The Evangelical Universalist Forum

You cannot discover history by finding facts ...

Greetings !

 To make it easier and to make it more personal ..  I will use my name too  
     so jim ( aka hothorsegz )  it is ...   <img src="/uploads/default/original/1X/15680453330e74f929b585a237613f0bdf61e069.gif" width="15" height="17" alt=":mrgreen:" title="Mr. Green"/> 

  Thanks so much for two intriguing posts about Myth as seen from what you are studying and researching 
     ( applause )  ( applause )

  I also found while reading CS Lewis adult triology some fascinating intuitive insights concerning
    the possible connection between "black holes" and those Eldil in the story line ....
 It seems from recent TV shows discussing the function and behavior of "black holes"
   that every Galaxy has one at its center ...   

     I have very little idea what was in CS Lewis mind while  he was writing his adult triology ...
   so I am only presenting how my active imagination was connecting these two phenomena together .. :wink:  :wink: 

     Especially the Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra ... 

     Out of the Silent Planet (1938), set mostly on Mars (Malacandra). In this book Elwin Ransom voyages to Mars and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the solar system. Far back in Earth's past, it fell to an angelic being known as the Bent Oyarsa, and now, to prevent contamination of the rest of the Solar System ("The Fields of Arbol"), it is known as "the silent planet" (Thulcandra).

      Ransom gets much information on cosmology from the Oyarsa (presiding angel) of Malacandra, or Mars. Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol, or solar system, directly. But then the Bent One (the Oyarsa of Earth) rebelled against Maleldil and all the eldila (similar to the Valar in Tolkien's Silmarillion) of Deep Heaven (outer space). In response to this act, the Bent One suffered confinement on Earth where he first inflicted great evil. Thus he made Earth a silent planet, cut off from the Oyéresu of other planets, hence the name 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet, which is known throughout the Universe. Maleldil tried to reach out to Thulcandra and became a man to save the human race. According to the Green Lady, Tinidril (Mother of Perelandra, or Venus), Thulcandra is favored among all the worlds, because Maleldil came to it to become a man.

In the Field of Arbol, the outer planets are older, the inner planets newer.
Earth will remain a silent planet until the end of the great Siege of Deep Heaven against the Oyarsa of Earth. The siege starts to end (with the Oyéresu of other worlds descending to Earth) at the finale of the Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. But there is still much to happen until the fulfillment of what is predicted in the Book of Revelation, when the Oyéresu put an end to the rule of the Bent Eldil and, on the way, smash the Moon to fragments. This, in turn, will not be “The End of the World”, but merely “The Very Beginning” of what is still to come.

     The eldila (singular eldil) are super-human extraterrestrials. The human characters in the trilogy encounter them on various planets, but the eldila themselves are native to interplanetary and interstellar space ("Deep Heaven"). They are barely visible as pillars of faint, shifting light.

         :wink:  :wink:   Now for my imaginative insights ( which by the way remain imaginative -- no need for Astrophyics or Astronomers to ceremoniously bop me on my noggin -- I do know the difference )

    In the story line ... also have significant power over their own planets too ...  being barely visible as 
     pillars of faint, shifting light makes them as Angels in another way of speaking ...   
   Along the lines of black holes which have extreme amount of power over a particular Galaxy there 
     could be a Mythological connection between eldila --- concerning this extreme amount of power ... 

     Certain very powerful eldila, the Oyéresu (singular Oyarsa), control the course of nature on each of the planets of the Solar System (similar to the Valar in The Silmarillion). They (and maybe all the eldila) can manifest in corporeal forms. The title Oyarsa seems to indicate the function of leadership, regardless of the leader's species; when the Perelandran human Tor assumes rule of his world, he styles himself "Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri" (presumably "Tor, Ruler of Perelandra").

       as for a Holy of Holies imagery ... when Tor assumes rule of is world...
      the dramatic breath-taking suspenseful climatic scene where this takes place has lots of imagery
        in connection with Holyl of Holies ceremony ...   

The eldila are science-fictionalized depictions of angels, immortal and holy, with the Oyéresu perhaps being angels of a higher order. (As Lewis implies in Chapter 22 of Out of the Silent Planet, the name Oyarsa was suggested by Oyarses, the name given in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia to the governors of the celestial spheres. Bernard's word was almost certainly a corruption—or a deliberate alteration—of Greek οὐσιάρχης [ousiarches, "lords of being"], used with the same meaning in the Hermetic Asclepius.) The eldila resident on—actually, imprisoned in—Earth are "dark eldila", fallen angels or demons. The Oyarsa of Earth, the "Bent One", is Satan. Ransom later meets the Oyéresu of both Mars and Venus, who are described as being masculine (but not actually male) and feminine (but not actually female), respectively. The Oyarsa of other worlds have characteristics like the Classical Gods, the Oyarsa of Jupiter gives a feeling of merriment.

Hnau is a word in the Old Solar language which refers to “sentients” such as Humans. In the book, the Old Solar speaker specifies that God is not hnau, and is unsure whether Eldila (immortal angelic beings) can be termed “hnau”, deciding that if they are hnau, they are a different kind of hnau than Humans or Martians.
The term was adopted by some other people, including Lewis’ friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who used the term in his (unpublished during his lifetime) The Notion Club Papers - distinguishing hnau from beings of pure spirit or spirits able to assume a body (which is not essential to their nature). Similarly, a character in James Blish’s science fiction novel A Case of Conscience wonders whether a particular alien is a hnau, which he defines as having “a rational soul”.
In recent times the term has been used by some philosophers, for example in Thomas I. White’s “Is a Dolphin a Person?”, where he asks if Dolphins are persons, and if such, if they can also be reckoned as hnau: that is sentient beings of the same level as humans.
Other uses of the term include the term as used by some Christians[citation needed]: here as with Tolkien’s use of the term “hnau” refers to sentient beings possessing independent will, and thus by extension a soul.

      The creative imaginative writing of an Author then has multi-valent aspects which create a 
  spider-web like effect touching many other authors who take up the pen to write ...   

    The cosmology of all three books—in which the Oyéresu of Mars and Venus somewhat resemble the corresponding gods from classical mythology—derives from Lewis's interest in medieval beliefs. Lewis discusses these in his book The Discarded Image (published much later than the Ransom Trilogy). Lewis was intrigued with the ways medieval authors borrowed concepts from pre-Christian religion and science and attempted to reconcile them with Christianity, and with the lack of a clear distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena in medieval thought. The Space Trilogy also plays on themes in Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry", which argues that as long as humanity remains flawed and sinful, our exploration of other planets will tend to do them more harm than good. Furthermore, much of the substance of the argument between Ransom and Weston in Perelandra is found in Lewis's book Miracles. Links between Lewis's Space Trilogy and his other writings are discussed at great length in Michael Ward's Planet Narnia and in Kathryn Lindskoog's C.S. Lewis: Mere Christian.[3]

J.R.R. Tolkien was a friend and sometime mentor to Lewis. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis alludes several times to Tolkien’s Atlantean civilization Numinor (spelt Númenor by Tolkien), saying in the foreword “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.” Villains in both Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle and here are very hostile toward the natural world (specifically in the wanton destruction of trees in Tolkien’s and the manipulation of life in Lewis’s).

        more coming soon... on the other two ...  :wink: 

   Thus there is ample room for plenty of thought here without the need of "Fencing" to "rightly divide the (sic) word..."
 :wink:  :wink:  :wink: 

      Through passionate enthusiasm for expressing, elucidating and sharing concepts, ideas and paradigms
     we can experience the sociological phenomena of what Lewis and others had during their meetings 
     of which was called "Inklings"   Tolkien had a role to play in aiding Lewis to enter into Christianity too...
     I recall Andre and SD33---  one is considering to walk out .. and one is discouraged ... 

       It might be that both of them being in the midst of "Fencing" to "rightly divide the (sic) word...
      and the incessant bickering among those who wish to exercise "authoritative clout" over others...
     makes for a dark stormy evening as both of them are walking along the road .... or in a place...

       Whereas -- when there is more than enough "Light" and the dialogue is filled with friendly warmth
      for each other --  where there is only a "shadow" cast upon the wooden walls of a Tavern 
      ( meaning a place where fellowship takes place while eating, drinking and the Grand Dance is taking place )

      the "shadow" on the wooden walls are a constant reminder that unless there is more than enough 
   "Light" shining around and surrounding everyone with its warmth and energy ... 
   then the atmosphere and environment turns back into becoming a Cimmerian, aphotic, atramentous
       cheerless, gloomy scene from Lewis triology and also as seen in his book -- The Great Divorce
     where the bodiless ghost like figures meander around or become bothersome annoying spirits...

