*Sass is away for the weekend so I won’t post anything directly relevant to the Quakers until she returns. However, as an interlude I will post some extracts from Mark Heim’s excellent book – in my view – ‘Saved from Sacrifice’ (I’ve already posted an extract from this on the Church of England and UR thread concerning Father Albert von Spee who did so much to end the European Witchhunts – and the feedback then was very positive).
The extracts that follow – from pages 252 – 259 of Heims’ study - are relevant to this thread because they consider Christian responses to politics in the light of a non-violent theology of the cross. Heim uses bits of technical language from Rene Girard’s theology – which has inspired him -but these technicalities are not obtrusive and do not obscure his overall accessible meaning. I think the extract is particularly relevant in the context of a discussion of Quakerism and mysticism because Quakers at their best have always rooted their mysticism in universal social concern. The extract is also relevant in being non-dogmatic regarding politics. I’ve revealed my hand as being a paid up member of ‘God’s left wing (as Jim Wallis of the Sojourners would put it). However, left wing solutions are not always the best – and I have great respect for many on the Right wing of politics. What matters in politics in my view is that we care about others and that we are prepared to listen to those with whom we differ. So here goes…*
''Paul is ready to follow Christ into danger, but he realizes he is not obligated to seek it.
The early church at times had to restrain an enthusiasm for martyrdom. The restraint is important… There is no value in gratuitous suffering, and it should not be a Christian ideal. The enthusiasm for the martyrdom was fuelled by many factors, some of which were not peculiar to Christians (such as the idea of a noble death would get you a through ticket to heaven). Even here, however, there is an interesting touch. An administration for the suicide (something Christians were forbidden) was common in the ancient world, and a stoic attitude towards suffering was also a virtue in some philosophies. Christian martyrdom was not distinguished simply by the acceptance of death or the presence of suffering. It required the peculiar additional condition of dying as an explicit victim was an unjust persecution, a confessor bearing witness for Jesus, the innocent scapegoat. This distinctive is location, we might say, location on the side of scapegoats. The church’s argument with those who were avid for martyrdom did not dispute their conclusion about the location faith pointed them to, but objected that no one should seek to occupy it.
If we could take an example much closer to hand, we can think of Martin Luther King, Jr. King can hardly be regarded as a man who sought death or idealized suffering. His program of nonviolent resistance was a way of life and a struggle, a desire neither to inflict not suffer evil. It called African Americans both to refuse to be victims any longer and to refuse to victimize. King’s encounter with Mahatma Gandhi’s thought and work sparked what was at first only a personal realization. Shortly afterward, when King was thrust into the leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott, that realization would become the seed of a transformative social movement. The realization was that non-resistance to evil, which many Christian pacifists took as Jesus’ example on the cross, was not the same thing as nonviolence. Nonviolence could be a strategy, a powerful force for an active resistance and transformation. Innocent suffering was not an intrinsic good, important as one’s own moral purity. Abstaining from violence could be a way of changing the world, not a way of standing aside from it. Here was a way of understanding the cross as a way of life, not as a call to become a victim, but as a mandate to refuse to be a victim. The reason this became the basis for a social movement rather than simply idiosyncratic idea of an individual, rests in the fact that it could be grounded in the existing faith of the African American church and of wider Christian circles, the faith in the crucified one.
David Garrow’s fine study of King is titled Bearing the Cross. The title is wonderfully ambiguous. It can be taken to refer to the suffering that King and others in the movement endured as a result of their stand. It can be taken to refer to an outward sign, in the sense that the civil rights advocates, marched, spoke, and sang with the explicit images of the Christian gospel and of the passion. And it can be taken in yet a further way that combines both: King and his movement held up before the eyes of a nation, side by side, the evident oppression of African Americans and the central symbol of the Christian faith. In that sense King uncovered, bared, the cross and set it before us in a way that made its relevance inescapable. The voice that had spoken to Paul – “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” – could not be stilled. King was killed as a result of his work. But his driving desire was not to imitate Christ’s crucifixion. It was to imitate Christ’s desire to end sacrifice. His model was not the cross, but the way of life the cross inspired. His public life was a profound struggle to lead a nation to realize its unity without scapegoats. It was a completely shaped by hope for the new community the cross makes possible, what King called “the beloved community”.
