dust beneath His feet” (Na 1:3). This God uses natural calamity, not for purposes of repentance, but for ultimate destruction. Where God in Jonah is too merciful, too loving, and too concerned for the least (in Jonah’s estimate) the God of Nahum and his people, have no room for grief: “Nineveh is devastated! Who will grieve for her? Where will I seek comforters for you?” (3:7). This is the sort of good news Jonah’s Jews like to hear. There is no question that God punishes with the same sort of violence and oppression leveraged against the Jews, and which Israel would, given the opportunity, use on her enemies. The cruelty of nations is not the issue in the holy wars but the victory of Israel and the Jews is the prime concern.

Considering the long rule of Assyria, from the ninth century until the death of Ashurbanipal in 626 B.C.E., and the fact that the Assyrians made Judah a vassal state and destroyed Israel, the hatred expressed in Nahum is understandable. The way in which the Jews understood God was thrown into question by their long subjugation, and the only explanation was for a future devastation. Warrior gods prove themselves in war, and by this standard the God of the Jews seems distracted or apathetic. Not only does Nahum not rebuke Judah (the usual prophetic explanation for their suffering is their sin) but he makes excessive promises: “For never again will the wicked one pass through you; he is cut off completely” (Na 1:15). Nahum has no sour notes about sin and repentance for Judah, but only bad news for Nineveh, the kind of sign to warm a Zionist heart.

The book ends with a question, which along with Jonah as a whole challenges Jewish self-identity and the identity of God: “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?” (Jonah 4:11). Could it be that God cares for all people, even Ninevites (or Palestinians), and that he even cares for animals? This is not normally open for consideration in the sacrificial, scapegoating world of the Jews. The danger is Christians too will miss the significance of the sign of Jonah, in maintaining a Pharisaical calculus, aimed at sending the good to heaven and evil sinners to hell forever, when the truth is God will search out hell itself for the souls of the perishing.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[2] Bartlett, 127.

[3] Bartlett, 129.

Daniel Versus Maccabees: Resolving the Contention Between Violence and Nonviolence

It is not that there is a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New, rather there are different streams of thought competing against each other in the Hebrew Bible, and the resolution to these competing views is found in Christ. An understanding of God that is opposed to Christ, opposed to the incarnation, opposed to the humanity of God, opposed to nonviolence, or opposed to a personal and humane understanding of God must be completed and corrected by the understanding of God in Christ. Comparing Ezra and Nehemiah with Ruth, shows that while the first two violently opposed intermarriage with gentiles and pictured God as retributive, Ruth is a gentile (of the “worst kind”) and yet bears the very character of God and serves as a model Jew (see here). In the stories of Jacob wrestling with the angel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, the prodigal son, and the book of Job, there is a fusion of the forgiving human victim with the face of God (see here). There is no paradoxical fusing of human means and God’s means, violence or nonviolence, or retribution and regeneration. By ignoring the contrasting images presented in the Hebrew Bible there is the danger of missing that Christ completes, resolves, corrects, and brings meaning that would otherwise be obscured. This transformational liberation reaches it culmination in the two views under contention in the books of Maccabees and Daniel.

Whether or not the Maccabean thesis of Daniel (that Daniel was composed primarily in the 2^nd century and not the 6^th century B.C.) is correct, the thesis brings out the contrast between the Maccabean violent solution and the nonviolent resistance in the book of Daniel to the challenge of empire. Daniel and the Jewish resistance to the empire’s demand for worship presumes a form of nonviolent martyrdom, though this possibility was also chosen by a large segment of the Jewish population resisting the Seleucid Greek empire. A thousand persons chose to escape into the wilderness, but when challenged by the Seleucid army they offered no resistance: “But they did not answer them or hurl a stone at them or block up their hiding places, for they said, ‘Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.’ So they attacked them on the sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and livestock, to the number of a thousand persons” (1 Mac 2:36–38). From the perspective of Mattathias and his friends this was total defeat: “’If we all do as our kindred have done and refuse to fight with the Gentiles for our lives and for our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from the earth.’ So they made this decision that day: ‘Let us fight against anyone who comes to attack us on the sabbath day; let us not all die as our kindred died in their hiding places’” (1 Mac 2:39–41). Having witnessed the slaughter, the Maccabees reject keeping the sabbath through nonviolence and choose extreme violence.

The contention between the two positions revolves around the sabbath, as it is not simply work but the violence of war forbidden on the sabbath, that may mean being slaughtered. These people were willing to die, along with their children, in what the text describes as their “innocence” or “singlemindedness” (ἁπλότης) and it is precisely this singleness of purpose embraced as the Christian ideal (Eph 6:5; Col 3:22; according to Jesus one’s eye should be single – Matt 6:22). These sabbath keepers are not legalists, but are shaped by the sabbath in a different relationship with God and a different way of being in the world. According to Anthony Bartlett, “The internal and symbolic content of sabbath is an earth of peace and blessing, where a fulness of life overtakes and displaces the need to work.”[1] Life comes from God, and this is not gained through human effort, whether work or war. This break-through stands out all the more, in that the tenor of Maccabees is a counter-argument to this brief episode.

The followers of Mattathias in choosing to fight on the sabbath do not want to be killed like their fellow Jews, and this is their prime inspiration. They set aside sabbath law, and begin an armed resistance. As William Farmer puts it, “once it is seen that as long as the heathen could attack the Jews on sabbath with impunity, just so long was the possibility of national independence out of the question.”[2] By attempting to save the temple and the law they miss the heart and character of the law. In violently defending Israel, they forsake the vision of a peaceful sabbath kingdom.

Where Maccabees poses the enemy and its defeat in literal terms, Daniel, through a figurative frame, poses a different sort of enemy. The four winds of heaven stir up four beasts from out of the sea, and these beasts have iron teeth, claws, tusks the wings of eagles, and the head of humans (Dan 7:2–8). They are killing machines given human pride and cunning, representing Babylonian, Mede, Persian, and Greek empires. The only resistance possible is heavenly, not simply through a new imagination but a new reality arising from within the human situation. God exercises sovereignty through “One like a Son of Man” and in his visions, Daniel describes this alternative structuring power.

Daniel’s apocalyptic vision focuses on divine intervention, not from without but erupting from within, fusing the divine with the human:

And behold, with the clouds of heaven One like a Son of Man was coming, And He came up to the Ancient of Days And was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, Glory and a kingdom, That all the peoples, nations and men of every language Might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion Which will not pass away; And His kingdom is one Which will not be destroyed (Dan 7:13–14).

Destruction and war are absent in this unified kingdom of healing, teaching, and peace. This Son of Man from the Ancient of Days transcends human limitations in fusing divine and human. He has a human nature and yet comes with the clouds on the order of YHWH’s presence in various theophanies (Exodus 13:21, 19:9; 1 Kings 8:10-11). He is given universal dominion over all peoples, unifying them under a singular head, where the bestial kingdoms are multiple and violent, with one succeeding the other (Dan 7:24-25) while the Son of Man will establish an everlasting and singular kingdom.

This enlarged frame comes with the pronouncement of resurrection:

But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12:1–3).

These “holy ones” (as Daniel describes them elsewhere) shine like the stars forever, having been made holy in a new way of being human. They have the characteristics of the Son of Man and are participants in his kingdom: “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever” (Dan 7:18). Daniel pictures these holy ones as being “worn out” in martyrdom (Dan 7:25) through relinquishing one sort of life (struggling in and through death) through a death accepting resurrection life (inclusive of martyrdom). As Bartlett emphasizes, resurrection has to be tied to a successful vision and practice of nonviolence as this is not passage beyond mortality, but its acceptance as part of eternal life, or part of a new sort of humanity sharing in divine wisdom.

Jesus taking up the title “Son of Man” from Daniel is the culminating resolution of the issue of sabbath keeping and violence: “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt 12:8). He is Lord of the sabbath in providing peace and life and final healing from sin and death. “’But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home’” (Mk 2:10–11). Jesus combines the image of the suffering servant of Isaiah with Daniel’s Son of Man, reshaping the messianic hope of Israel in himself with His impending nonviolent suffering and death (Mk 8:31, 9:31), and future return in glory (Mk 13:26, 14:62).

In this apocalyptic frame the immediate circumstance (persecution by empire) pales in comparison to an eternal perspective, and it is Daniels apocalyptic vision taken up by Jesus, referencing a Maccabean sort of desolating sacrilege, which account for his instruction: “So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains,” says Jesus (Matt 24:15–16). Jesus links the action of the nonviolent Maccabean martyrs (fleeing) with the wisdom and insight of Daniel.[3] The hope of the resurrection is the means of nonviolent resistance which recognizes the Son of Man reorders the world within a larger frame of meaning and wisdom.

This reordered reality is pictured in John’s apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man as alpha and omega and ruler of the cosmos: “In His right hand He held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength. When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last’” (Rev 1:16–17). The word of his mouth is sharper than any sword, and his life-giving human/divine radiance is the true light illuminating the fulness of a peaceable reality. Jesus fulfills the vision of Daniel as Son of Man, establishing everlasting sabbath rest.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 106.

[2] William R. Farmer, Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: An Inquiry into Jewish Nationalism in the Greco-Roman Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956),76. Cited in Sigve K. Tonstad, “To Fight or not to Fight: The Sabbath and the Maccabean Revolt,” (Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 135–146. Copyright © 2016 Andrews University Seminary Studies), 145.