      ( which is another reason --- I am an Egalitarian -- shameless plug -- :stuck_out_tongue:  :stuck_out_tongue:  :stuck_out_tongue: 

      Christian community should embrace Inclusion before Exclusion ... 
          should embrace Open Source before Proprietary closed system ... 
        ( example .. Linux as contrasted with Microsloft  :wink:  :wink:  as with Apple too or Oracle or Intel et al... )

       should focus on maximizing the warm hearted fellowship with social activities which integrate 
        every individual particularity in the pursuit of exhibiting the Unity which is connected 
        via the "bonding" of diversity ---  (bonding meaning the intense interpersonal interaction 
         between mother and new born baby --- along with the 'bonding' with the father too )

        social activities --  meaning NOT those that take place within the confines of a Church bldg...!
      while I was in Seminary it was a stunning statistic presented to the students ...
         after (so called ) conversion the new convert's number of "outside" social contacts diminished 
      quite suddenly ... leaving the question open ... who to evangelize next ????

       I would much rather spend my social time engaged in a social activity where a group of people 
        gathered together to enjoy and experience the personal (singularity) & social (unity) 
        interaction while "doing" something ... doing what ?   the possibilites are virtually endless...

        Instead of getting together with other "foreigners" or expats at the local Pub, Bar or Restaurant
       engaged with the typical "Westernized" style of slap sticking, high fiving, beer drinking 
         "yellow" jokes ( meaning sex jokes -- yellow jokes are chinese slang )

        or just to get together to experience the previous Cultural milieu that has greatly diminished 
          while living in a "foreign" country ...   

        Ransom had a bewildering time while in Perelandra .. but then later upon reflective musings 
        sorely missed his living experience there ... with the other celestial sentient beings ...

      getting together within the confines of a Church bldg for the sake of said "morning service"
         attempting to have Unity while at the same time expressing Singularity ...
        there seems to be a sense of cognitive dissonance at times ...   with each segment of the Service 
        trying to follow a predetermined order of events ... with a persistent over shadowing of 
        Hierarchical "authoritative clout "  

        now of course, I am exaggerating for the sake of emphasis .. because I certainly have no intention
       of dissing Sunday morning services .. simply due to the social phenomena that takes place there ...
         along with the spiritual experience too....

          however, I have definitely noticed and observed that Church meetings are stuck in a bldg...
        even those that are called "Retreats"  .......

       During this summer .. I decided to put a lot of passion towards encouraging the Hospital staff
         to get together for social activities to enhance their English learning skills .. while at the same
     time to increase their confidence, comfy zone and listening ability with me ... 
          in which there was a friendly warm hearted environment which came from my passion 
            to do so ... we went to Zhuhai .. and had a Camping trip ..  we went to another distant location
         to have fun on a sandy beach .. numerous Staff accepted my invitation to visit me in my localized
        area.. for a bicycle ride which took 4 hours ... the Dragon Boat Holiday we went to another location
           to pretend we were in a Dragon Boat race ... sitting in one of those specially designed boats
          and trying to use the paddles as fast as we could .. then went to a Lichee orchard to pick Lichees..

         during all of these social activities .. I invested much energy and effort to ignite .. to spark..
         to attempt to "draw out" each person's social skills and Natural abilities...
            most, if not all foreigners who are "teaching" prefer to follow the traditional method of teaching
         and when engaged in any English activity that would be outside .. just switch to behaving 
         as any other "foreigner" would do in that particular social setting ... 
           
        I tried to invite many Church members to have social activities in the past ...
           however, the focus of attention was .. we need to gather together for the purpose of 
         worship, bible study , prayer meeting, Sunday service (which is most important ... )

        more coming soon ...   :wink: 

   all the best !

Just remembered …
if anyone has never read any of Cheeseburger Brown’s stories … you should try … :smiley:
especially the Christmas Robots … which has a very poignant ending for community too… :mrgreen:

cheeseburgerbrown.com/Free_Stories.html

       psssssssst Christmas Robots ...

all the best !

(I wrote this before Jims last two posts, which I will read tomorrow and respond to)

Dick,
Wow thats awesome I’ll have to read her stuff. I have just been piecing much of this stuff together and really unable to even verbalize what I’ve been writing here until now. I didn’t even know there were other wack jobs like me out there :slight_smile:

I agree that the temple was a microcosm. The zodiac was carved into the floor of the inner court according to Josephus. Each level represented one of the heavens. Outer is the earth and its atmosphere, the first heaven. The inner was the second heaven, the stars, which is why it had the zodiac in there. The HOH was the third heaven, thats where Paul was caught up to, and likely where he received the Revelation of the Mystery.

Speaking of the cherubim, there were 4 heads. Through the years many people have recognized that each of the gospels correspond to one of the heads. Matthew the lion, for the tribe of Judah was the main audience of Matthews gospel. Mark the Ox, Mark is very action oriented, get work done. Luke the man, as it was written more for all men, gentiles. And the eagle is John. John takes the high view. Which is what I was talking about earlier. If you were to fly above a city you’d have a much different view of those buildings than walking at street level. You’d be able to see the whole form of the building, and its relationship to the other structures that make up the framework :wink: of that city.

4 is the number of creation. It is the 4 corners of the earth. The cherubim represent all of creation IMO,as they are a shorthand for the zodiac. All creation (the cherubim) waits with eager longing for the unveiling of the sons of God. Unveiling is the birthing of the sons of God. Hey did you know the name Mary means rebellion, the Son of God was birthed out of rebellion, and the Sons will(are) too. You were the guardian cherub who covers… until iniquity was found in you. The earth was formed out of chaos, the man was formed out of dirt, the Son(s) come out of rebellion. The manifestation of the presence of God was always within the cherubim. I would disagree with Ms. Barker that they throw the flaming sword away. The flaming sword is the Word being carried or covered by the flesh, the cherubim. It is the same as the pillar of fire, or the cloud, which is the same cloud we see in Ezekiel being carried on the cherubim, and in that cloud is one likened to a son of man. We actually see this man in REvelation with a Rainbow around His head.

When Israel was brought out of Egypt and made the golden calf, they were likely making the cherubim, for they said these be your gods who brought you out of egypt. This is the grave mistake. This is the essence of idolatry, worshipping the vessel instead of the Spirit inside. Thats why I say the cherubim are the heiroglyph for all the pagan gods, because as they were peering they couldn’t see very well(no eyes to see) what was in the cloud, but they could see the visible which was the cherubim. We see one of the kings of Israel making two golden calves to mark the borders of the Northern lands. Why would they? He didn’t want people going up to the temple and seeing the cherubim there, in the center of the beautiful temple. And he knew that God “dwells between the cherubim” and so he spread wide the place God would dwell.

I agree that the temple is the garden. You have the land of nod/outer court, the land of Eden/inner court, the garden/HOH. In the midst of the garden there were two trees. Do the two trees occupy the same space? Lets look at whats in the midst of the garden in the temple. The ark, with the two cherubim, which is where the Glory manifests, in the midst of the cherubim. Two cherubim that are one, good and evil. And in the midst of them is the tree of life, the glory of the Lord. What was it that were the traits of the TOKOGAE? (tree of knowledge of good and evil).

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.

Appeals to the senses, and to the ego. That is the natural mind. The TOKOGAE is the cherubim. To eat from It is to go after the image, and not the Spirit. The natural mind cannot understand the things of God, because it only sees the natural, and the cherubim are the representation of the natural. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

"But God turned away and delivered them up to serve the host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, ‘IT WAS NOT TO ME THAT YOU OFFERED VICTIMS AND SACRIFICES FORTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, WAS IT, O HOUSE OF ISRAEL?‘YOU ALSO TOOK ALONG THE TABERNACLE OF MOLOCH AND THE STAR OF THE GOD ROMPHA, THE IMAGES WHICH YOU MADE TO WORSHIP. I ALSO WILL REMOVE YOU BEYOND BABYLON.’

Here we have what is possibly Israel worshipping the cherubim. There are two of them. Moloch which is king, the king star is Jupiter, and Rompha(Chiun in Amos where this verse is pulled from) is Saturn(Abraham). They have a tabernacle. In Genesis the word that says they were stationed is a word that means to tabernacle. There was a separate tabernacle that just covered the cherubim. They had chosen again the TOKOGAE, the “natural” over the spiritual. That is why Paul says “now we know no man after the flesh”.

