[andrew]

Sheelah, thank you for clarifying those terms which were unfamiliar to me in your response. It would appear my guess at El-Shaddai was way off! I don’t actually know any Hebrew but sometimes, while studying the Bible, I try to connect Hebrew words to one of the smattering of Arabic roots I’ve learned. I did a little poking around in dictionaries on this one. It looks like the /sh/ sound in the Hebrew El-Shaddai became a /th/ sound in a very similar Arabic root.

I saw Barker referenced in an article of James’ I read about a month ago. I had never heard of her before. I visited her website briefly that day, but I have yet to have an opportunity to read anything. She has written many books. Do let me know if you have a recommendation for a good entry point into her work.

[andrew]

.

[andrew]

Which terms are familiar to you?
I have at least heard of all of each of these.

Which terms or dates are unfamiliar?
I would be hard pressed to distinguish between henotheism and monolatry. If I were to run across either term by itself, I would have thought it referred to the devotion to one god over and above all others. Now, seeing them side by in a grid, I can’t begin to think how to distinguish one from the other.

I know Omri was a king of either Israel or Judah, but I have no idea what makes him unique from others.

I know that El Elyon and El-Shaddai are divine names. If the meaning of Hebrew roots are similar to the Arabic roots they resemble (which certainly isn’t always the case), then I could hazard a guess the Elyon means “highest” and Shaddai means “strengthened,” “fortifier,” or something along those lines. I am aware that many English translations make no effort to inform readers that some such divine names are in all likelihood older than even the most ancient of Israelite traditional religions. Whether that is the case with either of these names, I have no idea.

Now choose a term or date that is unfamiliar to you, and prepare to listen for it in the unit’s video. Share which terms and dates you will be looking for as well.Share what you learned about the unfamiliar term you chose to listen for in this video.
Omri is the earliest Israelite king about which there is extra-textual historical evidence.

I had heard that there was archeological evidence suggesting that YHWH had acquired a female consort in some areas, but I didn’t know that YHWH might possibly have appropriated the name of a female divinity with the name El-Shaddai.

[andrew]

In what ways is your understanding of what God requires from religious people changing? What does it mean to be a good religious person?
I am having a hard time using the word ‘religion’ because I am living in linguistic circles in which the connotative value of that word fluctuates wildly. Sometimes it is associated with perfunctory repetition and is negative; other times it is associated with a reverence for God and is positive. I think some rituals are a way to manufacture a phony reverence, but I also think virtuous habits developed over time can become so second nature the communities we live in that we should call them rituals.

I suppose a good religious person would be the one who reveres the God who really is, who and doesn’t take shortcuts so as to play the game of being reverential without bothering to actually behold the God who really is. I should add that I have been finding James’ phrase “forgiving victim” to be quite productive in making sense of theological questions. This is another case in point. The “God who really is” is the forgiving victim; the “shortcuts” are means by which we can cover over our victim and thereby preclude any chance of us seeing him forgive us.

[andrew]

Yes, Sheelah, thank you, your synopsis does indeed help. I was attempting to read the Akedah like Girard reads one of those stories which relate a founding murder. These are stories of violent encounters. When told by mythologers, the violence is obfuscated. When told by Biblical authors, the violence is brought into focus. I correctly understood James to say that the Akedah seems to be replacing a slaughtered human with a slaughtered ram. I took this to mean James was (inadvertently) implying that the Akedah falls on the side of obfuscation, as opposed to clarification. My mistake, I see now, was to try and read the Akedah as an origin story. James never reads it as such in this lecture and, so far as I know, Girard never does so either.

Genesis 22 is not one of those stories that emanated from a founding murder; rather, it is a story about the sacrificial rituals that emanate from a founding murder. While a mythological perspective necessarily buries its head in the sand with respect to the spontaneous collective violence at its origin, those who adhere to a mythological perspective in their telling of origin stories need not have any qualms about embracing wholeheartedly the rehearsed collective violence of human sacrifice.