[3] Sigve, 144-145.

What is a Jew and Who is God?

Not only is the image of God under contention in the Hebrew Scriptures, but the meaning of what it means to be a Jew, and the two issues are very much interconnected. There is a Judaism focused on pure blood lines, linguistic purity, ritual obligation, and which presumes transgression in any of these areas results in God’s punishment. In this understanding the constant refrain is reform, separation, reinforced endogamy, rebuilding walls, sabbath keeping, protecting, purifying and preserving Jewish identity, and both the reform and the God who demands it are violent and retributive. On the other hand, there is a Judaism which presumes all people are invited into God’s family, in which God takes on the image of a servant, “the son of man,” and which names even foreign women as the truly faithful. We know these alien women (e.g., Ruth and Rahab) are the ideal through their identity as “kinsmen redeemers,” who are not only in the lineage of David and Jesus, but portions of the canon are dedicated to explaining their decisive inclusion in Jewish universalism. In this understanding foreigners can join themselves to the Lord (Is 56:6) and the temple is for all people: “For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Is 56:7). In this alternative literature there are nonviolent martyrs, who are either slaughtered, miraculously delivered, or as with Ruth and Tamar are kinsmen redeemers through birth and new creation. It is in this context that there is development of the possibility of new life, resurrection, and a non-retributive, restorative God. This alternative Israel makes the work of Christ comprehensible, and it explains his crucifixion as the end point of two competing conceptions of God and Israel.

So, the contrast is between an exclusive, violent, God, focused on a human remnant, and an inclusive, peaceful, God, focused on all people and the cosmos. The point in setting up a clear contrast is to avoid papering over very different understandings of Jews and God. According to some readings, the violent, exclusive, and retributive understanding is to be incorporated into its opposite, which may miss that God is not on the side of those who killed Jesus (as in some doctrines of the atonement). By showing there is a long lineage of two understandings, the point is not to meld them but to make it clear that true Jews, true faithfulness, and a correct understanding of God are what is under contention and what is being worked out in the Bible.

The Tradition of Nehemiah and Ezra

Nehemiah would not only rebuild the physical walls of Jerusalem, but would reestablish the uniqueness of Jewish identity, as Hebrew children are failing to learn Hebrew and the people and priests are not maintaining markers of separation in marriage. So, Nehemiah takes it upon himself to try to curb or stop Jews from marrying the women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab so he “contended with them and cursed them and struck some of them and pulled out their hair, and made them swear by God, ‘You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take of their daughters for your sons or for yourselves’” (Ne 13:25). For Nehemiah this is “great evil” and “treachery” against God (13:27). He prays for divine retribution against the Levites for having “defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood” (13:29). He also locks the city gates at night, to keep out foreign traders on the sabbath and when the non-Jews camp outside the city he threatens violence: “Why do you spend the night in front of the wall? If you do so again, I will use force against you” (13:21). According to Nehemiah, this sort of transgression is why calamity came upon the Jews in the first place: “Did not your fathers do the same, so that our God brought on us and on this city all this trouble? Yet you are adding to the wrath on Israel by profaning the sabbath” (13:18).

Ezra is so appalled by this situation that he pulls out his hair: “When I heard about this matter, I tore my garment and my robe, and pulled some of the hair from my head and my beard, and sat down appalled” (Ezra 9:3). After sitting “appalled” all day he says, “I arose from my humiliation, even with my garment and my robe torn, and I fell on my knees and stretched out my hands to the Lord my God; and I said, ‘O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, for our iniquities have risen above our heads and our guilt has grown even to the heavens” (Ezra 9:5–6). He too presumes it is intermarrying with foreign women that has caused God’s punishment: “Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been in great guilt, and on account of our iniquities we, our kings and our priests have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity and to plunder and to open shame, as it is this day” (Ezra 9:7).

At Ezra’s prompting and approval Sheceniah proposes a retroactive solution: “So now let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law” (Ezra 10:3). The God of Ezra and Nehemiah is not concerned he might be creating widows and orphans (let alone care for them). Nehemiah would create an exclusive political space and Ezra an exclusive religious space, and the concern is not with the vast majority who fail these tests of exclusion, but only with those who are included. Exclusive holiness is the means to salvation, as God is that sort of Other. On this basis, Nehemiah can approach God with confidence of reward: “Thus I purified them from everything foreign and appointed duties for the priests and the Levites, each in his task, and I arranged for the supply of wood at appointed times and for the first fruits. Remember me, O my God, for good” (Ne 13:30–31).

The Alternative Posed by Ruth

Ruth, the Moabite widow, represents the opposite attitude to foreign wives found in Ezra and Nehemiah. Ruth is of the Moabites, the product of Lot’s incestuous relations (Gen 19:36-37), condemned by both Ezra and Nehemiah as a forbidden source for wives. Ruth accompanies Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, back to Bethlehem when her husband, Naomi’s son, dies. Naomi’s other foreign daughter-in-law returns to Moab, but Ruth insists on continuing to serve Naomi in her struggle for survival. According to Anthony Bartlett, she is described with two key terms: hesed, (with a range of meanings from “loving kindness, to mercy, steadfast love, loyalty and faithfulness”) and go’el (the kinsman redeemer) both of which are associated with the character of God.[1]

The God of Israel is full of steadfast love (hesed): “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (hesed) and faithfulness keeping steadfast love (hesed) for thousands of generations. . .” (Exod 34:6-7). God is also redeemer, and it is the shape go’el takes in this story that marks it as messianic. Redemption may be from out of slavery, from out of debt, or the redemption of property (Lev. 25:25ff), and in the case of murder the go’el “redeems” by covering the spilled blood of the victim with that of the killer (Num 35:9-21). In Ruth, however, redemption is linked specifically with sex and marriage (as in Dt 25). The kinsman marries the widow of his brother in order to preserve her place in Israel, and where he refuses, there is a dereliction of duty: “his brother’s wife shall come to him in the sight of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face; and she shall declare, ‘Thus it is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house’” (Dt 25:9). The goal is that the widow give birth to a new family, and in this procreative act (life in the place of desolation and death), is redemption. So with Ruth: “It is a story of covenant kindness bringing new life, effected by the life of a woman who is a Moabite.”[2] Through Ruth there will arise the line of David and the ancestry of Jesus, but in the immediate context it is love and life in place of alienation and death which creates this messianic possibility.

Naomi blesses her daughters-in-law invoking the blessing of God’s hesed, and indicating they too have done hesed. In doing so “she is telling us in no uncertain terms that these Moabite women are capable of the core Israelite covenant virtue. Ruth, in refusing to leave Naomi, goes beyond Orpah and begins to manifest the deep radicalism and generative power of divine hesed.”[3] “But Ruth said, ‘Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried’” (Ruth 1:16–17). Ruth’s deep commitment to Naomi reveals her divine-like character. Rather than understanding God in abstract legal terms, the divine realm in Ruth overlaps with loving kindness experienced in personal relationship, through which Ruth transforms the world around her.

Under Naomi’s guidance, Ruth begins the elaborate wooing of Boaz a potential kinsmen redeemer, of great wealth. Boaz sees her gleaning the left-over harvest, and instructs his servants to care for her, and he tells Ruth to stay with the maids of his house and to only glean from his field. “Then she fell on her face, bowing to the ground and said to him, ‘Why have I found favor in your sight that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?’” (Ruth 2:10). She refers to herself as nokri, not only a foreigner but a “harlot” or “adulterous woman” (as the term is used in Proverbs 2:16; 5:20). She is the corrupting foreign other, warned against by Ezra, Nehemiah and Proverbs, who puts Israel in danger through her alluring power. Idolatry after all, is equated with harlotry and adultery. The “corrupting other” whose rejection is often equated with acceptance by God, is equated in Ruth, with the divine character and redemption. “The irony could not be more marked: the very figure dreaded for her power to adulterate Israel in every sense, until it is no longer Israel, becomes an unsubstitutable source of Israel’s life.”[4] It is precisely this switching of one sort of Israel for another that forms the messianic link, and it is pointedly a scene of seduction that accomplishes this swap.

Boaz is the potential go’el of Ruth and Naomi, but he does nothing to enact his redeeming role, until Naomi instructs Ruth how to illicit loving action from Boaz: “Wash yourself therefore, and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes, and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. It shall be when he lies down, that you shall notice the place where he lies, and you shall go and uncover his feet and lie down; then he will tell you what you shall do” (3:3-4). It is a seduction, but the point is not to entice Boaz away from but into being a true Israelite. He will fulfill his duties as a kinsman redeemer, first by making love, and then by loving and marrying Ruth. “May you be blessed of the LORD, my daughter. You have shown your last kindness to be better than the first by not going after young men, whether poor or rich. Now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you whatever you ask, for all my people in the city know that you are a woman of excellence” (Ruth 3:10-11).

Before redeeming her, Boaz must first make sure that another kinsman, closer in relation, will not choose to redeem her, but then he consummates his duties before all the people: “All the people who were in the court, and the elders, said, ‘We are witnesses. May the LORD make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, both of whom built the house of Israel; and may you achieve wealth in Ephrathah and become famous in Bethlehem’” (4:11). Ruth is compared to the mothers of the Jews, and with the birth of Obed, Ruth and Boaz’s son, she becomes the mother of the Davidic line. The whole city, the elders, and eventually all of Israel and the world will hear this story, not as one of God disqualifying a foreigner, but as one in which a faithful Moabite acts as model Israelite.