A little more on the number 4. In the first verse of the Bible, there are 7 words. The fourth word is an untranslated word. It is Aleph-Tau. The first and last letters of the aleph-beth. This is the Hebrew equivalent of Alpha-Omega. THE WORD is in the exact center of the first verse. It dwells within the verse. The 4th day of creation gave us the Sun, Moon, and Stars. The Son, Bride, and Sons (as elucidated by Joseph). The light was manifest on the earth in the 4000th year since adam (I don’t believe an exact time is necessary but an ideal time, which is what the geneologies are IMO, and thats another rabbit trail I could go down too). There are 7 colors in the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum is the center spectrum of 7. It is the 4th. And the 4th color in the 4th spectrum is green, the color of life. All things were made for and through Him. He is the very center point of it all. The bullseye.

Goodnight my friends.

Hi Jim and Jeremy

I have had difficulties accessing the EU site recently; but will reply to you both today (in temporal order :laughing: - so that’s Jim first and will post Jeremey later) -

Jim - regarding your interpretation of Lewis – I’m no expert because I haven’t read his science fiction trilogy - but what you say makes total sense to me. Lewis did use symbolism and myth in ingenious ways (and Charles Williams was even more ingenious). There is a scholar names Michael Ward who has done the full symbolic interpretation works on the Narnia chronicles. Here is the publicity blurb for his book (which I haven’t read):

***For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis’s famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia’s symbolism has remained a mystery.

Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis’s writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as “spiritual symbols of permanent value” and “especially worthwhile in our own generation”. Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called ‘the kappa element in romance’, the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaître knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody.***

Sounds interesting!

I love your vision of God’s easy hospitality Jim. Love it! -

This reminds me of Celtic Christian prayer -

I should like a great lake of finest ale, for the King of Kings.
I should like a table of the choicest food, for the family of heaven.
Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith, and the food be forgiving love.
I should welcome the poor to my feast, for they are God’s children.
I should welcome the sick to my feast, for they are God’s joy.
Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place, and the sick dance with the angels
God bless the poor, God bless the sick, and bless our human race.
God bless our food, God bless our drink, all homes, O God, embrace.
We saw a stranger yesterday, we put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place, music in the listening place,
And with the sacred name of the triune God
He blessed us and our house, our cattle and our dear ones.
As the lark says in her song:
‘Often, often, often goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise’
The blessings of God be upon this place, with plenty of food and plenty of drink,
With plenty of beds and plenty of ale, with much riches and much cheer
With many kin and length of life, ever upon it.
Amen.

It also reminds me, in a way, of William Blake’s dear Little Vagabond – who is shut out from Christian hospitality:

**Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.

But if at the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.

Then the parson might preach, and drink, and sing,
And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel,
But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.**

(note that the little Vagabond is a little beggar boy, forced to beg by destitution; and he’s looked upon as a little devil by respectable Christians. It’s not the God of love who his quarrel is with; it’s the god of the respectable who casts him out)

Warm blessings

Dick

Hi Jeremy –

Love your post and I think you will just love Margaret Barker – and really find a soul mate in her (it’ll be like a great minds think alike moment). Just for once I’m not recommending someone books because I’ve found them useful – but because I know you’ll find an answering in her work as well as a questioning. She has a website which contains papers that summarise the gist of her theological reflections at

http://www.margaretbarker.com/

The Christian writer who I’ve found most useful in thinking about myth is Rene Girard. At first his approach to myth seems to contradict that of Lewis, and Margaret Barker – he sees myth as something that covers up truth and Christianity as exposing the truth that myth covers up. However – I don’t need to drone on about Girard – but take a look at the extended extract from an essay by James Alison below (James Alison is Girard’s most accessible interpreter). What’s good about this essay is that it introduces all of Margaret Barker’s key ideas and all of Girard’s too – and he sees them as complementary. (and another scholar has done an analysis of Lewis ‘Till We Have Faces’ arguing for the compatibility of Lewis and Girard – but I haven’t read this yet)

jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng11.html

**‘We tend to have an impoverished notion of liturgy. And we do not realise how much our dwelling in theory complicates our lives. That in fact having atonement as a theory means that it is an idea that can be grasped – and once it is grasped, one has got it – whereas a liturgy is something that happens to you. I want to go back and recover a little bit of what the liturgy of atonement was about; because when we understand that we begin to get a sense of what this language of “atonement” and “salvation” is about.

Let’s remember that we’re talking about a very ancient Jewish liturgy in the First Temple. For this liturgy the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies. Before the high priest went into the Holy of Holies he would sacrifice a bull or a calf in expiation for his own sins. He would then go into the Holy of Holies, taking one of two goats – a goat which was the Lord, and a goat which was Azazel (the “devil”). He would take the first with him into the Holy of Holies and sacrifice it to the LORD; and with it he would sprinkle the Mercy Seat, and all that was in the First Temple, the throne on which were the Cherubim. This was a place that only the high priest was allowed to enter. Now the interesting thing is that after expiating his own sins with the bull, he would then don the white robe, which was the robe of an angel. From that point he would cease to be a human being and would become the angel, one of whose names was “the Son of God”. And he would be able to put on “the Name”, meaning “the name which could not be pronounced”, the Name of God. With the Name contained in the phylacteries either on his forehead or wrapped around his arms, he would be able to go into the Holy of Holies. (Remember the phrase, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”? This is a reference to the rite of atonement, the coming in of the high priest – one of the many references to the rite of atonement we get in the New Testament – and of which we are largely ignorant!). So, he becomes an angel; and one of the angel’s titles is “the son of God”. He sacrifices the goat that is “the Lord”, and sprinkles his blood about the place. The purpose of this was to remove all the impurities that had accrued in what was meant to be a microcosm of creation, because the Holy of Holies, in the understanding of the Temple, was the place where the Creator dwelt. The rite of atonement was about the Lord himself, the Creator, emerging from the Holy of Holies so as to set the people free from their impurities and sins and transgression. In other words, the whole rite was exactly the reverse of what we typically imagine a priestly rite to be about. We tend to have an “Aztec imagination” as regarding the sacrificial system. The hallmark of the sacrificial system is that its priest sacrifices something so as to placate some deity.

The Jewish priestly rite was already an enormous advance beyond that world. They understood perfectly well that it was pagan rites that sacrificed victims in order to keep creation going. And one of the ways in which they had advanced beyond that, even before the fall of the Temple and the Exile to Babylon, was the understanding that it was actually God who was doing the work, it was God who was coming out wanting to restore creation, out of his love for his people. And so it is God who emerges from the Holy of Holies dressed in white in order to forgive the people their sins and, more importantly, in order to allow creation to flow.

The notion is that humans are inclined to muck up creation; and it is God emerging from the place that symbolises that which is before creation began, “the place of the Creator”. The Holy of Holies was the place that symbolised “the first day” – which, of course, meant before time, before creation was brought into being.

The priest emerged from that and then he came to the Temple Veil. The Temple Veil was made of very rich material, representing the material world, that which was created. At this point the high priest would don a robe made of the same material as the Veil, to demonstrate that what he was acting out was God coming forth and entering into the world of creation so as to make atonement, to undo the way humans had snarled up that creation. And at that point, having emerged, he would then sprinkle the rest of the temple with the blood that was the Lord.

Now, here’s the interesting point: for the Temple understanding the high priest at this stage was God, and it was God’s blood that was being sprinkled. This was a divine movement to set people free. This was not – as in our understanding – a priest satisfying a divinity. The reason why the priest had to engage in a prior expiation was because he was about to become a sign of something quite else: acting outwards. The movement is not inwards towards the Holy of Holies; the movement is outwards from the Holy of Holies.

So the priest would then come through the Veil – meaning the Lord entering into the world, the created world – and sprinkle all the rest of the Temple, hence setting it free. After which, as the person who was bearing the sins that had been accumulated, he places them on the head of what we call “the scapegoat”, Azazel, which would then be driven to the edge of the cliff and cast down, where it would be killed, so that the people’s sins would be taken away.
That was, from what we can gather, the atonement rite. But here’s the fascinating thing: the Jewish understanding was way ahead of the “Aztec” version we attribute to it. Even at that time it was understood that it was not about humans trying desperately to satisfy God, but God taking the initiative of trying to break through for us. In other words, atonement was something of which we were the beneficiaries. That it is the first point I want to make when we are talking about a liturgy rather than a theory. We are talking about something that we undergo over time as part of a benign divine initiative towards us.