The idea of the archaic sacred is that God demands the shedding of blood. This is a useful lie which conceals the truth: people, having accidentally stumbled upon the benefits of temporary reconciliation through bloodshed, have begun to demand ritual bloodshed all of themselves. In the Bible, the Akedah is a case in which the death of a ram suffices “God’s” demand in an instance in which the death of a human was presumably called for. Here the substitution is not an obfuscation of some violence formerly perpetrated. Instead, the substitution suggests that a clarification to the human understanding of ritual bloodletting: the success of rituals depends less on what people believe they heard God to demand and more on whether or not all the people involved are left satisfied when it is over.

[andrew]

How has your understanding of the story of Abraham and Isaac changed?
Sheelah, James lost me on this one. You’ll need to help me sort it out. Do I understand this correctly? I’ve enumerated the steps I see James taking, so that you can pinpoint where I go wrong.

[1] James suspects that there are various ways to tell the story of Abraham sacrificing at a mountain in Moriah. Some versions of the story have been lost to history.
[2] Among those lost to us (but known to Biblical authors) is at least one rendition of the story in which Abraham slaughters his son.
[3] For James, inferring the existence of this gruesome version that predated Genesis 22 provides an explanation for the otherwise difficult image of Abraham returning from the sacrificial ordeal without Isaac (22.19).

If [1-3] is an accurate extraction of some of what James is proposing, then some of what James is proposing is contrary to Girard’s assessment of Biblical revelation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Girard considers mythology to be the accounts of founding murders which mitigate references to murderous behavior. Conversely, the Bible, for Girard, is a collection of stories that move toward an unmitigated presentation of founding murders in gruesome detail. If we surmise that an earlier non-Biblical parallel to Genesis 22 provides a unvarnished depiction of child sacrifice, and that the Biblical version “tones down” the human-against-human violence with the help of a ram-form-nowhere who is sacrificed in the boy’s stead, then we are affirming a trajectory of the Abraham-and-Isaac story in which Genesis 22 is not revelatory (in Girard’s sense of revelatory). In this lecture, I think I heard James suggests that Genesis 22, as we have it now, is further away from a true picture of human sacrifice; I think I heard James suggest that we should reconstruct a mythological precursor to the Biblical narrative that gave a clearer account of human sacrifice than the Bible. This is the opposite of how Girard relates the Bible to mythology.

I understand that James wants to say that, through the eyes of our resurrected Lord, we can read the “Big Bad Book” and embrace the queasiness it makes us feel. Genesis 22.19 is unsettling; it should make us queasy. It is very much about child sacrifice. But why does James suggest that there was some earlier version of Abraham and Isaac at Moriah that was more capable of embracing the queasiness of the story than Genesis?

I would have expected James to do precisely the opposite. If we were are going to speculate on some earlier version of what becomes Genesis 22 and maintain that the Bible reveals more than what precedes it, then we would need to infer the existence of a pre-Biblical story like the following: Abraham is intent on blood sacrifice (perhaps by divine mandate). He is ascending a mountain in Moriah with all the sacrificial accoutrements except for a lamb, when his donkey turns and says, “I see the fire and the wood, but …” [Let this story proceed more or less like the one we know—ram and all.]

Now, you see what I mean? Why didn’t James assume that the precursors to the Biblical version were even more opaque with respect to the child’s demise? Why did he assume Genesis was the version covering up the possibility of child sacrifice?

If my imagined story were the precursor to Genesis 22, then the Bible would be revealing something new to the people who already knew the talking-donkey version. Genesis 22 would be a familiar animal-talking tale with a twist, namely—there ain’t no animals talking in this animal-talking tale. (“Wasn’t it always kind of weird that the donkey started talking in that Abraham-at-Moriah story?” the original Biblical audience would ask each other. “No that you mention it, that was weird!” “Well, the truth is: it was never a donkey; it was his son!!” [for thus who’ve read _Life of Pi_, think of that moment when you realize exactly what Pi means when he says stories are just better with animals] “And we always thought—naively—that Isaac stayed at the foot of the mountain!” “Oh my God!” says one original listener who is finally gets the point of the retelling, “Remember how in the old version, Isaac was like ‘So, what happened to the donkey, Dad?’ and stuff—here Abraham comes back without Isaac … and nobody even asks a single question!”) The take-away, in my imagined context, would be that the Biblical audience’s forefather wasn’t the one who stopped performing a sacrifice as benign as donkey slaughter (as people had once thought)—in actuality, Abraham was the one who stopped sacrificing children!