Yet it is Ruth’s steadfast and redeeming love which is valued above all else, as the town folk explain to Naomi: “your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons, has given birth to him” (4:15). Ruth is more the redeemer than Boaz, and even more than Obed, in her steadfast love, giving new life in the midst of possible death. Rather than an impurity in Israel, she reenacts the origins of Israel as hapiru, a dispossessed non-people as chosen by God for redemption. As Bartlett puts it, “Ruth is a generative woman who creates possibility for those around her. She is a mother of Israel precisely in her situation of outsider and contaminant, because in this situation she is able to reproduce Israel’s origins and give the purest – the most selfless and generous – version of hesed.”[5] Her unconditional love and steadfastness is life-giving and redemptive and this, as much as her giving birth to the line of David, marks her as in the line of the final go’el, Jesus Christ.

Conclusion

Ezra and Nehemiah do not have the last word in the Hebrew Scriptures, as Ruth presents a diametrically opposed understanding. One might consider Ezra and Nehemiah over Ruth, were it not for the lineage traced in Mathew, which signals the resolution to this contradiction: “Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David the king” (Mt 1:5–6). Rahab and Ruth in a single sentence indicate the gospel marks the demise of the Jew and God as conceived by Ezra and Nehemiah. Jesus did not come as a reformer of Israel but as one who marks the telos of Israel, in the fulfillment of a meaning beyond law, temple, and the politics and institutions of an earthly kingdom. The Redeemer is not retributive but restorative through life-giving faithfulness and steadfast love, and this is the resolution to the contested identity of God and Israel.

(To be Continued)

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 91-93. I am following Bartlett throughout, and have been inspired by his teaching with PBI.

[2] Ibid, 93.

[3] Ibid, 91.

[4] Ibid, 93.

[5] Ibid, 98.

The Synthesis of the Divine with the Face of the Human Victim

Reading the Hebrew Scriptures through Christ establishes that what is under contention throughout is the identity of God in anthropology or conversely, the identity of humanity in theology. That is, the two topics, which we tend to separate, are made one in Christ, and where they are not synthesized there are characteristic errors. There is a divinization of what are assumed to be the controlling absolutes, such as law, retribution, and violence, and the dehumanizing of God. In turn, this divinization of human absolutes, now deified and reified, makes human revenge, retribution, and violence an imitation of God. This spiraling and seemingly inescapable evil, is broken open by Christ and thus the Scriptures are opened (they are constituted as Scripture), and counter-examples of God are made evident in human suffering, struggle, forgiveness and compassion. The Hebrew Scriptures simultaneously trace both narratives (the transcendent God of legal retribution and the immanent redeemer of mercy and love) but they are a confusion (a hodgepodge of contradictory texts) apart from the insight provided by this Christocentric hermeneutic, which puts a very different human stamp on the divine. Given the light of Christ, we can read Scripture as the gradual synthesis of the human and divine culminating in Christ.

One of the most bizarre incidents, in which God is first recognized as taking on humanity, is in Jacob’s wrestling match with a mysterious man: “Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Ge 32:24). This wrestling is a metaphor for what is at stake in the wrestling with God throughout Scripture. Jacob obtains his true identity in recognizing God in the face of his wrestling partner: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved” (Ge 32:30). Contrary to the megachurch preacher who said “I can’t worship a guy I could beat up,” Jacob discovers a God who allows himself to be pinned down, and in so doing offers his blessing: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Ge 32:28). As Anthony Bartlett concludes, “the God whom Israel is in relationship with is a God who does not win by violent means, who in fact loses – and needs “a man” to signify as much![1] Jacob memorializes the event and the place calling it Peniel, meaning “face of God.” This is an odd sort of beatific vision, as Jacob is not transported out of the body, but it is very much an embodied, enfleshed, synthesis of divine and human. Spirituality and divinity are interwoven with being touched by this man/God who dislocated Jacob’s hip and transformed his identity (Ge 32:25).

This transformation is immediately evident: “Then Jacob lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, Esau was coming, and four hundred men with him” (Ge 33:1). From his actions, hiding the most cherished part of his family (“He put the maids and their children in front, and Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last” vs. 2) it is evident Jacob presumed Esau would exact revenge. Rather than swaggering, Jacob is limping and humbled: “But he himself passed on ahead of them and bowed down to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother” (vs. 3). Jacob the trickster was out of tricks before the brother from whom he stole the birthright, the hunter and son after his father’s heart – a man’s man, if you will. But rather than exacting revenge, “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept” (Ge 33:4). This is unexpected and unexplained, though it points back to the lesson learned in the wrestling match. Jacob says to Esau, “I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably” (Ge 33:10). Jacob is metaphorically pinned, and Esau now bears the divine visage, precisely because Jacob recognizes in his brother what he found in his visitor the previous night. “Esau’s face of love and nonviolence is the very face of God.”[2] As Bartlett explains, there is no explanation for Esau’s transformation from seeming armed avenger to weeping and loving brother, other than pure grace. “The man who wrestles with Jacob and loses and then becomes God is the same sememe (unit of meaning) as Esau who loses, who forgives, who is recognized as the face of God.”[3] Rather than God being identified with violence, he is identified in the victimized brother showing forgiveness and mercy.

Jesus, in the story of the Prodigal Son, plays on the story of Jacob and Esau, with the younger brother grabbing the inheritance and leaving the elder brother to work the farm, while he squanders his inheritance and is eventually forced to humbly return home. He expects rejection and servitude in his father’s house, but instead the father reenacts the response of Esau: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him and fell on his neck” (Lk 15:20). The Pharisees did not understand Jesus keeping company with sinners, and the point of the story is to change their image of God. The echoes of Jacob and Esau must have been obvious as Jesus directly ties Esau’s and the father’s action to the figure of God (rejoicing in heaven).

The pattern is repeated in the story of Joseph and his brothers, in which the brothers who are jealous of Joseph would kill him, but he instead becomes their savior in Egypt. Rather than becoming a scapegoated and perhaps a deified victim, Joseph is a type of Christ, exposing the scapegoating intent of his brothers through a long and agonizing process, in which they are put in the place of either sacrificing their brother Benjamin or of laying down their life for their brother. The brothers tell Joseph the story of the lost son (of course, he is the lost son) and explain their father could not bear it should he lose Benjamin, the second son of his beloved Rachel. Joseph plays out the game until he cannot stand it any longer: “Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him. . . He wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard of it” (Ge 45:1–2). Then there is the scene like that between Jacob and Esau: “Then he fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers and wept on them, and afterward his brothers talked with him” (Ge 45:14–15). “Here Joseph becomes the single righteous individual who forgives and saves all his brothers.”[4]

In spite of the brothers agonizing experience, when their father, Jacob, dies, they assume Joseph will now exact revenge. Joseph, in response, calls up the words of his father upon seeing Esau: “Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones” (Ge 50:19–21). The betrayal of both Joseph and Jesus was the result of evil plotting, but God turned the evil into his purpose of salvation, not by confirming retributive justice, but by revealing himself in human victims, through forgiveness and blessing. The God of vengeance (or human vengeance as divine) is displaced by the God victimized and even demonized by vengeance. Recognition of the divinity of the crucified and forgiving Christ, accentuates this synthesizing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.

While large sections of Scripture seem to stand against the non-retributive God of the forgiving victim, Job may be the book where these two conceptions are most clearly under contention. The friends of Job explain Job’s suffering as required by divine righteousness, and after seven days of silence before their suffering friend, they start demonizing Job. As Zophar explains, the wicked have it coming, and their triumph is short (Job 20:5). Soon they will be trashed like so much garbage (vs. 7), and will be turned to dust (vs.11) and will experience continual vomiting due to the poison they have swallowed (v.15). He waxes elegant describing the agony but the point is, “God will send His fierce anger on him” (vs. 23) and the implication is this is what is causing Job’s calamities. In fact, Job is not suffering enough, as “God forgets a part of your iniquity” (11:6). God is the cause of suffering and violence in their estimate, and Job has it coming.

The friends of Job want to account for everything according to the working of the righteous requirements of God and they cannot forgive Job’s illness. The law of righteousness separates them from afflicted sinners and this explains their relative prosperity. For Job, on the other hand, this law is in tatters. There is the realization of an excess of evil which cannot be accounted for by legal righteousness. In Job’s estimate, either evil reigns, and God and evil are indistinguishable, or there is another explanation

The story begins with God consulting Satan, and then He and the devil wager on Job’s response to random suffering (Job 1:6 ff). It is not a very exalted view of God, posing the possibility that God and Satan might collude in causing suffering and in fact might be confused for one another. Though some might feel uncomfortable putting God in league with the devil, Job does not feel such hesitation: “It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys the guiltless and the wicked. If the scourge kills suddenly, He mocks the despair of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not He, then who is it?” (Job 9:22–24). Job is posing the possibility that God is evil, and there is no justice, as his suffering is unjust.