This puts many things in a slightly different perspective from what we are used to. It means, for instance, that the picture of God in the theory that we have that demands that God’s anger be satisfied is a pagan notion. In the Jewish understanding it was instead something that God was offering to us. Now here’s the crunch with this: the early Christians who wrote the New Testament understood very clearly that Jesus was the authentic high priest, who was restoring the eternal covenant that had been established between God and Noah; who was coming out from the Holy Place so as to offer himself as an expiation for us, as a demonstration of God’s love for us; and that Jesus was acting this out quite deliberately.
There are a number of places where we get hints of this language. One of them is in Jesus acting out the role of Melchizedek. For example, the announcement of the Jubilee, which Jesus preaches in the synagogue in Nazareth (cf. Lk 4:16f.), was the way in which the high priest Melchizedek would come back and work for the liberation, the “atonement”, or “redemption”, of the people. In fact, what Jesus says and does in Luke is to fulfil the Melchizedek agenda, which includes going up to Jerusalem and being killed.

There are different ways in the other Gospels in which this is depicted. The classic example is in St John’s Gospel, Jn 17: Jesus’ last speech to his disciples before the passion is a speech based on the high priest’s atonement prayer. And Jesus then goes off to act out the role of the high priest who is making available the new temple in his body (which, of course, John had given us a hint about in the beginning of his Gospel).

One of the ways in which this is told in St John’s Gospel is that Jesus is crucified on Thursday, not on Friday. So on Thursday afternoon he is going outside the city walls to be killed at exactly the same time – three in the afternoon – when the priests in the Temple were killing the lambs for the Passover feast. So, while they were killing the lambs, the real lamb, the one who was identified as “the lamb of God”, was going to the place of execution to be killed. But – bizarrely – he was going dressed in a “seamless robe”, a priest’s robe: hence the importance of his robe being “seamless”, and lots having to be cast for it rather than it being torn. So the high priest was going – the Lord was going – to “the Temple” where he would be “the Lamb”, for, as we are told, when they look on him after he has died they see that not a bone of his body was broken, alluding to the Passover lamb.

The identification is complete. And of course, Jesus cry on the cross in John’s Gospel is “It is finished”, “It is completed”: meaning the atonement, and therefore the inauguration of creation is completed. In John’s Gospel the “I shall go to my Father” is always synonymous with “I shall go to my death, in which I shall be lifted up, and that is how I will glorify my Father.” All of these things we know; but usually we do not see them in the context of Jesus being the authentic high priest doing the high priestly thing.

You can tell that that was how it was read because immediately after this, at the resurrection, we are transferred to the garden. The “first day” we are in “the garden”. Peter and John come to look, then Mary Magdalene comes in. What does she see? Two angels! And where are the angels sitting? One at the head and one at the foot of a space that is open because the stone has been rolled away. What is this space? This is the Holy of Holies. This is the mercy seat, with the Cherubim present. The Holy of Holies is now open, because creation is able to flow completely freely. No more tangling up of creation. The Holy of Holies has been opened up. The high priest has gone in who did not need to sacrifice a bull for his own sins because he didn’t have any! He was able to come out of the place of creation. And remember that in the epistle to the Hebrews, as in much of the Pauline literature, and in John’s Gospel, Jesus was the Word of God who was with creation from the beginning – “all things were created through him”. This is the high priestly language of the One who is coming from God to offer atonement so as to open up creation. That is being fulfilled. And you get a sense of a realization in John’s Gospel that this is what has been acted out: Jesus’ fulfilling of the liturgy of the atonement. So far so good! This is an explanation that allows us to see Jesus’ “subversion from within” of the ancient liturgy of atonement – which was practiced in a much more cursory way in the Second Temple period.

In the Second Temple there was no longer a mercy seat. There was no longer anything inside the Holy of Holies. The priestly mysteries had been lost. And this was one of the reasons that there was excitement that here was a priest who was going to fulfil the promises and restore the priestly mysteries. But of course “restored” in a skewed, “off stage” way – i.e. the real high priest was engaged in being the sacrifice, “the victim”, the priest, the altar and the temple on the city rubbish heap, at the same time as the corrupt city guys – which is how the ordinary Jews saw them at the time – while going through the motions in the corrupt Second Temple, which was not of any great concern to the people. They didn’t think it was the real thing (very much the diet Pepsi version of the real Coke – if you’ll excuse the imagery).

From our point of view that is all an aspect of atonement. What Jesus was doing was fulfilling a set of prophecies concerning a liturgical happening, which is to us largely mysterious. The reason I wanted to tell you about it is that it is very important for our understanding when we see that this is not someone simply abolishing something that was bad, but someone fulfilling something that was considered good but not good enough. Do you see the difference? That means that our tendency to read the whole world of priesthood and sacrifice as an “unfortunate Semitic leftover” is really very wrong. The Jewish priestly thing – apart from being responsible for some of the most extraordinary texts that we have in what survives in the Hebrew scriptures – was also the pattern which enabled the relationship between creation and salvation to be held together. And that is the pattern of the Catholic faith, as I want to explore a little bit more: it is the notion of God making available for us the chance to participate in the fullness of creation by God becoming a sacrifice for us in our midst.
We are all – quite rightly – allergic to liturgy by itself. We are absolutely right because that is one of the things that the NT is insistent on. The genius of Jesus is the bringing together of the liturgical and the ethical, which is why atonement matters to us. Because what Jesus did was not really, as it were, to fulfil a series of prophecies regarding a somewhat bizarre ancient rite that involved lots of blood and barbeque. What Jesus did – and this is the fascinating thing – was to make an extraordinary anthropological breakthrough. And this is where atonement is “substitutionary”.

Here I want to make a little aside: normally, in the theory understanding of substitutionary atonement, we understand the substitution to work as follows: God was angry with humanity; Jesus says, “Here am I”; God needed to loose a lightning rod, so Jesus said, “You can loose it on me”, substituting himself for us. Boom: lightning rod here: sacrifice: God happy. “Got my blood-lust out of the way!”

The interesting thing is that it worked in an entirely different way: what Jesus was doing was substitute himself for a series of substitutions. The human sacrificial system typically works in the following way: the most primitive forms of sacrifice are human sacrifices. After people begin to become aware of what they are doing this gets transferred toanimal sacrifices. After all it’s easier to sacrifice animals because they don’t fight back so much; whereas if you have to run a sacrificial system that requires you to keep getting victims, usually you have to run a war machine in order to provide enough victims to keep the system going; or you have to keep the pet “pharmakons” around the place – convenient people to sacrifice, who live in splendour, and have a thoroughly good time, until a time of crisis when you need people to sacrifice, and then you sacrifice them. But this is an ugly thing, and people are, after all, human; and so animals began to be sacrificed instead. And in some cultures from animals you get to more symbolic forms of sacrifice, like bread and wine. You can find any variation on the theme of sacrificial substitution.

The interesting thing is that Jesus takes exactly the inverse route; and he explains to us that he is going in the inverse route. “The night before he was betrayed…” what did he do? He said, “Instead of the bread and the wine, this is the lamb, and the lamb is a human being.” In other words he substituted a human being back into the centre of the sacrificial system as the priest, thus showing what the sacrificial system was really about, and so bringing it to an end.
So you do have a genuine substitution that is quite proper within the atonement theory. All sacrificial systems are substitutionary; but what we have with Jesus is an exact inversion of the sacrificial system: him going backwards and occupying the space so as to make it clear that this is simply murder. And it needn’t be. That is what we begin to get in St John’s Gospel: a realisation that what Jesus was doing was actually revealing the mendacious principle of the world. The way human structure is kept going is by us killing each other, convincing ourselves of our right to do it, and therefore building ourselves us up over and against our victims. What Jesus understands himself as doing in St John’s Gospel is revealing the way that mechanism works. And by revealing it, depriving it of all power by seeing it as a lie: “your father was a liar and a murderer from the beginning”. That is how the “prince” – or principle – of this world works.