Of course, this is wild conjecture on my part. I am unaware of any such story in the Ancient Near East. I have no good reason whatsoever to believe anybody ever thought of Abraham as the father of all peoples who stopped slaughtering donkeys or camels or something. It seems highly inadvisable to argue for the existence of some talking-beast-of-burden-about-to-be-sacrificed folktale, simply to salvage my positive assessment of the Bible as revelation. Neither, however, do I support James contention that Genesis was more bashful about Abraham’s complicity in child sacrifice than some pre-Biblical accounts. It may well turn out to be that there existed scriptures more revelatory than the Bible, but I’m not prepared to accept an invitation to simply assume that is the case.

[andrew]

Were you aware that sacrifice of firstborn children was part of the religious practices of ancient Israel, as of the surrounding nations? How do you feel about that?
Yes, but I still find it very striking to be reminded just how matter of course the practice would have seemed.

–The stories about human sacrifice made Marcion so queasy that he suggested we ditch such passages from our Scriptures. Do you feel any sympathy for Marcion’s position? Why would you want to exclude stories of human sacrifice?
The inclination of cultures to remove stories of human sacrifice from our heritage is not unlike the inclination of individuals to remain silent about certain unflattering stories from their youth in which they behaved rather inappropriately in comparison to what they now consider to be properly decorous. I’m quite sympathetic to people (groups or individuals) who don’t what to look too closely at all the missteps they took along the way to becoming who they are.

What value is there in including them?
If rituals of human sacrifice are mimetic reverberations of the spontaneous scapegoating episodes that lie at the origin of every human culture, then including these stories in scripture has the value of directing people towards the truth of how we became people. It’s one thing stop telling the stories of debauched rabble-rousing that marked my youth because I simply am not that person anymore; it’s quite another for my brother and I to just stop talking about the results of our genetic tests once we notice that we only seem to share about half the same DNA. In the latter case, I can’t just say, “Oh that online genetic testing was just a quirky gift-giving thing we did for the holidays last year—there is nothing to talk about now”—even if I might be tempted to hide my head in the sand and convince myself that concealment (or “lack of candor”) might make it easier for everyone to carry on as before.

If human sacrifice is simply something some of our unruly ancestors dabbled in, then our scriptures wouldn’t lose all that much if those episodes were edited out. If human sacrifice is directly linked to the moment of hominization, then it is not an accident of ancestry that these episodes appears prominently in scripture. They mustn’t be ignored, if we don’t wish to remain ignorant.

[andrew]

Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
I’ve been thinking about a couple of billionaires who were being compared to one another recently in the news. Both claim to be “self-made” men with political aspirations, but I was initially led to see a clear demarcation between the two. One came from “humble” beginnings; the other did not. One received $400 million dollars from his father; the other, at the age of 7, watched his father struggle mightily with a broken leg to support his family. I asked: How could two billionaires be more different in their origins? Only one could be truly self-made–or so I thought. The more I thought about this claim, I began to switch my question: How could these two be any more alike in their self-deception. They have exactly the same origin story, and both are utterly blind to it. Whether it be money or a motivation to develop a solid work ethic (this distinction is immaterial my point), these billionaires both received everything that makes them who they are from someone else.

There is no humble beginning to human life, we are each and all brought to life by a lavish act of giving from somewhere beyond ourselves. Humility doesn’t pertain to some level of impoverishment; humility describes those who see their riches rightly. The humble recognize the truth and know that they received their identity from someone else. The arrogant claim the impossible: to have made themselves from nothing.