This false choice brings him to a Messianic realization: “This I know: that my Defender lives, and he, the Last, will take his stand on earth. After my awakening, he will set me close to him, and from my flesh I shall look on God. He whom I shall see will take my part: he whom my eyes will gaze on will no longer be a stranger” (19:25-27). He will see God face to face, in the flesh, not as adversary but as advocate. In place of Satan (the adversary which also includes his friends), Job pictures a witness for the defense who will address the problem of violence and bloodshed: “O earth, do not cover my blood, And let there be no resting place for my cry. Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And my advocate is on high” (Job 16:18–19). “It’s as if the ancient biblical topos of Abel’s blood crying out to the Lord from the ground has leaped in the mind of the author and produced a second iteration of God, one who listens to victims.”[5] Job’s hope is for the blood “that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24).

Job wishes his words could be written down, chiseled in stone like the law, or gathered up in a book, as he sees his insight as a new order of meaning (19:23-27). As Bartlett asks rhetorically, is Job claiming that his words “serve to transform the meaning of God, so that one day that meaning will be established on earth?”[6] The Satan figure disappears from the book and God sides with Job against his friends: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has” (Job 42:7). God stands against the calculus of a law of vengeance and wants nothing to do with it.

The confirmation in Christ of Job’s perspective indicates that retributive conceptions of God are human projections (arising from the adversary) and not worthy of the image of God grounded in his humanity. The identity of God is not with the victimizers, with the accusers, with the satan, but with suffering, forgiving victims. The character of God is under contention, and it is rightly reflected in the face of Jacob’s wrestling opponent, in the face of Esau, in the face of Joseph, and in the face of Job’s messianic defender, and this is confirmed through the interpretive frame of Christ: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). In this divine/human synthesis the humanity of God displaces falsely deified human projections.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022), 35.

[2] Ibid, 36.

[3] Ibid, 37.

[4] Ibid, 38.

[5] Ibid, 57.

[6] Ibid, 58.

The Liberating Truth of Christ as an Eternal Fact About God

The point of Scripture is that history has a goal and an unfolding purpose in which change and development have an eternal importance, such that the eternal is not a static accomplishment separate from creation, time, and history. We learn that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, and that God is defined in relationship to the world. The eternal embraces the dynamic of time, so that God is always creator, God is always the Father of the Son, and the life of Christ, the cross and resurrection, are eternal facts about the identity of God. It is not simply that the eternal destiny of souls is determined in time, but eternity itself is inclusive of the outworking of time and history. This is the implication of there being a God/Man seated at the right hand of the Father, crucified from the foundation of the world, who is the alpha and omega. There is development, change, and an unfolding of revelation culminating in Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, but what is this a development out of and in to?

Christ does not convey an already established meaning, perduring in the heavens, but in his relationship to the world and God he reveals a dynamic meaning of relationship and personhood, otherwise absent. The incarnation does not leave God and the world the same, but in their relationship, there is an unfolding transformation that is alive with the Spirit. This is not the encounter with an object, left unchanged by the encounter but it is meaningful in the change enacted, the life discovered, the freedom and openness of Spirit. This is transformational and living truth, in which God in Christ transforms the world through the incarnation, out of bondage and into liberation and this is the meaning unfolding and realized.

The unfolding of revelation is of liberation for the oppressed, for slaves, for the outcaste or for the Hapiru – an inferior social class made up of a shifting, unsettled underclass. As Anthony Bartlett describes, they are the landless underclass, the “displaced peasantry, disinherited clans, refugees, scattered warriors,” who could easily be enslaved, fall into thievery, or hired as mercenaries.[1] We learn in Genesis (14:13-16) that Abram had gathered three hundred eighteen men, with whom he attacked the “kings” and “brought back all the goods, and also brought back his relative Lot with his possessions, and also the women, and the people” (Gen. 14:16). It is in this context that “Hebrew” appears for the first time in the Bible, not to name an ethnic or religious group, but to describe this class, fitting the category of Hapiru, gathered around Abram. “So, when the text says, ‘Abram the Hebrew,’ it pretty naturally means ‘Abram the Hapiru.’”[2]

Abraham’s willingness to prostitute his wife in moments of danger or insecurity (Gen. 12:10-20; 20:1-18) points to his desperate status. When Pharaoh discovers she is his wife and not his sister, he releases Sarai from his harem and sends them away, as breaking this taboo has brought on a curse: “But the LORD struck Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife” (Gen. 12:17). He casts them out, much as a future Pharaoh would drive out all of the Hapiru from Egypt. “’Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and go.’ Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him; and they escorted him away, with his wife and all that belonged to him” (Gen. 12:19–20).

While some among the Hebrews may share an ancestry, what molds them together, even under Moses, is their shared slave status in Egypt. “[T]he Egyptians could not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is loathsome to the Egyptians” (Gen 43:32). Like Abram and Sarai, it may be the Jews were liberated by being driven out. Outcastes have no caste, no place, no personhood, and this is how they are identified as a distinctive group. The point is not to locate how it is the Jewish people formed, but to show that the formation with which God is concerned is with the oppressed: “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings” (Ex. 3:7). God knows his people as those who are not taskmasters but those who suffer. It is to people that are not a people, without a distinctive genealogy, or a distinctive place, to whom God reveals his name and will become a name in which they can dwell. Exodus describes a mixed multitude (or “foreign mob”) “who went up with them” out of Egypt (Ex. 12:38).

The status of the Hebrews is not with their physical descent and God is not peculiarly aware of them due to their lineage. Concern with the outcaste and stranger, culminating with Christ, begins as the identifying mark of Jews and becomes a distinct part of Hebrew law. There are some fifty-two instances of “do not mistreat aliens (strangers)” in the law. Compared with surrounding contemporaneous law codes, which make provisions for the marginalized (such as widows and orphans), protection and care for foreigners and strangers in Jewish law is unique.[3] The reason given for this distinctive understanding: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 22:21). “So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve Him and cling to Him, and you shall swear by His name” (Dt. 10:19–20). “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). “’Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, orphan, and widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’” (Dt. 27:19). The Hebrew people are constituted a people, first due to their outcaste, enslaved status, and then due to liberation: “When Israel was a youth I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son” (Hos. 11:1).

The paradox is this homeless underclass, identified by their liberation, choose to become a kingdom, with a king, and to be re-indentured. To become a people there must be the constraints marking inside and outside, there must be class marking one’s place in the group, there must be a certain severity of the law so that by the weight of the law one feels the gravity of identity. People are individually and corporately masochistic, needing the group and the possibility of being an outcaste to gain recognition. Bondage is required, and mental and moral freedom are unknown quantities. There is no spiritual or rational freedom where nature and dominance are the highest value. Natural necessity, material might, and physical and political domination are the ruling logic, and in this logic the center and reification of power is in a king. Thus the Jews demanded a king: “Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, ‘No, but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles’” (1 Sam. 8:19–20).

The prophet Samuel warns, a king will draft your men into his army as fighting men, to work his fields, to make his weapons, and he will indenture your daughters as “perfumers, cooks, and bakers” and he will tax your harvest, and confiscate your fields. “Then you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day” (1 Sam. 8:11–18). The turn to empower a king seems instinctive among primitive peoples, and unfortunately of a failed Christian people, unfamiliar with spiritual freedom.

Eventually, with the collapse of Israel, the Babylonian destruction and captivity, Hebrew kings disappear and the option of oppressive violence is no longer possible. The promise is given by Zechariah of a form of deliverance for which there was long preparation: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts” (Zech. 4:6). After being shaped as a people and then destroyed a new possibility presents itself: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech. 9:9).

The world is not as it should be, and the structure of might makes right, or the law is the law, or the king is the king, can be challenged. In place of human reason (the Greek logos), there is divine reason and incarnate Logos. A humble king who promises divine power, indwelling every individual, is a new order of reason. History is not static, but the possibility of knowing God presents itself, though it is an alien idea when Jesus first announces it: “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The Pharisees explain, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?” (Jn. 8:33). They skip the enslaving circumstance of both Abram and the Hebrews in Egypt, and have no notion of the system of enslavement Jesus is describing. Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn. 8:34–36). There is a development in the process of history, out of bondage toward the liberating work of Christ, culminating in the freedom of the Spirit: “that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you” (Jn. 14:17). People once enslaved, though they may not recognize their enslavement, learn of a new order of liberation, not requiring violence, oppression and revenge, but involving the indwelling of God.

Jesus Christ as truth, comes to maturity and full manifestation in history, where there was once immaturity or absence of the truth. The spirituality of truth (Jn. 4:23) does not exist full-grown at the beginning, so truth is not always available for human consciousness. The Bible speaks of times past, in which God overlooked human ignorance (Acts 17:30). There is a time before Christ, before the giving of the Spirit, before freedom, before the fruits of the Spirit, and there is growth and development revealing this end. Bondage to sin, darkness, oppression and violence are realities holding the world in bondage, then there is the liberating work of Christ and the introduction of the Spirit.

There is a developing realization of God, through the Hebrew Scriptures, to the Son, and culminating in the Spirit, and the text of the Bible is not isolated from this unfolding development. There are a series of semiotic shifts, foreshadowing the final shift in Christ, in which God is no longer identified as a tribal God, a warrior God, or the God promoting genocide and murder. The fulness of liberation, culminating in the freedom of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17) is a developing concept through Abraham’s departure from the religion and strictures of his homeland, through Israel’s departure from Egypt, and culminating in the full freedom from violence and peace of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Christ as all in all (Col. 3:11) is being realized, though for many primary identity is still as Greeks and Jews, circumcised and uncircumcised, slave and free.