So what we get in St John’s Gospel is a clear understanding that the undoing of victimage is not simply a liturgical matter, it’s not simply a liturgical fulfilment, but is the substituting himself at the centre of what the liturgical thing was covering up, namely human sacrifice, therefore making it possible for us to begin to live without sacrifice. And that includes not just liturgical sacrifice, but therefore the human mechanism of sacrificing other people so that we can keep ourselves going. In other words, what he was beginning to make possible was for us to begin to live as if death were not, and therefore for us not to have to protect ourselves over against it by making sure we tread on other people. Do you see how he is putting together the ethical and the liturgical into the same space so that there is a moment of anthropological revelation? God is showing us something about ourselves in Jesus bringing together the liturgical and the ethical understanding of victimhood.

Now, this was quite clearly seen at the time, as is clear from references in St John’s Gospel to the prince of this world as the way Jesus understands this mechanism. But there are also some give-aways in St Paul that are very revealing.
Let me read you a little story from 2 Samuel, that takes us straight back into the world of expiation, propitiation and atonement , in the anthropological sphere, not the liturgical sphere. Remember, the two are linked, but they haven’t yet been linked clearly:

Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David sought the face of the LORD. And the LORD said, “There is bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.” So the king called the Gibeonites. Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had sought to slay them in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah. And David said to the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make expiation, that you may bless the heritage of the LORD?” The Gibeonites said to him, “It is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house; neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.” And he said, “What do you say that I shall do for you?” They said to the king, “The man who consumed us and planned to destroy us, so that we should have no place in all the territory of Israel, let seven of his sons be given to us, so that we may hang them up before the LORD at Gibeon on the mountain of the LORD.” And the king said, “I will give them.” But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Saul’s son Jonathan, because of the oath of the LORD which was between them, between David and Jonathan the son of Saul. The king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the five sons of Merab the daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite; and he gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the mountain before the LORD, and the seven of them perished together. They were put to death in the first days of harvest, at the beginning of barley harvest. (2Sam 21:1-9)

After a short time the famine and the drought went way. A lovely story! The interesting thing about it is that it reminds us of what we often forget: the language of expiation. Here King David is expiating something, offering propitiation to the Gibeonites. In other words, the Gibeonites have a right to demand vengeance. Can you remember where this passage comes into the NT? St Paul seems to know about this: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32) Do you see what St Paul is playing with there? St Paul is saying that God, unlike King David, did not seek someone else as a stand-in sacrifice to placate us, but gave his own son to be the expiation, putting forth the propitiation.

In that text, who is propitiating whom? King David is propitiating the Gibeonites by means of Saul’s sons. God is propitiating us. In other words, who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. That is the purpose of the atonement. We are the angry divinity. We are the ones inclined to dwell in wrath and think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again. This turns on its head the Aztec understanding of the atonement. In fact it turns on its head what has passed as our penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which always presupposes that it is us satisfying God, that God needs satisfying, that there is vengeance in God. Whereas it is quite clear from the NT that what was really exciting to Paul was that it was quite clear from Jesus’ self-giving, and the “out-pouring of Jesus’ blood”, that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

Now, what is particularly difficult for us, and why I want to remind us that this is a liturgy rather than a theory, is that the way we live this out as Christians is to remember that the one true sacrifice – that is to say, the place where God gave himself for us in our midst as our victim – has been done. It’s over! The whole of the sacrificial system has been brought to an end. The Holy of Holies has been opened.

The way in which we depict this in our iconography is through the doctrine of the ascension. Remember what happens at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus is with the apostles on a hillside outside Jerusalem, and then he is taken up into heaven. He blesses them on the way – i.e. we have the high priest. They stand looking up; and there are a couple of angels – who are, of course, our old friends the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, which is now become everywhere – saying “Why are you standing there looking up to heaven? Go and wait to be empowered from on high.” What we have here is Jesus going to “sit at the right hand of the Father”: the place of the priest – the Word, the Creator – the sacrifice having been fulfilled. We live under that. And the way we live under it liturgically is by our participation in the Eucharist.
The purpose of the Eucharist is not us trying to make Jesus come down here but our obeying Jesus to invoke him, to do this in memory of him, in such a way that we find ourselves transported into participating in the “heavenly banquet”, the place where the Lamb is standing as one slaughtered, as in the vision described by the Book of Revelation. This is a Holy of Holies vision; this is a vision of the Holy of Holies now full. It is the one true sacrifice that has been done. That does not mean to say “over and done with”. It means that the victorious Lamb is there; his blood is flowing out; the victim, the forgiving victim, is present. And we have access to participate in that atonement, which has been achieved through it being made available to us in our Eucharist. What the Eucharist is for us is the high priest emerging out of the Holy of Holies, giving us his body and blood, as our way into the Holy of Holies.

Now, if that picture is true, then it seems that what our Eucharistic life is supposed to be about is that we are a people who are being turned into the new temple by receiving the body and blood of the self-giving victim, who is already victorious. We are being turned into the new temple that is able to participate here and now. That is what the doctrine of transubstantiation is about. It means: this is not our memorial supper; this is, in fact, the heavenly banquet where someone else is the protagonist and we are called into it. We are being called “through the Veil”, into the participation. We are given the signs; which is why the body and blood are not something that hide the divinity but make it manifest. They are signs reaching out to us of what God is actually doing for us.

Now, all that is happening in heaven. That is the purpose of the doctrine of the ascension: the Holy of Holies fulfilled, and us beginning to receive it.

This has ethical consequences. This is tremendously important for our understanding, because, if you have a theory of atonement – something grasped – you have something that people can “get right”, and then be on the inside of the good guys. “We’re the people who are covered by the blood; we’re the ones who are okay, the ones who are good; and then there are those others who aren’t.” In other words, rather than undergoing atonement, we’re people who grasp onto the idea of the atonement. But the whole purpose of the Christian understanding is that we shouldn’t identify too soon with the good guys. On the contrary, we are people who are constantly undergoing “I AM” – that is to say, God – coming towards us one who is offering forgiveness from the victim. And we are learning how to look at each other as people who are saying, “Oh! So that’s what I’ve been involved in.” Which means that we are the “other” in this package; that we are the “other” who are being turned into a “we”, in the degree to which we find our similarity with our brother and sister on either side of us; rather than: we are the people who, because we’ve grasped the theory have become part of “I AM”, and therefore the “other” is some “them”. If you are undergoing atonement it means that you are constantly in the process of being approached by someone who is forgiving you. That, it seems to me, is the challenge for us in terms of imagination when it comes to imagining and re-imagining atonement.

The difficult thing for us is to sit in the process of being approached by someone. Because we are used to theory we want someone to say, “This is what it is. Get it right. Now put it into practice.” This imagines that we are part of a stable universe that we can control. But if the real center of our universe is an “I AM” coming towards us as our victim who is forgiving us then we are not in a stable place. We are in that place of being de-stabilized, because we are being approached by someone who is entirely outside our structures of vengeance and order.

Imagine what it is like to be approached by your forgiving victim. What a pity none of us like very much to think about our being approached by our forgiving victim! What is it like to actually undergo being forgiven? We are not going to resolve this by saying, “Oh, it’s not being forgiven that matters. It’s forgiving: I must forgive!” So we work ourselves up into a moral stupor about straining ourselves to “forgive the bastard!” It’s very, very complicated. But in fact the Christian understanding is quite the reverse: it’s because we are undergoing being forgiven that we can forgive; and we need to forgive in order to continue undergoing being forgiven. But remember: it’s because we are approached by our victim, that we start to be undone. Or in Paul’s language: “even though you were dead in your sins he has made you alive together in Christ.” Someone was approaching you even when you didn’t realize there was a problem, so that you begin to discover, “Oh! So that’s what I’ve been involved in.”

Now, this is vital for us: it means that in this picture “sin”, rather than being a block that has to be dealt with, is discovered in its being forgiven. The definition of sin becomes: that which can be forgiven.

And the process of being forgiven looks like the breaking of heart, or “contrition” (from the Latin cor triturare). What forgiveness look like in the life of the person is “breaking of heart”; and the purpose of being forgiven – the reason why the forgiving victim has emerged from the Holy of Holies offering himself as a substitute for all our ways of pushing away being forgiven, trying to keep order – the reason he has done that is because we are too small, we live in a slowed up version of creation … because we are frightened of death. What Jesus was doing was opening up the Creator’s vision, which knows not death, so that we can live as though death were not. In other words, we’re being given a bigger heart. That is what being forgiven is all about. It’s not, “I need to sort out this moral problem you have.” It’s, “Unless I come towards you, and enable you undergo a breaking of heart, you’re going to live in too small a universe, you’re not going to enjoy yourselves and be free. How the hell do I get through to you! Well, the only way is by coming amongst you as your victim. That’s the only place in which you can be undone. That’s the place you’re so frightened of being that you’ll do anything to get away from it. So if I can occupy that space, and return to you and say, “Yes, you did this thing to me. But don’t worry! I’m not here to accuse you. I’m here to play with you! To make a bigger space for you. And for you to do it with me.” And of course the way he acted this out before his death was setting up the last supper, in which he would give himself to us so that we would become him.