[andrew]

James explains that reading the texts through the eyes of the Forgiving Victim is a particular option for interpretation. What difference does this option make to how we interpret Scriptures?
Reading scripture doesn’t have to be a theological exercise. It does not have to be a matter of distinguishing two gods from one another or about outlining a consistent theodicy. When we adopt the position of the forgiving victim, reading scripture might be nothing more than perceiving with greater and greater clarity what it is we do to maintain order in our community.

What unheard voices might emerge using this option?
If it were the voice of an indignant victim that emerged, then we would have a voice that we must either silence completely or a voice we would need to burnish beyond recognition. For if the indignation in a victim’s voice is heard and believed, we would be turning ourselves turn toward revenge. Internecine violence would escalate among ourselves without restraint. If we forgo listening to the voice altogether, then a community of people proceeds in ignorance not knowing the full story of what made us a community of people. The only way for us to hear the truth about the source of human being (and live through it) is to hear it from a forgiving victim.

How does reading Scripture as progressive revelation help us discover new and more true things about God and ourselves?
It allows God to be a subject who guides our reading of scripture, rather than taking God merely as an object which is spoken about in scripture.

[andrew]

Have you read, or do you know someone who reads, Scripture from a Marcionite perspective? What question does a Marcionite reading attempt to answer?
I suppose I have heard people talk about “God in the Old Testament” as if this were a distinct from what we read in the Gospels.

Why does James say a Marcionite reading of Scriptures is a mistake?
It sets up the God of the Israelites as an inferior foil for understanding the superior God of the Christians. Not to mention the question of consistency that would face people who define their “One God” over and against some other people’s “One God,” the practice is tantamount to anti-Semitism, and lends itself very easily to justifications of violence against the “barbarians” who worship the wrong “One God”.

Have you read, or do you know someone who reads, Scripture from a fundamentalist perspective? What question does a fundamentalist reading attempt to answer?
Yes, plenty. They attempt to reconcile a depiction of God’s righteousness with all the violent acts attributed to God in the Bible.

Why does James say a fundamentalist reading of Scriptures is a mistake?
Fundamentalism assumes that Scripture are meaningful in themselves and by themselves apart from readers. Fundamentalists claim falsely that an objective bias-free reading predates any readership and is available to cautious readers to uncover. The truth is that scriptures only take on meaning when they are reader and that readers are always employing a particular (i.e. not universal) interpretive key.

[andrew]

Share a favorite mystery or detective story. Describe what effect learning “who done it” at the end had on how you viewed certain characters or events from earlier in the story.
The first season of the British television series “Broadchurch” is perhaps the most gripping detective story I have ever been told. It isn’t about a crafty killer who attempts to outfox the authorities and get away with it. In fact, the murderer in this story simply grows tired in the end. He starts trying to turn himself in before he ever even becomes a suspect. It is not really about the intrigues of a murderer, a sleuth, or what it takes for the latter to track down the former. Rather, it is primarily about a small town which is grieving the loss of one of its own and, overall, everyone in the town does a remarkably terrible job of grieving. The death was the murder of a child. So I don’t suppose there really would have been any way the towns folk could have processed the ordeal “well”. But accusations start flying! Almost everyone starts to look guilty (even the murdered child’s father). A second town member ends up dead—not at the hands of the villain “back at it again,” but, rather, this second death owes solely to the sheer force of the fierce accusations being bandied about by the townsfolk.

One of the lead characters is a local police officer who is slowly and methodically taught to become suspicious of the people she grew up with. This aspect of the story begins to muddy the genre distinction. The local officer’s forced descent into the terror of suspecting the worst of loved ones is not unlike the classic contours of a horror film. Normalcy slowly erodes and in the end only frightful villainy is left.

This detective story doesn’t fill the viewer with satisfaction once the case is solved. I felt more disturbed after the culprit confessed; I think because I had (to that point) judged the murder to be the most steadfast and levelheaded character. The one who had seemed the most successful in pushing ahead with normalcy was the perpetrator of the disaster that turned the town upside-down. The murderer never appeared anything other than normal; all the while, the police were scouring the town for the person who was “cracking” and starting to behave unusually. It was a catch-22. The unusual thing (i.e. the cracking) that would have ed the police to the murderer would have been to notice that one person behaving normally in a fracas.