The tendency is to reduce the story of the Bible and the story of Christ, so that it is all either human or divine. Theology can be reduced to a simplistic process theology, apart from the eternal point of view, but it can also be reduced to a crude Calvinism and mechanical predestination apart from naming real world developments. In the first instance everything is changing and moving and there is only process, and in the second instance, nothing changes and everything is set and history is static and its purpose, if there is any, is beyond comprehension. To say that history has eternal importance, is the key Christian claim, and yet this key claim is often neglected, leaving aside the why and how of the Christian faith and Christian life in the process.

If Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, an eternal fact about who God is, it can also be acknowledged that we can see God in becoming without falling into the heresy of process theology. God embraces process, God can be found in history, God becomes human, and the incarnation, the birth, life and death of Christ are all divine facts describing the purpose of history. This deepens Jesus’ claim of truth, or in fact, makes sense of it. Jesus is often pictured as a finite manifestation of eternal and divine trues, but his claim is more immediate and personal. Christ is not the manifestation of a truth which might be manifest otherwise. He is the truth – the truth of God and the world. He is not simply a manifestation of a truth that could have come by means other than his incarnation and personhood.[4] His personhood, his incarnation, his life, are to be directly identified with the liberating Truth. This is not natural truth, but involves narrative, personhood, history, spontaneity, and unpredictability. This truth is not the eternal trues of a disincarnate reason, but the truth incarnate. History is made meaningful through Christ, above and beyond natural law, as meaning is through and in the actuality of Christ – meaning as life and Spirit. Christ is not conveying truth as propositions or facts, but he is truth in meaningful relationship, freeing from the bondage of the logic and law of this world.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022), 2.

[2] Bartlett, 3.

[3] Bartlett, 11.

[4] Natural revelation or natural philosophy is not an alternative to Christ.

The Greek Logos Versus Jesus as Logos: Anthony Bartlett’s Completion of the Girardian Philosophical Project

It is not simply that Christ offers a new meaning, built on the same foundation as human religion, philosophy, or culture. There is the exposure of the violent origins of human language (e.g., as in the history of the Greek logos) and the setting forth of a peaceable alternative (Christ as Logos). The thinker who brings this out most concretely is René Girard, but the contemporary thinker who has completed the work of Girard, in his philosophical implications and expression, is Anthony Bartlett. Bartlett (who is now teaching a class with Ploughshares Bible Institute) tells the story of presenting his findings in a seminar, in which Girard was in attendance. Girard responded after the presentation, “Very impressive,” but immediately left. His singular genius in textual hermeneutics, seemingly left him uncomfortable to engage in discussion of its philosophical implications.[1] Bartlett however, through a close reading of Martin Heidegger (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics and violence) picks up where Girard left off.

Why Heidegger Fails to Discern the Johannine Logos

Girard notes both Heidegger’s tracing of the Greek logos into an originary violence and its contrast with the Johannine Logos, but Heidegger does not draw out this difference as violence opposed to nonviolence but as a difference of violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[2] It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) to the Greek Logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[3] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

There is an incapacity to distinguish, and thus the Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought, but Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[4] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

Part of this incapacity is explained by Heidegger’s starting point in Being and Time, which is a philosophical articulation of the sense that things are the way they are, and this reality is the necessity within which we work. The primary thing is that man speaks or dwells in language, which does not mean Heidegger’s goal is an intellectual or propositional explanation. “Being there” (Dasein) is the given presupposition and determination, such that one can “take a look” at the meaning of Being, but the point is not to arrive at some “axiom from which a sequence of propositions is deductively derived. It is quite impossible for there to be any ‘circular argument’ in formulating the question about the meaning of Being; for in answering this question, the issue is not one of grounding something by such a derivation; it is rather one of laying bare the grounds for it and exhibiting them.”[5]

As Heidegger puts it elsewhere, “Language speaks”[6] and so too the ground of Being reveals, but there is no penetrating this fact. Rather, what is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward”[7] and the question is to spell out the nature of this relatedness. “The speech of mortals rests in its relation to the speaking of language.”[8] The capacity for difference is drawn together in language. “Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing.”[9] He finds himself in language, and this is the primary fact about him, which cannot be penetrated but must be allowed to make itself manifest. (Thus poetry is the truest and highest art form, in that it allows language to speak.) Human speech locates Dasein not so much in what is said but in the speaking, in the relatedness to language. Heidegger reifies language as the essential relation shaping human reality and he does not presume to go beneath or above this speaking.

Thus, Heidegger presumes Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek thinker who first develops the history of logos, in his view that “war is the father of all,” has hit upon the origin of logos. Referencing Heraclitus he concludes, violence (German, Gewalt) or war (Polemos) is synonymous with the logos; it is the transformative and creative center. “Confrontation” is the “sire” of all that comes to presence. The gods, humans, slaves and free, arise through “strife” (polemos), as this opposition is what first allows hierarchy, status, discreteness, intervals, and distances. “Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same.”[10] As he says later, “Who the human being is, according to the word of Heraclitus, first comes forth (edeixe, shows itself) in the polemos, in the disjunction of gods and human beings, in the happening of the irruption of Being itself.”[11] Heidegger locates entry into Dasein with “deinon,” designating one who is “violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein.”[12] Heidegger, who fully embraced and never repudiated the Nazi project, sees violence as the creative center from which meaning arises.

In short, humans come into being (Dasein) through the violence of logos. Heidegger locates essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being. “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[13] The human comes into being as what is distinguishable (out of the indistinguishable) through the emergence of opposition in logos, which brings one thing into presence against the other.[14] Logos is this gathering together, the original differentiating, which marks Dasein.

The Differentiation Proposed by Girard

Heidegger recognized and commended the inherent violence of the logos and of Western thought,while for Girard human meaning has violent, irrational, origins in the scapegoat mechanism but Christ poses an alternative meaning system escaping violent origins. Girard agrees with Heidegger in his focus on myth, his picture of an originary human violence, and the presumption that language, writing, or the oracular contains a hidden truth. Heidegger is right about something concealed in language but the “un-concealing” is only possible through the revelation of Christ: “I propose that if today we are capable of breaking down and analyzing cultural mechanisms, it is because of the indirect and unperceived but formidably constraining influence of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.”[15]

The Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[16] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[17] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[18] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.”

Bartlett’s Completion of Girard

As Bartlett notes, the gospel consists of transformative news delivered in simile and figures of speech: “Christian faith depends on the popular use of words, with their built-in potential for metonym, allusion and suggestion, rather than strict conceptual-propositional agreement.”[19] According to John “these [signs] are written in order that you may believe” (John 20:30–31), suggesting “it is the overall writing of Jesus’ deeds and teaching that makes the effective gospel.”[20] There is an immediate identity of signs and mental activity (appreciated in Western or Latin study of signs), but what is missed is the identity of Christ as Logos, completely differentiated from the Greek logos.

Jesus Christ, not the slain scapegoat, is the “true transcendental signifier,” the generator of a peaceable order of meaning. In the Logos of Christ there is a defeat of the violence structuring the world, and this involves a “semiotic struggle, comprising stories, law, prophecy, poetry and, last of all, the singular fact and figure of the cross.”[21] This one rejected by men “must always have itself expelled from a world that cannot be its own.”[22] This is the error on which Jewish thought and the whole of Western thought is founded: Jews who believed “they could keep Yahweh in the Temple” or capture Him in the Law, or Christians who imagine there must be sacrifice and at least one scapegoat (necessary violence).

In Bartlett’s summary, “Another way of saying this is that the logos of Christianity is non-violent, is non-violence itself, and will never retaliate. It is precisely by being ‘driven out’ that it reveals itself: a paradoxical, subversive, world-overturning revelation amounting not to the continually misrecognized double valence of the human good, but to a generative new human meaning.”[23] The Christian Logos not only overturns myth but subverts the ground of Western metaphysics and thought. Christian truth is not to be set along side other truth systems but is singular and overturns the tables of human religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. (In this the project of the poststructuralists, such as Heidegger and Derrida, is brought to completion in the exposure and overturning of the violent metaphysic at the root of human meaning.)

The deep existential choice, posed by Heidegger (summing up the Greek religious and philosophical tradition) and Girard (summing up the Christian exposure of this tradition and offering an alternative) is between a violent and a non-violent (peaceable) organizing center for human existence. As Bartlett emphasized in his lecture, this shift requires total commitment: “You have to go to the heart of it – this is the idea of going to the desert, of changing your life the way Paul changed his, of really taking this thing to heart, because everything is at stake.” Violence is the organizing principle of human civilization, and the empty tomb is a “cataclysmic shock” that provides “no real resolution yet” – “just the radical deconstruction of all familiar structures.” Heidegger retreated into Naziism and Girard did not arrive at total nonviolence, toward which his work pointed. The legacy of the Christian logos is hard to take, hard to assimilate as a way of being human. The vast majority of people, including great thinkers, shrink back from the radical implications of choosing the non-violent path, because it requires nothing less than a complete transformation of how we understand human existence and meaning-making.24

[1] This is too brief and inadequate of a summing up but this is my feeble attempt to capture some of the profound significance Anthony Bartlett is setting forth. His work deserves a wide exposure and I hope this class is the beginning of a wider and much deserved recognition.

[2]René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.

[3] Things Hidden, 265.

