The Power of the cross
The Powers… stripped him naked and crucified him in humiliation, all unaware that
this very act had stripped the Powers of the last covering that disguised the
towering wrongness of the whole way of life that their violence defended.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 83)
What killed Jesus was not irreligion, but religion itself; not lawlessness, but
precisely the Law; not anarchy, but the upholders of order. … And because he
was not only innocent, but the very embodiment of true religion, true law, and true
order, this victim exposed their sacrificial violence for what it was: not the
defense of society, but an attack against God.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 83)
In the Hebrew Bible, God’s alleged punishments are usually carried out by human
beings attacking each other. … the actual initiative for killing does not originate
with God, but is projected onto God by those who desire revenge.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 85)
The violence of the Bible is the necessary precondition for the gradual
perception of the meaning of violence. … The violence of Scripture, so
embarrassing to us today, became the means by which sacred violence was
revealed for what it is: a lie perpetrated against victims in the name of God.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 85)
Jesus simply declared people forgiven, confident the he spoke the mind of God
(Mark 2.1-12). Why then, is a sacrificial victim necessary to make forgiveness
possible? Doesn’t the death of Jesus reveal that all such sacrifices are unnecessary?
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 88)
Paul’s ambivalence towards Christ’s sacrifice:
Paul betrays a certain ambivalence toward the sacrifice of Christ. For Paul,
Christ is the end of sacrificing and the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism, as
Girard correctly perceives. But by depicting Jesus as sacrifice, Paul also gives
credence to the notion that God caused Jesus to be a final ‘sacrifice of atonement by
his blood” (Rom. 3.25). If Christ’s death saves us from the wrath of God (Rom.5.9); if
Jesus was sent by God as a sin offering (1 Cor. 15.3; Rom 8.3); if Christ is a
Passover lamb sacrificed on our behalf (1 Cor.5.7), then it would appear the God’s
wrath must indeed be appeased. Paul has apparently been unable fully to
distinguish the insight that Christ is the end of sacrificing from the idea that
Christ is the final sacrifice whose death is an atonement to God. And Christianity
suffered from this confusion ever since.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 88)
…
...God of mercy was changed by the church into a wrathful God whose demand
for blood atonement lead to God’s requiring his own Son’s death on behalf of us all.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 88)
By contrast, the God whom Jesus reveals refrains from all forms of reprisal.
God des not endorse holy wars or just wars…. As twentieth-century mystic
Simone Weil put it, the false God changes suffering into violence, the true God
changes violence into suffering. To be the true God’s offspring requires the
unconditional renunciation of violence.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 89)
Two irreconcilable systems stove for the allegiance of humanity. The “Christus
Victor” (‘Christ is Victor’) theory of atonement proclaimed release of the captives
to those who had formerly been deluded and enslaved by the Domination
System. And it portrayed Jesus as st against that system with all his might.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 89)
With the conversion of the emperor Constantine, however, the Roman Empire
took over from the church the role of God’s providential agent in the world. … The
Christus Victor theology fell out of favor, … because it was subversive to the
church’s role as state religion. The church no longer saw the demonic as lodged in
the empire, but in the empire’s enemies. Because society was now regarded as
Christian, atonement became a highly individual transaction between the
believer and God. The idea that the work of Christ involves the radical critique of
society was largely abandoned.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 89-90)
The Christus Victor theory of the atonement, by contrast, states that what
Christ has overcome is precisely the Powers themselves. The forgiveness of
which Col. 2.13-15 speaks is forgiveness for complicity in our own oppression
and in that of others. Our alienation is not solely the result of our rebellion against
God .. We do not freely surrender our authenticity; it is stolen from us by the
Powers. Before we reach the age of choice, our choices have already been to a high
degree made for us by a system indifferent to our uniqueness. … the Law itself is
one of the Powers that separates us from the love of God; it is the ‘letter’ which ‘kills’
(2 Cor. 3.6). Therefore, Jesus ‘gave himself for our sins to se us free fro this
Domination Epoch’ (aion – Gal 1.4).
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 90)
Christianity has, on the whole, succeeded no more than Judaism in unmasking the
violence at the core of society. Its accommodation to power politics through the
infinitely malleable ideology of the just war, its abandonment of the Christus
Victor theory of the atonement for the blood theory, its projection of the reign
of God into an afterlife or the remote future - all these gutted the church’s
message of its most radical elements. Jesus was made divine. The Mass…
became a perpetual sacrifice rather than THE END OF ALL NEED FOR
SACRIFICE. And all Jews were scapegoated for the death of Jesus, so that the cycle
of scapegoating was set loose to run its violent course again.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 90-1)
THE PRESENT CULTURAL ORDER CANNOT SURVIVE THE DMISE OF THE
SCAPEGOATING MECHANISM, says Girard. The Domination System grown ot
of the fundamental belief that violence must be used to overcome violence.
Wherever the gospel is truly heard, the scapegoat mechanism is rendered
impotent, the persecutors’ reports of their official actions are no longer
believed, and the Powers’ involvement in the execution of innocent victims ins
unmasked as judicial murder.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 91)
Christ died in order not to reconcile God to us but to reconcile us to God (2 Cor. 5.18).
God has renounced any accounting of sins; no repayment is required or even
possible. God is not a stern and inflexible magistrate but a loving parent. Why, then,
was a redemptive act necessary? Because our resentment toward God and our
will to kill leave us unable to turn to God.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 92)
Jesus absorbed all the violence directed at him by the authorities and the
Powers but still loved them. If humanity killed the one who fully embodied God’s
intention for our lives, and God still loves us, then there is no need to try to earn
God’s love. And if God loves us unconditionally, there is no need to seek conditional
love from the various Powers who promise us rewards in return fro devotion.
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 92)
… through Jesus the scapegoat mechanism is exposed and the spiral of
violence broken. …The ideological justification that the Powers advance for
scapegoating (anti-communism, anti-capitalism, national security) are today
becoming less and less convincing. The problem is that once the gospel has
deprived a society of the scapegoating mechanism, that society loses one of its best
defenses against violence. And when the violence comes, it is not a vengeful God
who ushers it in, but we ourselves. The ‘wrath’ or judgment of God is precisely God’s
‘giving us up’ to the consequences of our own violence (Rom. 1.18-32; Acts 7.42).
(Wink, The Powers That Be, 1998, 92-3)