This is a risky project. That is the point! That is why I want to bring together the notion of creation and atonement, recovering the priestly dynamic. This is the risky project of God saying, “We don’t know how this is going to end. But I want you to be co-participants with me on the inside of this creative project. And that means I’m running a risk of this going places I haven’t thought of because I want to become one of you as you, so that you can become me as me.” We get this in John’s Gospel: “You will do even greater things.” And we think, “Oh Jesus is just being modest about his miracles.” No, he is being perfectly straightforward anthropologically. To the degree in which, by receiving this sacrifice, we learn to step out of a world which sacrifices, tries to run things protectively over and against “them”, to that extent we will find ourselves – as we have found ourselves! – doing greater things than he could even begin to imagine. That’s what the opening up of creation does.

The opening up of creation works in our midst through the Spirit who is the advocate, the defense counselor, who therefore rejects the accusatory tendency. While we accuse, while we live in a conspiracy theory, we never learn what is, so we never learn to take responsibility for it. We never learn to inhabit creation with fullness.
Do you see that there is a huge movement in the atonement? The movement is from creation to us becoming participants in creation by our being enabled to live as if death were not. This is the priestly pattern of atonement; and it is the priestly pattern that Jesus had the genius to combine with the ethical, bringing together the ancient liturgical formula, the prophecies, the hopes of fulfillment of the anointed one, the true high priest who would come and create a new temple, the true shepherd of the sheep who would come to create a new temple – fulfilling those, and revealing what it meant in terms of ethical terms: the overcoming of our tendency to sacrifice each other so as to survive. That is the world, which thanks to him, we inhabit.

Now, do you see why I said that I wanted to give you a much more conservative account than the atonement theory allows? What we are given is a sign of something that has happened and been given to us. What is difficult for us is not grasping the theory, but starting to try and imagine the love that is behind that. Why on earth should someone bother to do that for us? That’s St Paul’s issue. “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32) St Paul is struggling to find language about the divine generosity. That is the really difficult thing for us to imagine. We can imagine retaliation, we can imagine protection; but we find it awfully difficult to imagine someone we despised, and were awfully glad not to be like – whom we would rather cast out so as to keep ourselves going – we find it awfully difficult to imagine that person generously irrupting into our midst so as to set us free to enable something quite new to open for us. But that’s what atonement is about; and that is what we are asked to live liturgically as Christians.**

Warm fire Blessings

Dick

I started writing this before I read Dicks most recent post, which I can’t wait to get into. I decided to stay on track, which is like a drunk weaving in and out of lanes, and not touch on those subjects. I am going to have to go back and read it again. I’m sorry if I’m overloading too. Its really flowing right now, and most of what I’m saying won’t make sense even to me outside of this conversation on this topic, so I’m using this kind of as a notebook. And most of what I’ve been saying is fresh to me too, or at least concretely (as concretely as this topic can get), so what I’m saying is I’m not preaching a systematic theology here. Just piecing things together.


The reason there is no ark in the second temple was because Jeremiah took it and the Bronze Serpent and buried them in a cave on the way out to the deportation. The reason is they had become the objects of idolatrous worship.

Acts 7
35“This Moses whom they disowned, saying, ‘WHO MADE YOU A RULER AND A JUDGE?’ is the one whom God sent to be both a ruler and a deliverer with the help of the angel who appeared to him in the thorn bush.
–(Moses is called an elohimExd 4:16 NASB - "Moreover, he shall speak for you to the people; and he will be as a mouth for you and you will be as God to him.
Who made you a ruler? Exo 20:19 Then they said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die.”
Exo 14:31 When Israel saw the great power which the LORD had used against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD, and they believed in the LORD and in His servant Moses.)–

36“This man led them out, performing wonders and signs in the land of Egypt and in the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. 37“This is the Moses who said to the sons of Israel, ‘GOD WILL RAISE UP FOR YOU A PROPHET LIKE ME FROM YOUR BRETHREN.’ 38“This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness together with the angel who was speaking to him on Mount Sinai, and who was with our fathers; and he received living oracles to pass on to you. 39“Our fathers were unwilling to be obedient to him, but repudiated him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt, 40SAYING TO AARON, ‘MAKE FOR US** GODS WHO WILL GO BEFORE US; FOR THIS MOSES WHO LED US OUT** OF THE LAND OF EGYPT—WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM.’ 41“At that time they made a calf and brought a sacrifice to the idol, and were rejoicing in the works of their hands.
–(Exo 32:4 And he received the gold at their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it a molten calf; and they said, These are your gods, O Israel, whichbrought you upout of the land of Egypt!)–

42“But God turned away and delivered them up to serve the host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, ‘IT WAS NOT TO ME THAT YOU OFFERED VICTIMS AND SACRIFICES FORTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS, WAS IT, O HOUSE OF ISRAEL? 43‘YOU ALSO TOOK ALONG THE TABERNACLE OF MOLOCH AND THE STAR OF THE GOD ROMPHA, THE IMAGES WHICH YOU MADE TO WORSHIP. I ALSO WILL REMOVE YOU BEYOND BABYLON.’
–(Moloch is a bull/calf)

  44“Our fathers had the tabernacle of testimony in the wilderness, just as He who spoke to Moses directed him to make it according to the pattern which he had seen. 

–(tabernacle of moloch/tabernacle of testimony adam/christ natural/spiritual cherubim/Lord)–

1 Cor 10
1For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; 2and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; 3and all ate the same spiritual food; 4and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ. 5Nevertheless, with most of them God was not well-pleased; for they were laid low in the wilderness.

I was originally posting this from Acts to show that the Israelites were worshipping the cherubim, but as I was reading the passage something jumped out at me (this is the first time I’ve even thought this so its a little rough, haven’t really vetted it yet). That Moses may have been the cherubim. They needed gods since Moses was gone. Once they had built the calf, they said that was the god that brought them up, yet right before it says Moses brought them up. They believed in God and Moses. They sent Moses as their mediator on the mountain. Moses wore a veil, the cherubim are woven into the veil. They chose the TOKOGAE, the vessel, not the tree of life that was carried by the vessel.

In Ezekiel 10 it describes the faces of the cherubim. It also does in EZE 1. In chapter 10 instead of the ox it says that of a cherubim. The Bull was known as a cherubim, or the calf was a cherubim.

We also see the 12 bulls carrying the bronze laver. I believe it to represent the LOF, seeing as how Revelation is explicitly symbolic of the temple. They are both used for purifying. Again note that the true form being fire. Here again we have the cherubim carrying the fire of God’s presence.

We see Christ pictured glorified with a body, but we see fire coming out of His eyes. The fire is pouring out/bursting out. It is the fullness of the Deity/Fire. The veil is gone and the deity can be seen bursting forth out of the glorious body. At the transfiguration the light comes out from inside Him and that transforms Him.

Deu 33:16 With the precious things of the earth and its fullness, And the favor of Him who dwelt in the bush. Let the blessing come ‘on the head of Joseph, And on the crown of the head of him who was separate from his brothers.’

That word dwell is shakan, which is the same word used of the cherubim “stationed” outside the garden. God dwells in the thorn bush. The ark was to be made of acacia, which is named in Hebrew for its thorns, that used of a scourge.

Behold the dwelling place of God is with man


This is from J. Preston Eby on the sphinx:

The ancient Sphinx in Egypt actually holds the key to the riddle and unlocks the mystery of the Zodiac. All have heard of the Sphinx. Most people know that it was a figure with the head of a woman and the body of a lion. But what this creature actually stood for, or was intended to represent, has been lost from history and has always been an open question. It is what is spoken of as the unknown and insoluble mystery — “the riddle of the Sphinx.”

Neither the ancient religion of Egypt, nor mythology, nor yet astrology has the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. When Napoleon was in Egypt he was told that if he could solve the riddle of the Sphinx he would know the way to eternal life. After the nations had lost the original meaning of the signs of the Zodiac, they invented a mythological meaning out of the carnal imagination of the thoughts of their own hearts. How clear that just as the truth of the Zodiac antedated the mythological interpretations of those signs, just so the truth contained in the great Sphinx lies far back beyond even the knowledge of ancient Egypt! And it is intricately connected with the truth of the Zodiac.