[4] Things Hidden, 271.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28

[6] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207

[7] Being and Time, 28.

[8] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 206.

[9] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 207.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 65.

[11] Metaphysics, 149.

[12] Metaphysics, 160

[13] Metaphysics, 160.

[14] Metaphysics, 132.

[15] Things Hidden, 138.

[16] Things Hidden, 275.

[17] Things Hidden, 275.

[18] Things Hidden, 276.

[19] Anthony Bartlett, “Theology and Catastrophe A (Girardian) Semiotics of Re-Humanization,” (Forum Philosophicum 23 (2018) no. 2, 171–188 ISSN 1426-1898) 178.

[20] Theology and Catastrophe, 178

[21] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[22] Things Hidden, 272.

[23] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[24] Thank you Jim for the notes.

Girardian Evolution of Language and the Semiotic Shift with Christ

Religions focused on death, by sheer quantity, point to René Girard’s claim that significance or making signs begins with death and killing (the scapegoated victim). Ancestor worship from ancient Egypt, in African traditional religions and in modern Japan, and the veneration of the dead in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, or the Mexican Day of the Dead, all point to the primacy of death. A new world unfolds from the body of the victim, as is graphically displayed in religious myth. The violence between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Elish) results in the body (the canopy of the heavens) and blood of the god Tiamat (slain by Marduk) providing the raw material for the created order. In Norse creation, the giant Ymir is slain by Odin and his brothers and his body becomes the earth, his blood the seas, and his bones the mountains. In Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl, and his trickster brother, Tezcatlipoca, tore a goddess (or god in some accounts) Tlaltecuhtli in half to make a new heaven and Earth and from the divine body sprouted everything that was necessary for the life of human beings. In Hindu mythology, the Rigveda describes the cosmic being Purusha, whose sacrifice leads to the creation of the universe and all living beings from his body parts. In African mythology, the Dogon people believe that the god Amma created the world from his own body, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and the cosmos. In other myths there may not be as direct a connection, but as in the Japanese myth the death of Izanami precedes and indirectly is connected with the creation of the Japanese Islands. A world of meaning arises in these myths through the dead body of the god.

Girard explains the rise of the sign as directly connected to the cadaver of the victim: “The origin of symbolic thought lies in the mechanism of the surrogate victim . . . It is a fundamental instance of ‘arbitration’ that gives rise to the dual presence of the arbitrary and true in all symbolic systems . . . To refer to the origin of symbolic thought is to speak as well of the origin of language.”[1] The symbol of the sacrificial victim, carrying the guilt and violence of the community, gives rise to the first sign and entry into language: “there is the cadaver of the collective victim and this cadaver constitutes the first object for this new type of consciousness.”[2] The crisis of all out violence and then the resolution in the victim, Girard speculates, brings on the evolutionary leap into language: “As weak as it might be, the ‘consciousness’ the participants have of the victim is linked structurally to the prodigious effects produced by its passage from life to death, by the spectacular and liberating reversal that has occurred at that instant . . .”[3] Around the cadaver, perhaps connected with a cry or meaningful utterance in death, there arises the linguistic ordering of the world: male and female, inside and outside, and good and evil. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly the myth points to the reality of a murder in which the victim is the “transcendental signifier” constituting meaning and from which all potential meaning will arise.

Girard provides a key to the bizarre and otherwise mystical religious myths. They are not reasonable but they give rise to a peculiar order of reason. Reconciliation, community, and communication arise through the original and ritually repeated act. Out of chaos and murder there arises a system of order, held together by signs, grounded, not in some arbitrary arrangement but in warding off violence through the very possibility of signification given in the scapegoated victim. Language has its roots, according to this view, in the possibility of peace through violence, the possibility of inside through casting out, the possibility of friend and family through enemy and stranger. There is an explanation of the binaries in the act from which they are generated.

But doesn’t this originary violence paint a dark picture of the evolution of the species, as it requires violent death and the worst forms of evil (e.g., scapegoating, discrimination, murder, victimization)? Though Girard is a Christian with a deep belief in the primacy of revelation, he reinterprets the biblical story of the fall through originary violence on a human scale. Does it really matter though, that what comes first is not binaries and opposition (as in structuralism), but a transcendental signified, if this signified is a murdered cadaver? There may be no immediate answer to this question, but the reality of human violence structuring meaning is not speculation, faced as we are with the pervasive reality of violence and evil, but in the Girardian system the darkness is not only offset by Christ but transformed. Meaning is at first grounded in the reality of violence, pointing to the violence which Christ endured, but the teaching of Christ and the work of Christ, displace and transform human systems of meaning, grounding them in a divine order.

This is a move beyond both the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, in that Girard “grounds” signs in the scapegoating mechanism. Structuralism does away with metaphysics as ground and in its anthropological version (developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss) culture is unmoored from metaphysics. According to Anthony Bartlett, culture is set “adrift on a sea of purely semiotic relationships, that is, a kind of language; and, yes, this language was as mobile and uncertain as the sea itself.”[4] The incest taboo for Lévi-Strauss is simply an ordering and arbitrary construct, but Girard points to its prevention of revenge and violence among fathers, brothers and uncles, fighting over daughters, sisters, mothers, and nieces.

Girard grounds symbolic meaning or language in empirical realities of foundational violence. Meaning is embodied, literally and historically. Signs are not simply an endless interplay with other signs, with meaning fabricated in différance (deferral, opposites, sameness and difference), but the original sign or the transcendental signified is the scapegoat victim. If there is no transcendent or stable meaning (no grounded meaning), then there is no representation of reality or “truth” but only the sign system (the point of deconstruction and poststructuralism). The Girardian system escapes the arbitrariness of an endlessly circulating system of signs, existing only in human consciousness, but it is not that Girard directly rescues truth.

As Bartlett points out, “none of this demonstrates anything real.”[5] The sacred cadaver, or the deified victim – the god, is a necessary fiction falsifying murder and hiding the destructive and cathartic role of violence. “It is a falsification of a real event which, in today’s terms, boils down simply to group murder and a kind of misrecognized foundational PTSD implanted in the collective hominid brain.”[6] The victim, after all, is arbitrary and his significance is false (e.g., he is not the singular cause of trouble) but Girard points to how significance may have evolved through blood and murder. “Girard offers a scientific demonstration of how meaning comes about, how something acts as a transcendental signifier, but not that it really is so, that there is metaphysical truth”[7] but there is the possibility for truth and uncovering truth.

There is the creation of a sign system, a reserve of meaning with a false significance. The tomb and death, grounding the system, refer to a pure absence and nothingness. Death is not restorative and the magic of the scapegoat depends upon a lie. Scapegoating is historically real, following the contours of mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence – so it comes through a certain reality, but it obscures this reality in human consciousness. If it is binaries and linguistic structures all the way down, then there is no intersection with reality and no ground, nor truth (though the transcendental signified of the scapegoat is hardly the “truth”). There is the recognition in Girard of a historical reality and a metaphysic, false though it is. He recognizes the binary function of meaning, but does not presume this alone contains meaning but offers an order of meaning grounded in the realities of human relationships and community. He explains the rise of religious meaning in the scapegoating mechanism as the source of meaning per se, but this false meaning is best understood, according to Girard, against the background of biblical revelation. That is false religion or failed religion provides the context for what is happening in the revelation of Christ.

The body of Christ symbolically presented in the Lord’s Supper is the first instance of a meaning system arising from the living body. He breaks bread symbolizing his body, and offers the cup symbolizing his blood (both before and after his death), with the promise of a new order of significance, not in the reification of the cadaver but in the living body of the crucified and living Lord. Christ reveals the workings of the scapegoating he undergoes, but also establishes a reordering of all meaning and Truth around himself.

Christ takes over the meaning fostered by religion in the same way he gives meaning to the law, the temple and indicated in the original Passover. Christ casts truth backward as well as forward, showing how it is that in him death would Passover, and the covenant with death would be broken. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[8] Throughout, Christ is duplicating and fulfilling or giving final meaning to the history of Israel, which would otherwise have no clear reference. The Exodus of Israel and the original Pascha (or Passover) is the type of the true Passion of Christ (Christ is the true Passover Lamb). The tabernacle and temple are grounded in the reality of Christ as true temple. Moses warded off the deadly snakes in the wilderness but this event finds its true meaning in Christ: “Just as Moses raised the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14). The true bread from heaven (John 6:41–42), the heavenly King and Truth (John 18:36–38), and the true prophet (John 7:47–52), resonate with and complete the prior understanding of the Scriptures.

According to Behr, “the antinomies of the old creation (male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile—circumcised/uncircumcised) are now done away with, as belonging to a different era; with the revelation of Christ, the world is structured anew, indeed is a ‘new creation’, with its own antinomies—the Spirit and the flesh—resolved and brought together in Christ, the Church, and the Israel of God.”[9] In the words of Bartlett, “there is implied a Christian signifier at work in the world: its truth arrives like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky.”[10] As Girard writes, “What [Christ] brings us cannot come from human beings, and therefore can only come from God . . . the thought that underpins the Gospels must stem from a reason more powerful than our own.”[11] The meaning and reason of Christ transforms human meaning, grounding it not in violence, but in the divine peace that defeats and displaces violence.