[andrew]

Thank you for sharing these quotes, Sheelah. I found them to be quite fertile beginnings for meditation. I look forward to pausing to reread them in the future. These are my thoughts thus far. It’ll help if I enumerate the clauses of the first passage.

(1) Our challenge as Christians is not to try to convert people around us to our way of belief (2) but to love them, (3) to be ourselves living incarnations of what we believe, (4) to live what we believe and (5) to love what we believe.”

I was initially puzzled by the conclusion of Main’s quote (5). What would it mean “to love what I believe”? I know a few smug ideologues—but, of course, that can’t be what was meant here. I worked backward through the quote trying to make sense of this line; for I had thought I was tacking and in complete agreement until I hit up against this bit at the end.

The second to last line (“to live what we believe”) seems to me to be little more than a rephrasing of the line immediately preceding it (“to be ourselves living incarnations of what we believe”). So, I collapsed (3) and (4) together. However (3/4) seems to say something different than (5). So how were they to be related? I read back further still and saw that (2) “to love them [i.e. those around us]” seemed to be that which is defined by the conjunction of (3/4) and (5). In other words, to love those around us is to simultaneously become what we believe and love what we believe.

Now, if we become a something and love that same something, then we love ourselves. Have I gone off the rails, or is this not implied by what Main is saying? We will love ourselves when we succeed in meeting the Christian challenge to love those around us and forgo any desire that we may have to convince them of stuff.

If it is OK to read the passage this way, then it appears to affirm a (new-to-me) approach for interpreting “love your neighbor as yourself.” In order to love another, the lover must love the one whom she herself becomes in the loving of the other. In the same vein, in order to love herself, the lover must love the love she has for someone other than herself. When we love, it is not actually other selves that we are loving. Rather, when we love, we love love itself—whether this loved love be our own act of loving or the act of some other’s loving. And if God is love, then the love of love is the love of God. So, we love love first, then we can love others and ourselves by loving the love in ourselves and others. Is this not congruent with Jesus’ identification of the greatest commandment and what he says comes right after? I think so, but maybe this is a vain analysis of something that is only understood in performance.

As for Day’s quote, I initially had a critical reaction. It seemed that she was operating within the autonomous-self paradigm. At first, I read the “we must only work on ourselves” to mean “we each-as-an-individual must only work on our respective selves—each to each’s own.” But after very few minutes, I saw that it was my own reading that imposed this individuated-self interpretation upon Day’s words. The text could be read just as well through the lens of interdividuated selves. The ‘we’ can be understood as a group growing in grace as they love one another. This group works to improve the love they all share—while loving this love they share even as they are working on it.

What, then, does this make of the “people” referred to in the last sentence? I think that the “we” refers to all of those whom we love and with whom we jointly endeavor to improve our love. Accordingly, I think that, the “people” Day refers to at the end (i.e. those about whom we can do nothing other than love) are those who don’t join in our endeavor to improve the love we share. These are our enemies; they are working against what we are working for. Yet, as Jesus instructed, it is best to love our enemies. Our friend are those we both love and with whom we work in tandem on improving our expressions of love. Our enemies are those we can only love, because they won’t work with us on improving any expressions of shared love.

In a lecture delivered to the Seminary of the Southwest in September of 2017, James makes the point that loving our enemies should not be construed as pretending our enemies aren’t really working against us. Our enemies are, by definition, truly working against us, but we don’t have to respond in kind. We don’t have to work against them. There is a transcendent model we can follow, whereby we are guided toward working for the benefit of all—ourselves and other people. Jesus didn’t say, “He who is not with me, I am against.” He only said, “He who is not with me is against me.” There may be people who are against us, when we are for the resurrected Lord. However, we cannot be for the resurrected Lord if we are against anyone.

[andrew]

Yes, it has occurred to me that it is my neighbors and loved ones who have provided me with my desires, both profound and superficial. But I haven’t ever tried to catalogue precisely which desires come from who.