When we consider the KKK and their burning crosses, there is a sense in which the civil rights struggle can rightly be seen as a battle over the cross. What side was it on? Who spoke for it? Crucifixion, or in this case assassination, was not needed to make Martin Luther King’s ministry more fully Christian or King’s “imitation” of Jesus any deeper. The effect of the assassination on others, however, is telling, King’s death was like Jesus’ death, a fact so obvious and compelling that it needed no commentary and effectively ended any battle over the cross in the civil rights era. It could not credibly be claimed for the service of racism when it had been demonstrated so dramatically where Jesus’ place would have been in this struggle.
To summarize, in the practice of sacrifice a victims suffering and death is required, false accusation is believed, divine justification for persecution is affirmed, collective agreement is enforced and the victim’s voice is silenced. When the suffering comes in the course of the Christian life, its character should be opposite of this. It should arise only by virtue of resistance to all of these sacrificial elements, not because of their acceptance’’.
''If the first criticism of the theology of the cross was that it invited suffering, the second that it underwrites domination and violence. The supposition that God demands an innocent sacrifice to balance out the guilt of humanity has been attacked in a charter for earthly powers to practise sacrifice in God’s name. The idea that Christ’s death provided an infinite satisfaction to offset humanities offense is taken to empower those who regard themselves as the custodians of that merit with the right to conquer and condemn others. The apparent contradiction in these two criticisms – the cross makes Christians abase themselves and it makes them exalt themselves – does not mean they don’t have substance. Christianity can in fact go wrong in both of these ways. That reflects the paradox of the Gospel narrative itself. If both sides are not in order, then either one or both will go astray.
The way of life that follows on the cross depends on recognition that the death of Jesus ought not to happen. It is not God’s recipe that innocent suffering is the way to restore peace: God’s purpose (to end such a pattern) is superimposed on that event of humanly sanctified violence. Sacrificial scapegoating is not something invented by those under the spell of the passion narratives, but something revealed and opposed there. Just as it is an error to think that it is somehow a Christian requirement to be a victim of redemptive violence, so it is an error to think there is a Christian responsibility to administer it. Christian parenting does not go far astray in this sense will claim some need to apply violent coercion or inflict pain for general redemptive purposes ( to break an ungodly spirit or teach submission) rather than any proportionate specific ones.
Rather than insist on being victims, the Christian way of life calls us to do without victims. Faithfulness is that effort is however no guarantee that one will not encounter suffering. In a parallel way, rather than employ the structures of sacrificial violence, the Christian way of life calls us to find alternative forms to build community. Faithfulness is that effort, however, does not mean that valid human order is emptied of all elements of coercion.
Some critical reconstructions (or rejections) of the theology of the cross conclude that the only authentic Christian life is one of absolute pacifism or total nonviolence. This conclusion may correct, but if so it needs more than an analysis of the cross to establish it. I have stressed that the cross does not in principle address all suffering, nor does it address all conceivable violence. Its direct relevance to those must be traced from its primary focus on scapegoating sacrifice and on tributary forms of mimetic conflict that lead it on. In confronting this collectively sanctioned violence from the place of the suffering victim, God neither sanctified all suffering nor condemned all collective sanction.
“Scapegoating” and “sacrifice” are terms we have applied to cases other than ritual or cultic ones. Indeed, following Girard, I have argued that the ritual and cultic practises in fact stem from (or are assimilated to) a prior kind of social violence. Such supposed “founding murders” or recurrent social dynamics have a very particular profile. Not all violence or coercion falls within that profile. It is a measure of the impact of the biblical tradition that in Western though particularly there are strong tendencies to collapse the two.
Christian theology throughout its history has had to make assessments. Where does the pattern of sacrificial violence apply, though we may not even realize it? And where is that not appropriate category? There are “private” forms of sin, like dishonesty or theft or one person’s physical assault on another. Christian life and faith certainly address these wrongs. But they are not the same wrong as sacred violence, even if these personal sins feed in various ways into the social dynamics that support that violence. And there are dimensions of collective coercion, even violence, that are not sacrificial in the sense in which I’ve been speaking. They may or may not be consistent with the Christian way of life, but that cannot be decided simply by reference to the distinctive meaning of the cross we have explored.
The levelling of taxes is a coercive collective act, and the enforcement of that act may involve imprisonment or even bodily violence against those who resist it. But a tax code does not in principle constitute sacrificial violence. Nor does an economic structure in which some people succeed more than others. Nor does a legal system in which after due process people can be deprived of property and liberty. Nor does abortion. Nor does a police force that at the extreme exercises deadly force. Now does war.
Christians can argue theologically for or against participation in any of these structures or activities, without necessarily making reference to the cross’’.