Girard provides a deep technical explanation of Christ’s “regenerative semiotics.” “It is from within the biblical system of signs that truth is found, by reason of the quality of the semiotic reversal itself.”[12] “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (Jn 1:18). Christ, the innocent scapegoat, reveals the truth of victimhood and God, generating a new significance, not grounded in violence but in an originary peace and self-giving love.

[1] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Translated by Patrick Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 235. Cited in Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (p. 36). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] René Girard, et al., Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 99-100. Cited in Bartlet, 39.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bartlett, 35.

[5] Bartlett, 46.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Bartlett, 41-42.

[8] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-28.

[9] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 116. Behr is referencing Louis Martyn, ‘Apocalyptic Antinomies’.

[10] Bartlett, 47.

[11] René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer. Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014) 92-93. Cited in Bartlett, 48.

[12] Bartlett, 48.

Forgiveness

This is a guest blog by Brad Klingele

A dear friend, suffering in a protracted conflict says to me “I have my story of what is happening, they have their story, and neither story is the real story.” Jesus’ observation that my friend is not far from the Kingdom whispered to my soul.

The end is like the beginning, as Nyssa says. In Christ all of creation will be reconciled to God, such that God will be All in All. We will be reconciled to each other and divinized, participating in the self-gift of the Trinity. Jesus’s life shows us that we are the ones who are violent, and we project our violence onto God and onto others. We live by “the law” when we defend our false self image and an image of a false, retributive and therefore violent God by inflicting death on others.

Jesus shows us that God is not like this; He comes and predicts that we will murder Him, that we are all murderers from the beginning, and that we try to preserve life by inflicting death on others (John 8). We live by a “law” of violence. We set up rules to live by, and we live by seeking to preserve our sense of self and our very lives in and through protecting our lives and self-image by using violence and preventing a true self-understanding of ourselves as hopelessly caught up in a world-view in which we must use violence to prevent death and prevent seeing ourselves as caught up in this culture, this way of being. Jesus’ life reveals that from the beginning it is not the case that God is violent, rather, He is forgiveness.

Jesus refuses to use violence to protect Himself, revealing that God is nonviolent, for when we see Jesus, we see the Father. If we are to become God, we are to live by recognizing that God forgives us and invites us into accepting death and suffering. Death and suffering are not the problem; living by violence and living by an image of God as violent is the problem. God is forgiveness and peace. We needn’t fear death or suffering because God will raise us up when we accept His life and enter into accepting death. In this acceptance, we trust that God forgives us all, and will forgive us all.

If we want to live a life that is a participation in the forgiving, non-violent God, we too must live by forgiving each other and returning peace instead of violence. We may not withhold forgiveness, we may not return violence, for we are to be the ongoing reconciliation of God and the world by accepting our brokenness, our violence, and enact a different culture, a way of being, that is Divine.

Labelling people who harm us as bad, or as evil, is normally seen as the prerequisite for forgiving; why would we forgive if we had not been harmed?

It is hard to forgive other people. It is in fact very dangerous; Jesus forgave sins, and people knew that this was a claim to be God. Only God can forgive sins. There are hidden impediments to forgiving that are not normally understood in the literature on forgiveness.

Forgiving others does preserve ourselves from the ravages of anger that injures us. Stanley Hauerwas, in his Princeton lectures emphasizes that it is much, much harder to be forgiven than to forgive. Rene Girard reveals why this is the case.

Girard helps us to read, through the Scriptures, that since the dawn of the evolution of becoming human (hominization), we are participants in a reality in which we hide our violence from ourselves and project it onto others and, ultimately, God.

Before the Gospel, I couldn’t look at my faults because it was too scary and also because at some level surely God hated me. Accepting forgiveness requires feeling accepted and loved in and with many faults. Real love is capable of seeing faults and assuming the best and fully accepting the person as they are; in this unconditional acceptance of myself as broken, we can allow Christ to transform us because we can look at our faults while knowing that our value lies in being loved; we are not loved by God because we are good, we are good because God loves us.

Forgiveness requires acknowledging that I am blind to the ways I hurt other people. If I can see that I am blind, maybe I can forgive others for their blindness when they hurt me. I am grateful for friends who explain, right away, the ways I hurt them. It is only because they love and like me that I can hear how I hurt them without just despairing. It’s only in love that I can accept my faults. But it still is so painful, to see the seemingly intractable patterns I have of hurting people.

For most of us, however sophisticated our articulation, we have a kind of first pass Christianity, or Sauline Christianity, meaning Saul before he became Paul. I have broken a moral norm and I must be forgiven. I am saved insofar as I trust Jesus to forgive the transgression and confess breaking this norm and then follow the norm. Once I or anyone recognizes that they ought to follow the norms and believe the right thing, one is safe. This safety usually extends to “I won’t be harmed” by the results of my breaking of a moral norm; I will have a life that is less troubled. We tend to imagine that the troubles we face are usually due to breaking of a moral norm. And so once I find myself following the moral norms, and someone breaks a moral norm and injures me, I see myself as injured, as righteous, and the other as a worse person than I am. Their injury to me ends up reinforcing my sense of being righteous, and I come to rely on the unrighteousness of others in order to reinforce my righteousness. At a subconscious level, we are seeking safety, a self-image as good, so that we are safe from God and feel good about ourselves, and safe from hell and the consequences of an immoral life. Jesus pokes fun at this with the prayer of the Pharisee vs the Plebian, the woman caught in adultery, and emphasizing the righteousness of prostitutes as distinct from religious leaders.

This makes nonsense of course, of the cross and incarnation as a mere second-chance, or even infinite chance schema and does little to acknowledge the radicality of Jesus; it makes the following of norms the primary reality and God’s forgiveness the secondary reality, as James Alison articulates in The Joy of Being Wrong. St. Paul makes fun of this notion in the first section of Romans, but alas, as Douglas Campbell points out, we have lost the context and read it not as a first century Colbert Report sendup, but as an earnest condemnation of those who break moral norms.

We fear death, alienation, poverty, suffering, and violence. We seek security through power, position, prestige, money, and a deontic “objective” truth bereft of the category of relationship. When we ground our identity in these idols we live by “the law.”

When we live by a concept in which belief in Jesus is essentially following the rules, we derive our security and sense of self from whether or not we are successful in following these rules. We necessarily blind ourselves to self-knowledge because any discovery of rule-breaking is a threat to who we think we are. We become our own saviors because we must succeed in following the rules and we must believe the right thing.

When others cause injury, we see them as outsiders and ourselves as insiders. And so we must compound our self-identity by setting boundaries in which those who have broken the rules are bad, while I, who live righteously, am good. Jesus punctures this when He says “no one is good but God alone.”

In this schema, we necessarily place others on the outside and ourselves on the inside in order to feel secure. As Paul says, who will free us from this prison?!

How do we learn the real story we are living in? Jordan Daniel Wood, explaining Maximus the Confessor’s theory of sin, explains that sin means that we pour our lives into something that is not real, because we don’t understand ourselves or God, and so we create a false incarnation. Freeing ourselves of the false self, as Thomas Keating calls it, is, according to Nyssa, like cauterizing a wart; the condition of the skin is not its true condition, and gaining true skin is painful. We think we are losing our very self, but it isn’t who we are. This is why sin is so painful; God is simply giving us our true self, but it feels like we are losing ourselves, it feels like punishment. It is not punishment but healing. Elsewhere, Wood explains that Origen tells us that God does in fact fulfill His promise in Jonah to destroy Nineveh, but in doing so He saves. God destroys what is false in order to restore Nineveh by restoring it to its true self. Jonah is rather put out by this; he wants Nineveh destroyed, not saved.

Anthony Bartlett places Jesus’ entire self-understanding of His ministry in the sign of Jonah; Jesus invites us to see ourselves as Jonah; we are violent and want our enemies vanquished. We, like the followers of Jesus before the Resurrection, imagine God as violent, but it is we who are violent, and Jesus refuses to return our violence, instead, Jesus returns after we murder Him and forgives us.

James Alison explains that the culture we live by, one of self-deception and violence, is not the center of reality; Jesus’ forgiveness is. Jesus lovingly accepts our violence, a willing victim to us, in order to reveal His love for us and our violence. We need not hide our violence from ourselves because we see that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Now, we needn’t hide from ourselves our violent ways, we can see them and know that Jesus’ love is greater than, and precedes, our violence.

The Fall, explains Alison, is not the defining reality; forgiving self-gift is. God is self-gift, God is love, and in Jesus we see that we no longer need scapegoat others in order to hide our brokenness from ourselves; we can trust Jesus who reveals through His kindness and His complete self-gift that will win over all of us, for “God desires that all will be saved,” and Jesus reveals the truth that He will win over all of us to His manner of Being; self-gift.

The Gospel reveals what we cannot see; we are murderers who are forgiven. We cannot see ourselves if we don’t know first that we are loved and then can see the ways we hurt others. Universalism is necessary for seeing this; we need God’s help, not protection from God. Only a God who saves all can do this.

We don’t know what it means to be a human or who we are, until Jesus reveals who He is, as the true Human, and then who we are called to become; participants in His Divine-Humanity as members of a communion of mutual self-gift, which is the Church.

In most approaches to forgiveness, we end up as the Pharisee “thank you Lord that I am not like this tax collector.” We are, in fact, constantly messing up, and only by trusting that God will keep transforming us can we allow ourselves to perceive our constant messiness. Shusako Endo’s Silence has a hero that we tend to miss; Ichiro. Ichiro is the one who is most like us; he doggedly seeks forgiveness. The Jesuits constantly seek to be heroic. Ichiro constantly seeks forgiveness.

