There Must Be Another Way

I received these two quotes from my Dad yesterday (do you see where my brilliance comes from?). Close followers of my blog know that I have an affinity towards Wink and Girard. In light of the violence in Bosten yesterday these are good things to read. Wish I thought of finding them.

Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death. Its followers are not aware, however, that the devotion they pay to violence is a form of religious piety. Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. It is embraced with equal alacrity by people on the left and on the right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives. The threat of violence, it is believed, is alone able to deter aggressors. It secured us years of a balance of terror. We learned to trust the Bomb to grant us peace ... It, and not Christianity, is the real religion of America. .....Walter Wink

from  http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/hemer/violence.htm

John Hemer MHM commentary on Girard:   People do not simply desire what others have, they desire what others desire.

Almost all human conflict is the result of people modelling themselves, (albeit unconsciously) on others and then entering into rivalry with others. All human conflict is about wanting what someone else has and desires – money, land, prestige, a spouse, a friend, power etc. every human society is threatened by this desire which becomes rivalry which leads to conflict.

The Bible is in fact the story of the slow, painstaking and sometimes faltering escape from the idea of a God who is violent to a God who is love and has absolutely nothing to do with violence.

The Bible comes to birth in a society where this scapegoating mechanism is fully operational, but it is the genius of Biblical revelation that it slowly unmasks this process and shows it up for what it is and offers an alternative. Societies use one sort of violence to expel another sort. The violence expelled is deemed ‘bad’, the violence used to expel it is deemed ‘good’. This is basically what we mean by myth. Not fiction, nor the product of a primitive imagination. Myth tells of a violent event, but tells it from the point of view of the society which benefited from that event, and therefore veils and vindicates the violence. No one in a society where myth holds sway is aware that the facts have been tampered with or coloured, so people in such societies are not hypocrites. But the more biblical influence works on a society, the less myth is likely to work. The OT, slowly at first, tells of these events, but tells them from the point of view of the victim. This is not universally clear in the OT, but is dazzlingly clear in the Gospels. The central event in world history is the Son of God becoming the victim of this process, and then rising 

His is the voice of everyone, every individual, every society which has tried to solve its problems by scapegoating; the voice of reason, the voice of political common sense, the voice which speaks up for the ‘common good’. It is the voice of pogroms, ethnic cleansings and final solutions, and has been heard countless times in history and has resulted in untold human suffering. But it is not the voice of the gospel. The gospel speaks with another voice, with the voice of the victim. That’s why the Gospel as well as being a unique piece of theology is a unique piece of anthropology.