Marshall
St., every Friday afternoon, in the Syracuse University student
quarter, there's a man parading dressed in scripture-quote billboards
and threatening hell to all those who don't take Jesus as their
savior. His booming voice bounces off bar fronts and food joints,
declaring doom to come. Everyone blocks him out, but that doesn't
bother him. It simply confirms the structure of his universe. Each
time his voice is ignored the ground opens up in front of the person
who ignored him.
Hearing
this man it's easy to feel the hard edge of violence in the inherited
Christian message. It's something difficult to square with a Teacher
who began his teaching with "Blessed are the peacemakers..."
but quite easy to believe once you understand the story that has gone
on between. The Teacher died a violent death, as part of his mission,
and what simpler way to understand a violent episode than via the
accepted mechanics of violence?
Once
Christian thinkers looked around for ways to explain Jesus' death to
the masses, they swiftly hit on notions of payment and punishment.
You offend me, I'll take a chunk of you! Simple as that. All that was
required was to put Jesus in the place of the rest of us who should
be paying, and bingo, what have you got? You have the displaced
payment of dues to a most unforgiving, grim and terrible god, by a
passive, submissive victim who happens to be his son. This is the
classic Christian doctrine of atonement.
Not
hard then to imagine the second-order consequence of refusing to
accept the ferocious pay-off made available through Jesus! Hell, yes!
My
friend on Marshall St. is a typical child of two millennia of
Christian misconstruction of Jesus' death.
The
violence in his voice and soul was put there by Christian history.
How much more difficult and challenging it would have been--given
intellectual and institutional frameworks-- for Christian thinkers to
explain Jesus' death as overcoming the mechanics of violence itself?
If Jesus did pay anything it was of such an extravagant, limitless
kind that it blew up the system of payment. It was as if he kept
printing dollars on the cross, and no one could stop him, so all the
dollars became completely worthless, and the only economy left was
the one he had modeled, one of limitless giving.
As
for violence, it is always itself a system of payment ("I'll get
you back!") and Jesus of course exploded that too. By the excess
of giving on the cross he shed light on our ancient structure of
violent human reciprocity, one that works itself out in our bones
and minds in an instant, before we even realize it, and in a flash
there is blood on the ground. This revelation by the cross has become
articulated in contemporary thought in the notions of "mimetic
desire," "mirror neurons" and "the surrogate
victim" powerfully laid out in the work of Rene Girard.
Institutional
Christianity seems more or less stuck with the default meaning of
Christ's death inherited from the centuries. Certainly there are
numerous theologians and teachers working in this new direction, but
the comfort of violence as a generative principle and its hold on
human logic are so great that it adds up to an enormous ideological
and religious obstacle. The man on Marshall St. is perhaps an
extreme example, but his condition to one degree or another is
endemic in all of Christianity.
However,
that is not the whole story, by any means. The gospel revelation of
violence is not in fact happening essentially in the churches, but
broadly in culture, and that is Girard's amazing insight. He found
the evidence first in novels and plays, and to some degree in
philosophy, and in my own work I have shown it in evidence in movies
(and again in philosophy). What this means is that the crucial shift
in Christianity is being prompted largely from outside its
institutional forms. It's almost as if the Crucified struggles on his
own with violence, bringing it to the surface, exposing it and slowly
making possible the alternative. This leads me directly to Halloween
and what I'd like to propose as the "Halloween Atonement Test." If
popular culture can pass the Halloween Test it means that, one way or
other, the mechanism and message of Christianity have been changed
radically, from one of violence to one of peace and nonviolence.
The ghosts, zombies, skeletons, witches, hanged men, chopped up limbs, crumbling graveyards, rats, bats, scorpions, spiders, cobwebs, and oh yes the pumpkins, those gaudy gourds with a color and shape uncannily reminiscent of a severed human head, what is all this, if not a revelation of generative violence? It is taking place chaotically and ambiguously but without a doubt it shows an enormous consciousness of violence. Why not then include a large crucifix in the front yard alongside the skulls and hanged men? Would it not perfectly belong there?
The reaction at once is "No, this would be a kind of blasphemy! The cross is a sacred form of violence, all that other stuff is regular profane violence." But, really, the point of the cross is exactly that: it is regular human violence, to which Jesus replied with transcendent forgiveness and peace. Putting it among the ghouls and the gore would declare this definitively as its role. It would show a true recognition of the death of Jesus as a laying bare of generative violence, and with that the communication of generative peace.
The ghosts, zombies, skeletons, witches, hanged men, chopped up limbs, crumbling graveyards, rats, bats, scorpions, spiders, cobwebs, and oh yes the pumpkins, those gaudy gourds with a color and shape uncannily reminiscent of a severed human head, what is all this, if not a revelation of generative violence? It is taking place chaotically and ambiguously but without a doubt it shows an enormous consciousness of violence. Why not then include a large crucifix in the front yard alongside the skulls and hanged men? Would it not perfectly belong there?
The reaction at once is "No, this would be a kind of blasphemy! The cross is a sacred form of violence, all that other stuff is regular profane violence." But, really, the point of the cross is exactly that: it is regular human violence, to which Jesus replied with transcendent forgiveness and peace. Putting it among the ghouls and the gore would declare this definitively as its role. It would show a true recognition of the death of Jesus as a laying bare of generative violence, and with that the communication of generative peace.
The
prehistory of Halloween is pretty clearly a pre-Christian cyclical
feast, the Celtic Samhain (pronounced sawin) celebrated Oct.
31st/Nov. 1st. It was especially concerned with the dead and enemies
lurking among them (very possibly the victims of murder). The victim
gets his day in the sun so to speak and then is stuffed back in the
ground. The church's attempt in the 9th century to upstage the
"summer's end" ritual by placing a Feast of All Saints on
November 1st (and All Souls the day after) proved unable to suppress
it. Perhaps because "saints" go to some heavenly otherworld
and leave this one still roiled in violence. Perhaps because the fact
of the victim was already dimly sensed, despite the pagan trappings,
as a Christian truth. But the North American Halloween, and its
growing popularity throughout the world, are something else again. It
is an intense semiotic display which looks and feels more and more
like visual and dramatic "disclosure" of violence. It seems
as if deep down the broad cultural effect of the Crucified has been
added to the ancient ritualized event pushing all this cruelty into
the open, implicitly asking us, begging us, to let go of it.
So
why not then place a crucifix in the front yard, next to the
skeletons and hanged men? Would that not state unarguably that
the cross is an event of human violence, and at the same time and
for that reason, communicate a transforming peace to the human
scene?
If I
ever get to see something like that I'll know Christianity has finally
passed its Halloween Atonement Test!
Tony Bartlett, Contributing Theologian