Dostoevsky’s Zosima explains that we are all responsible for each other’s sin. This is not pious hyperbole; we are inescapably caught up in relationships with each other in which we are continually blind to the ways we hurt and scapegoat and seek protection from self-knowledge, from suffering at each other’s hands. This is why nonviolence, whose active form is peacemaking, is essential to participation in becoming one with Christ, who is ontologically incapable of retribution or violence. Our experience of suffering is never from God, but only from our brokenness. In the eighth chapter of John Jesus tells His interlocutors that are seeking to kill him. They hide their violence from themselves and accuse him of being crazy.

We too are all caught up in killing Jesus whenever we injure others; “Saul Saul why are you persecuting Me?” When we are angry with anyone, we miss that we are all made in God’s image and likeness; “amen, amen, I say to you, whenever you are angry with your brother you have committed murder in your heart.” When we live so as to use violence in any form to protect ourselves from suffering we live according to the history of the fall “you are children of Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning.” Girard explicates this reality handily in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Today more than ever we hide vengeance from ourselves more easily because we outsource vengeance in the judicial system, as Girard explains in Violence and the Sacred. Within this context we misunderstand justice as retribution. True justice is restoration to Christ.

When we know that we are loved in our bones no matter what, we can begin to see ourselves as we are; loved and brought into Jesus’ healing restoration. We are loved by Jesus precisely as people caught up in violence. Jesus was able to enter into the human culture of violence and offer love and forgiveness because Jesus knew He is loved by the Father in the Holy Spirit. Jesus is willing to suffer our violence without resentment

Forgiveness requires accepting, without resentment, our own participation in violence. In Jesus we can experience ourselves as loved by the Father in the Spirit. This often happens when we experience, usually, in at least one concrete, specific person in our life, the unconditional love, which is in fact the love of Jesus. As we experience this unconditional love, we too can then turn and offer the same to concrete, specific people in our lives.

Salvation then, is, the concrete specific participation in a particular community of people who, knowingly (as Christian) or unknowingly (in Christ) enact mutual self-gift, nonviolence, forgiveness, and unconditional love. This does not mean that we must not try to avoid injury, or that we don’t engage in trying to change the violence we experience at the hands of others. Jesus shows us His radical form of engagement, without violence, harsh words, or retribution “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” Salvation is a communal participation in self-gift within a community of specific people with whom we practice mutual self-gift. We begin to offer this self-gift even to those who have not yet accepted or returned this self-gift. God is love, meaning self-gift. Salvation given to humans because it is divine-humanity.

Reconstructing the Temple in Christ: Revelation as Salvation

Jesus action in the Temple (Matthew 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–16) symbolizes he is the true Temple, the reality behind the Temple’s cosmic representation, that is God communing with the world, displacing death, and inaugurating life and peace (I argue here). However, if Jesus action in the Temple, and Christ himself, are reduced to the sacrifice in the Temple on the day of atonement, this misses the shift in meaning inaugurated by Christ. According to Paul (in Galatians 4), Judaism and the law are subject to the elementary principles of the cosmos. To interpret Christ through the law is to subject him to enslaving elementary principles of this world, rather than reconceiving the world in light of freedom in Christ. Paul warns Christians that by prioritizing the law, rather than Christ, they remain enslaved to the world (ta stoicheia tou kosmou), like Israel and all people. By following Torah, by observances of days, months and seasons, by concern with circumcision and food laws, by following and prioritizing Judaism, they are returning to idolatry (4:8) (enslaved to the stoicheia). The meaning of Christ is not to be fit into Judaism, the Temple, the sacrifices, rather, this world is undone in Christ. As Paul says to the Colossians, having died with Christ to ta stoicheia tou kosmou, they should not be submitting to decrees any longer (2:20-21). Is Christ sent by God to be a sacrificial victim, in which he is understood in light of the law (the sacrifice of atonement), or is the revelation of Christ providing a new, salvific, meaning. This is what is at stake in the debate around one key word, hilastērion, in one key verse, Romans 3:25.

The piece of furniture in the Temple, the Ark of the Covenant, with its covering – the Mercy Seat (hilastērion), is the semiotic point for understanding both the work of Christ and Temple symbolism in Romans 3:25. Does hilastērion here refer to the Mercy Seat, or by means of metaphor or metonym, is this verse referring to Christ as (commonly rendered) the “sacrifice of atonement” or “propitiation”? What is at stake in the rendering of this key verse and key word are two opposed ways of conceiving the work of Christ.

Hilastērion is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word kapporet, which is the cover or Mercy Seat of the ark upon which the blood was sprinkled on Yom Kippur. Hilastērion is not the sacrifice or the blood, but is the place the blood of the sacrifice is applied, though the common rendering (in verse 25) is to relate Christ directly to the sacrifice: “Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood” (ESV); or “whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” (NRSV). Contrary to this interpretation, many argue that Jesus is to be identified with the place, the Mercy Seat, and not with the sacrifice.[1] Daniel Bailey states the case bluntly, “hilasterion never designates a sacrificial victim, the NRSV lacks support.”[2] Jesus as Mercy Seat “involves more than just forgiveness based on cultic atonement. Like the old mercy seat, Jesus is the focal point of the revelation of God and his saving righteousness” and this best fits Romans 3:21-26.[3]

The Mercy Seat was the place Moses would come to speak directly to God, and God would provide an interpretation and even revision and addendum to the law. Exodus 33 describes Moses habit of pitching the Tent of Witness so he could confer with God face to face. Numbers names the place explicitly as the Seat of Mercy: “Moses went into the Tent of Witness to speak to him [God], and he heard the voice of the Lord speaking to him from above the ἱλαστήριον, which is on the Ark of Witness between the two cherubim, and he spoke to him” (Num 7.89). Numbers 12 also describes this face-to-face meeting: “When there are prophets among you, I the LORD make myself known to them in visions; I speak to them in dreams. Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak face to face—clearly, not in riddles; and he beholds the form of the LORD” (Num 12:6–8).

Though the law is already given at this point, the conversation regarded interpreting the law, and even revision of the law. As Nathan Porter shows, in response to a question, God made exceptions for rules regarding uncleanness during Passover (Num 9:7-8). God tells them that anyone who is unclean in a particular way should still keep the Passover (9.10). “In other words, God has reinterpreted the laws previously given, in accordance with the new events in Israel’s life. . .. Moses is not simply to keep the Passover according to the law (νόμον), but also according to its interpretation (σύγκρισιν; 9.2).”[4] Interpretations are provided, allowing for the changing circumstances of Israel, which already indicates the coming radical shift.

As Porter concludes, “Paul refers to Jesus as a ἱλαστήριον because he is the place where God reveals the definitive interpretation of the law to his people. The faith of Jesus Christ is the content of this revelation, the true meaning of the law.”[5] Christ is where God is revealed and the means by which access to God is provided. He is the location and means of the final and full self-disclosure. In Bailey’s translation, “God set out Jesus in his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith.”[6] It is through faith, or the faithfulness of Christ and imitation and entry into this faithfulness, that both Jews and Gentiles have put on righteousness.

“He is the righteousness of God revealed” (Rom 1:17). God’s righteousness is the content of revelation as salvation through Christ: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Rom 3:21-22). The law attested to this righteousness and yet is separate or “apart”, as God made Christ the true Mercy Seat, a revelation of his righteousness (25-26). This is not simply a rehashing of the cultic meaning of hilasterion, but its deployment in an overturning of its identity with the Jewish cult.

Through identity of Christ with the Mercy Seat, the focus is on the revelation of Christ, Jesus as the ideal sanctuary (cf. Exodus 15:17), not a fitting of the meaning of Jesus into the Temple but taking Christ as the point of meaning, with Jesus becoming the new center of worship, the new cosmic meeting point of God and humans, and the key to interpreting the law. The law was interpreted originally with the aid of the divine voice at the Mercy Seat, and now Christ is the “semiotic portal,” in the words of Anthony Barlett, through which meaning is apprehended. Bartlett renders Rom 3:25: “The redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as the portal of mercy (divine nonviolence) by his blood working through faithfulness.” As he goes on to note, “It is the simultaneous deconstruction of the Temple and the generative event of the cross.”[7] Christ is not just another Temple sacrifice, a means of propitiation or expiation, but the identity of Christ with the Mercy Seat opens a radical new semiotic portal that is salvific.

[1] Daniel P. Bailey, “Jesus as the Mercy Seat: The Semantics and Theology of Paul’s Use of Hilasterion in Romans 3: 25” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1999); Bell, “Sacrifice and Christology in Paul,” 17–20; Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity, 197–205; Markus Tiwald, “Christ as Hilasterion (Rom 3:25): Pauline Theology of the Day of Atonement in the Mirror of Early Jewish Thought,” in Day of Atonement (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 189–209; Vis, “The Purification Offering,” 2012, 312–18.

[2] Bailey, from the abstract of his dissertation.

[3] Bailey, 221.

[4] Nathan Porter, “Between the Cherubim: The ‘Mercy Seat’ as Site of Divine Revelation in Romans 3.25” (Journal for the Study of the New Testament 1 –26) 7.

[5] Porter, 3.

[6] Bailey, 221.

[7] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 190.