Confirmation of this is found in one of the very old Zodiacs dating back to 2000 B.C. or before. It is called the Zodiac of Dendereh and was found on the ceiling of an ancient portico in Egypt. In this Zodiac there is placed between the signs of Virgo and Leo a picture of the Sphinx. Its woman-like face gazes upon the sign of Virgo, and its lion-like body and tail point to Leo, telling us that we begin with the Virgin and end with the Lion.

Furthermore, by the very formation of the Sphinx with its woman’ s head and lion’s body — IT BINDS TOGETHER IN ITSELF THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THE GREAT CIRCLE OF SIGNS. The head of the Sphinx, the woman, is Virgo the virgin, whereas the body and tail of the Sphinx, the lion, is Leo the lion. The circle is thus seen to begin at the woman (Virgo) and to end with the lion (Leo).

The word “sphinx” is taken from the Greek word SPHUNGO which means “to bind closely together.” It is, therefore, designed to show where the two ends of the Zodiac were to be joined together and where the great circle of the heavens begins and ends.


Now most of the sphinx’s of Egypt have wings, which are supposed to be of the son/sun Horus. That is the northern station of the eagle. There is evidence that the phoenix is an eagle or hawk, (can’t remember where, or what the link was, but I found some pretty compelling evidence), which would make the phoenix Horus, or the rising from ashes, which makes sense since Horus is the reborn Father, Osiris aka Baal/Nimrod/Moloch. Horus is known in the middle east as Tammuz. And we see in Ezekiel they are weeping for Tammuz, and praying to the sun, which is Baal, the bull. The image of jealousy in Ezekiel is none other than the ark, IMO. They also had the bronze serpent. In Egypt you see all the sphinx’s and pharaohs, with the snake for a headband. The serpent representing the carnal mind. The Israelites had the separate bronze (for judgement) serpent wrapped around a pole instead of the head. When Christ hung on the pole, all the sin was put on him, and for a moment He experienced being veiled from His Father, when He said Father Father why have you forsaken me? We don’t see the serpent wrapped around the head in the Jewish heiroglyph of the cherubim. And in the zodiac, we don’t see the serpent wrapped around the head, but instead it is grasped in the eagles claws. The eagle is the highest elevation, the divine. The book of John/the Eagle is focused on Jesus as the son of God. That is how we overcome the serpent, by putting on the heavenly. You will mount up on wings like eagles.

I wanted to add a bit to the number 4 too, which is the link between what I was saying about the cherubim and the number 4 in the first place, but that short attention span got me aga… Ooh look at the butterfly :slight_smile:

The bible in its original order is something that is quite interesting. According to Earnest Martin, the Bible was ordered with 7 sections. The OT was originally ordered as the Law, Prophets, and Writings. It was organized into 22 books, each corresponding to a letter in the aleph-beth (some books were originally one like the minor prophets was one book. They expected 5 more because there are 5 extra letters called ending letters? IIRC. Anyway they were expecting another law. And thats what they got with the 5 gospels, Acts being the gospel of His body. The 4 gospels were of The Head. Then there were another 22 books written in the NT. The sections of the NT were the General letters, those written to the jews. The Paulines including Hebrews. And Revelation. (One of the reasons I see REV as the cypher to the whole bible is it is the only book with its own section. Its like a key or an appendix, or better a map, or even better a 3d model.) Ok so thats 7 sections. The center section is the 5 gospels. The four heads of the cherubim and the body. It is the 4th of 7. The central focus.
BTW 66 books, has nobody ever thought how ironic that is? But Mans confusion has mixed up the original order of 49 books (7x7). Hebrew reads from right to left, and Greek from left to right. They both go out from the same point, that is the center focus of the Bible, and all of creation…the CROSS.

The bible is a vessel for the Spirit. It is even laid out like the carriers, the cherubim. BUT the letter kills and the Spirit gives life. "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me;. How many people have deified the Bible? I didn’t want to take it in the bathroom with me when I was younger because I didn’t want to defile it. (Sorry for the imagery I’m sure you could have done without, just think of George Costanza) These pharisees were doing the same thing that the killers of Stephen were being called out for. TOKOGAE, it makes one wise. Search and search in your own stubborn independence leads to bondage and death. ONly the Spirit gives life. But they say I will ascend to the heights of zaphon, above the throne of God. Thats why at the End of Stephens diatribe he says:

“But it was Solomon who built a house for Him. 48“However, the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says:

49‘HEAVEN IS MY THRONE,
AND EARTH IS THE FOOTSTOOL OF MY FEET;
WHAT KIND OF HOUSE WILL YOU BUILD FOR ME?’ says the Lord,
‘OR WHAT PLACE IS THERE FOR MY REPOSE?

50‘WAS IT NOT MY HAND WHICH MADE ALL THESE THINGS?’

  51“You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did.

Even the disciples didn’t see it when they said Look at the marvelous buildings of the temple. This was just after Jesus contrasting giving to Caesar, the coin with his image on it. And giving to God the image of God, you. After saying that David called Him Lord. The giving of the Royal Law in contrast to the written law. The contrast of the widows mite to the wealthy showboating religious dudes. So they just go through all this and still say look at how amazing this temple is.

Ooh look at the pretty thing. But eye has not seen nor ear heard.

Greetings …!

 Wow.. both of you must be in the business of opening Gold mines... 
     for both posts are really full of fascinating material...

     I really look forward to reading much more from both of you ...

    all the best !

I’ve gone and read about half of what is posted on Ms. Barkers website. I also emailed her and she is going to be reading this page, so maybe she can join in and give us the low down straight from the source. :slight_smile: I’ll respond to this in red below. I may add some things (I know shocking) to how I interpret this data. Also I’d like to read Girard if you could point me in the right direction.

Hi Jeremy –

You’ve touched base with Margaret Barker :smiley: ! I thought you’d have a lot in common – a great deal actually. That’ll be a turn up for the books if she joins us!

Regarding Girard, have a look at the very attractive Raven foundational Website for more information at -

ravenfoundation.org/

This gives links to other Girardian conversation partners too including -
Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R)
James Alison
Paul Neuchterlein (Girardian Reflecitons on the Lectionary)
Preaching Peace

All of which I have enjoyed and benefited from.

For the moment, here are some clumsy notes I made on Girard once which I;v ealready posted on another thread (a lot of them cribbed from Mark Heim and Gill Baille)-

***Human beings have one huge problem when trying to live together in settled communities; namely the way we ‘operate’ means that we often desire things that others have – whether this be physical goods/property, social status, personal qualities, friends, wives, husbands etc. And if we desire something that someone else cannot or will not share with us we can become envious – we can hate another person because they have what we want; and if we fear that someone envies what we have we can become jealous – we can hate anther person because we fear that they may take from us what is ours. This is what the tenth commandment terms ‘covetousness’. The problem with covetousness is that if it is not kept in check it leads to murder and then to an escalation of cycles of retribution that can tear society apart (for example, Lamech in Genesis requires seven deaths in recompense for every single death he and his clan suffer). This is the reason, for example, for the widespread fear of ‘the evil eye’ in archaic and nomadic societies. If you tell a Bedouin that you like/admire his camel he is liable to give it to you to forestall further problems – so be careful that you want the camel before you open your mouth.

In archaic societies, before proper institutions of law have developed, religion and religious ritual serve the function of preventing/dealing with escalation of violence born of covetousness. The theory goes that order in early archaic cities/settled communities is first established by a ‘founding murder’ – a human sacrifice that takes place so that a community can discharge all of their suspicious wrath born of covetousness on the victim and feel united in the frenzy of this lynching – and then peace descends and order emerges. This is why the skeleton of a sacrificial victim is often found in the foundations of ancient city, and it is reflected in founding myths, often featuring twin brothers who are rivals… For example, in Roman myth Romulus kills Remus before the founding of Rome – and Romulus is counted the hero for doing so. Likewise in the Bible Cain kills able before the founding of the first city – but in this case, in contrast to the myths of the world, the blood of Abel cries out to heaven and it is Abel who is vindicated by God –not Cain. The wonder of the Bible is that it questions the whole mechanism of using victims to cement our peace on which archaic religion is centred; the God of the Bible is truly transcendent of human culture and is the judge of ore history and culture.