Yes, I’ve known resentment all too well on too many occasions. It occurred to me one night how much I hated a certain type of person. I began writing all the reasons I couldn’t stand any of the people I’d ever met from this particular group (i.e. westerners who live in non-western countries). I had meant for my indictments of others to be a self-justification (as is I were the one western sojourner who actually knew how to respectfully inhabit a foreign culture), but once my indictments were written down … I saw that I couldn’t have described myself better. For a few years I could only make sense of this self-encounter in the other by thinking, “well, I guess I’m just one of those people who hates himself.” But after being introduced to Girard’s analysis of scandal, I began to see more than hatred. I had believed in a distinction that wasn’t there in order to give myself prestige. I had become a ex-patriot who sought only to situate himself amongst an array of other ex-patriots, and who never actually gave his full attention to the local population. This had been, of course, at the very top of my list of things I hated about ex-pats. The unmitigated forces I poured into proving I was not like the other western sojourners I met, ended up turning me into the living breathing reality of what I had perceived those others to be–even as I made-believe that I myself was vastly superior. I couldn’t stop myself from becoming more and more isolated, as I nurtured my resentment of those who isolate themselves from their neighbors while claiming to be exploring the world.

The way out of the snare, I suppose, would have been to sincerely endeavor to help those other travelers I despised to appreciate the culture we were living in. Then maybe I would have been open to receiving their help in doing the same.

This was all several years ago, I’m not at all sure what I may be ensnared in now.

[andrew]

I’d like to publicly thank whoever had the foresight to sell these online subscriptions to the Forgiving Victim series in 2-year stints. It has been a very pleasant experience to think on a question for months, get nowhere with it, and know all the while there is still a supervised forum awaiting my return. Thank you, Sheelah, for your questions. The person I wrote about last September was a guest speaker who has not yet returned to our church. Still, I knew it would be entirely unsatisfactory if I responded to your “Can you think of any examples or illustrations of mimetic desiring that would help the person of whom you are speaking?” with a “Well, I doubt I’ll ever see her again anyway, so what’s it matter?” It does matter. If I’m not a part of helping others see, I’m not a part of people seeing—and that would make me blind, wouldn’t it? I’ll continue to carry your question with me. I’ve begun to seriously doubt that I’ll ever think up a good example of mimetic desiring, but I do still hope to recognize the good examples when they meet me.

[andrew]

Yes, Sheelah, I believe you were correct to describe what I observed as an instantiation of how “The idea of the autonomous self really does die hard.” I was reviewing the first video of module one yesterday. In the introductory bit, before the lessons begin, James says, “What I hope you are going to get from this course is quite how far removed Christianity really is from being all about how you should behave yourself—how what it is really all about is how much you are loved.”

I run in circles where the height, depth and breadth of God’s love is proclaimed. However, it is most often proclaimed in such a way that the ‘me’ in ‘God loves me’ somehow precedes God’s loving. There is an unsightly twist in this messaging whereby the greatness of God’s love is demonstrated primarily in relief against a list of contemptible attributes belonging to those God loves in spite of themselves. It presupposes that we must know an existence as sinful people before we can adequately appreciate God’s love. How do I communicate that God doesn’t need great sin to frame the greatness of divine love? I try to say, “God doesn’t need us to be sinful! God loves us just how Fred Rogers said he liked his audiences—just the way you are.” But my audience hears a man who can’t come to grips with his own sinfulness and, thereby, can’t see just how much God loves him.

It’s comical really. Two sides berating the other with the same accusation: “You don’t understand how much God loves you!” –“No, it’s you who doesn’t understand how much God loves you.” Rivals insisting on explaining the love of God instead of practicing it.

No, Sheelah, I’ve yet to come up with any effective examples for illustrating how desire is essentially mimetic. Ironically, I’ve seen myself become an example of mimetic desire in my failed attempts to illustrate mimetic desire. But the miserable example I’ve made of myself on these occasions is hardly illustrative to those who don’t already know what to look for.

[Author]

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