''The trajectory of the cross in history is such that images like the one I just described increasingly strikes us as protest. But taken alone, in conjunction with certain kinds of theologies, the representations could be taken as counsels of resignation or invitations to imitate Christ’s supposed docile submission to oppression. This points up the fact that concrete images of the crucifixion are liable to the same ambiguity that attaches to any images of suffering. This was powerfully reflected in the controversy surrounding Edwina Sandy’s 1975 sculpture Christa, which depicted a partially nude female form in the traditional crucifix pose. Many objected to the image as a departure from tradition and an assault on the Christological particularly of Christian faith. But it is also criticized variously as an objectification of women, an incitement to abuse, or an invitation to women to idealize their own suffering. When presented with a relatively novel image like this, our visceral responses testify to the way the liberating power of the cross is entangled with sacrificial and mythical tendencies. Those who objected to the sculpture because it did not represent the historical Jesus, and who wanted no explicit parallels, missed the point that part of the saving effect in that unique death was enabling us to see others in the same place. Thos who dismissed the objections, and would willingly have replaced focal emphasis on the cross of Jesus with an array of representations of the oppressed, misunderstood the ambiguous nature of images suffering in themselves.
Images of violation, suffering, and condemnation can readily become incitement or prurient stimulation. Without a tie to the particular objectivity of God’s death on the cross, the sight of a suffering victim from my group can very easily arouse only a desire for retribution. It is exhibited as an atrocity that reinforces the unity of our rage against our enemies. Such images, whatever else may be said, are not equivalents to the cross. For an integral element of the cross is that we cannot attribute it only to others. Without a tie to the cross of Jesus, the sight of a suffering victim who is outside my won circle of identity can all too easily arouse a kind of perverse satisfaction, a sense of just condemnation, or a distanced indifference. This is no equivalent to the cross either. For another integral element is that we must identify with its victim.
There will be those who reject the cross for just the reasons noted. Some advocates of the oppressed will reject it because they believe no shadow of hesitation should fall on the white-hot anger of the aggrieved against their oppressors. And there will be those who stand in positions of advantage and power who will reject it for essentially the same reason, because no matter the legitimate case they make for the relative justice and peace of their communities, the cross insistently requires them to ask anew, who are our victims? If when we look at the cross we see only and always the face of Jesus, its saving power has not fully reached us. If it had, we would be able to see others. But if we substitute only our preferred others, we have warded off its power as well. To be converted is to be able to see ourselves and those we love with Christ. But it is no less to be able to see our own faces in the crowd, a crowd gathered against a Christ who looks like a stranger or an enemy.
For the Christian life generally, and particularly for understanding the cross, the crucial thing is not imitation of Jesus’ actions, the formation of our intentions and behaviour through the model of Jesus’ desire. A consistent desire that animates Jesus’ ministerial life, his antisacrificial death, and his risen witness is the desire to overcome scapegoating as the means of social reconciliation. This is the subjectivity that unifies Jesus’ resolution to go to the cross and his anguished recoil from it that unifies the Gospels’ testimony that his death saves the world and is an evil that must be reversed. This is the example that calls Christians to remember Christ’s death in order to avert others, and exhibits the truth of sacrifice in order to end it. There is in Jesus no desire for death, and no desire for suffering. The reluctance, fear, anguish, and desolation that the passion narratives show us are precious testimony on this point. If we want to become “like him in death,” then the likeness we must imitate is the longing to empty the world of crosses.
The victims of sacrifice die to keep things the same – to restore communal peace in the face of conflict and to validate yet again the ancient solution to social crisis, the eternal return of the scapegoating. Christ died as such a victim, subject to the same intention on the part of his executioners, but without sharing it. His death was an act of resistance to scapegoating death, not an endorsement of it. He died to change things, most specifically to end this way of keeping the peace. He died to change the repetitive dying to maintain the world.
Those who would follow his teaching and his desire and his example, then, should have no desire to join him on the cross. If we did have such an aim, then Christ’s death would not be in vein. The intended reign of God is a life without crosses, peace without scapegoats. Short of the reign of God, may the faithful Christian life lead to suffering? May it bring the specific suffering of the scapegoat or of those who cross to the side of scapegoats? Yes. The only redemptive about such suffering is that it participates in Christ’s reversal of the redemptive violence the world practices, arbitrary victimization to heal our discord. It is Christlike only if it opposes suffering. It is acceptable only if it is resistance. It is legitimate only if its desire is to end what it must endure’’.
Gee thanks… Love you Brother! 
) and Roger Williams