The founding murder is then remembered in ritual re-enactment to sustain the order of the community and make ‘fertility’ possible by providing social stability. In this ritual the community returns to the chaos before the foundation of the world/city. All social distinctions are dissolved as the community turns from a group of individuals into a crowd and then into an ecstatic mob. Distinctions of rank are forgotten and , and with the help of the scared prostitutes all sexual and gender distinctions are forgotten in an orgy as people become intoxicated and forget all individuality. Then the mob – by now in ecstatic rage – focuses their rivalry of envy and jealousy on to a scapegoat. A scapegoat is a person chosen randomly because of a slight difference in them – perhaps they have a disability, perhaps they are an outsider. The ecstatic mob tear the scapegoat apart while loud music blocks out the scapegoat’s screams and thick incense obscures the sight of the murder. Then the mob comes to its senses – almost unaware of what has happened. They feel they have been visited by a god of wrath – but the death of the scapegoat has saved them from a contagion of violence rivalry because they now feel peace together – having discharged their violence -and social order can be reborn from the chaos. This is reflected in myths of creation in which the god enters into combat with the chaos monster to create the world, and often the monster when dead turns in to a human giant and society is formed from the giant being cut apart by the god. And one of the remarkable things about the creation story in Genesis is how different it is from these myths.
An understanding of the relationship between the Bible and the myths found throughout the cultures of the world is central to Girard’s thinking. Thinkers from the pagan philosophers who debated with Christian apologists in the 2nd century, to Joseph Campbell in the 20th have pointed out that the kernel of the Christian story - the sacrificial victim who is revealed as being divine - is also found extensively in the myths of other religions. Therefore, they have argued that the Christian story, far from being unique, is no more than the re-telling of an archetypal myth. Indeed, this view has been influential in strands of Liberal Christianity.

Girard’s extensive research in comparative mythology, literature and anthropology has led him to a very different conclusion. For him, the story of the divine sacrifice is none other than the disguised story of the murder of the scapegoat – the original founding act of human communities that is ’the thing hidden since the foundation of the world’. Girard argues that whereas in the myths of the world the story is told from the point of view of the lynch mob concealing the sordid truth of the murder of the innocent victim, in the Bible the same story is told from the perspective of the victim. Thus the mechanisms of human violence that generate the lynching are unmasked and ‘demythologised’

To illustrate Girard’s point I’m going to tell you a story (nicked from Mark Heim)- .

Christ – the sacred lamb sent by God – visited a great city in the form of a swarthy stranger from a distant province, in order to call back those who had fallen into ignorance. He did many acts of power and the people worshipped him and made him their king. He taught them how he would become God’s son.

However, in those days there was turmoil in the city, each house was set against another; and so Christ prepared his final wonder.

One day he called to him Mary, his mother and his dearest disciple. He went with her into the temple and ate bread in the holy of holies that no person is to touch. Then he lay with his mother near the altar throughout the night. The earth shook, many in the city were stricken with a deadly disease, and the people were afraid.

In the morning the people came to the temple seeking to know what evil had been done to bring these troubles upon them. They found nothing but the smallest mustard seed carrying the entirety of divinity within it. All the people were greatly distressed at this and were seized with trance-like awe. With one spirit, they rushed to form a great procession and carried the seed to a stony hill outside the walls of the city. Each person, without exception, threw stones in to cover it.

Miraculously the seed immediately grew up into a great tree, and Christ himself was the fruit of that tree. All who ate of this fruit discovered the joy of eternal life. The people returned to the city rejoicing; and health and peace ruled again in those walls. And they worshiped at Christ’s tree of life in every generation.

This story has all of the features of a myth of the sacrificial victim. We note that Christ is a stranger and therefore bears one of the archetypal marks of a potential victim. There is an unresolved crisis of rivalry in the City – and conflict and crisis are always the context for sacrifice in myth. Christ commits heinous acts of sacrilege in the Temple and this results in a plague (the implication being that he is guilty as the source of pollution and the cause of the crisis – as in the mob’s view he is). His expulsion and death at the hands of the mob is not referred to explicitly. Rather, it is covered up in the sanitised euphemism of the crowd’s procession with the seed and their ritual placing of the stones over the seed. This use of euphemism is another hallmark of myth and is not entirely propaganda – once they return to normal life, the individuals who form the crowd feel genuinely disconnected from the violence they have done in a unified frenzy. It is as if a wrathful god has visited them while they were in a trance. This ‘misrecognition’ results in misrepresentation. Peace returns after Christ is killed; and, paradoxically, the source of pollution becomes a source of blessing and Christ becomes a divinity. This all accords with universal pattern of narrative myth but it is unnecessary for me to point out to you that is not what we find in the Bible.

‘What myths hide, the Bible reveals’ and Girard points out that the vindication of the victims of the scapegoating is there in the Hebrew Bible from the start. Abel’s murder cries out to heaven. Joseph is cast out by his envious brothers – but is vindicated by God (and events). Crowds also unite against the victim in the servant songs of Second Isaiah, as they do against Jeremiah, Job and the narrators of the penitential psalms. However, in none of these instances is there any attempt at a ‘cover-up’. The story is told from the point of view of the victims who are vindicated by Yahweh. Indeed the murder of the very first victim - Abel – whose murder is the thing hidden since the foundation of the world – cries out for vindication.

Of course, the voice of the victim is not the only voice in the Hebrew Bible – we also have the ideology of the Hebrew sacrificial cult, which Girard would admit does contain mythological elements. As he says, ‘the Bible is a text in travail’ In Hebraic sacrifice, an animal was substituted for the human victim. However, if the ritual went wrong the priest could become the victim as happens, for example, to Aaron’s sons in Leviticus. This is portrayed as an instance of the descent of ‘the wrath of God’. However, it is not difficult to discern that what is actually being related is an event in which rivalry in the community becomes so intense that the sacrifice of an animal is not effective and there is a frenzied reversion to human sacrifice as a safety valve for human wrath. Indeed, Girard argues that the bible is a text in travail in which t

The later prophets repudiate the notion of redemptive sacrifice completely, telling the people of Israel that Yahweh despise the stench of their burnt offerings and requires works of justice and mercy of them instead. However, Girard argues that even in the most progressive texts of the Old Testament such as the fourth Servant Song in Second Isaiah there is ambiguity. Sometimes the crowd is presented as the sole instigator of the persecution but sometimes Yahweh is also implicated.

It is in the New Testament that Girard sees the complete unmasking of the scapegoating mechanism, and an accounting for ‘the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world’ (Luke 11:50-51). Now it is Christ who is the innocent victim against whom the mob unanimously unites. However, his vindication is complete through his resurrection; and it is through this resurrection that those who joined in with the lynch mob (Peter through his denials and Paul through being the instigator of persecution) are able to see the truth without myth/satanic lies, and live according to the order of life rather than the order of death.

The Gospels also unmask the anatomy of human destructiveness that makes scapegoating necessary. The Greek word Skandalon occurs many times in the New Testament, especially in Matthew’s Gospel. It has a richer and more nuanced meaning than the English word ‘scandal’ and is best translated as ‘stumbling-block’ rather than ‘moral offence’. It implies an addictive process of overwhelming compulsion. The unavoidable obstacle’ both attracts and repels each time we stumble against it (and each time we do this we suffer progressive psychic damage). For Girard this term encapsulates what happens during the process of rivalry; it speaks of the core of our human problems – of our ‘anthropology’.

When two people desire the same thing they become each other’s ‘stumbling blocks’. As rivalry escalates, the contested object of desire becomes forgotten and the antagonists become fascinated with each other instead. The more they block each other’s desire, the more they imitate each other. In effect, they become each other’s ‘Doubles’ as mutual fascination gives way to envy, indignation, and hatred and – in the end – to annihilating violence (hence the repeated motif of warring twins in world mythology and to a certain extent in the early books of the Bible). However, the more they become ‘the same’ in their actions, the less they can see the violence in themselves. Each only sees the violence in the other.

On a number of occasions in the Gospels, Jesus warns the disciples with great severity and in quite shocking language against the dangers of scandals. A pivotal example comes in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus first predicts his violent death at the hands of the worldly powers (Matthew 16: 21-23), and Peter protests that this must not happen. This suggests that Peter believes his Master should be capable of beating these worldly powers at their own game on their own terms (a temptation that Jesus has already struggled against and rejected in the wilderness). Jesus rebukes him harshly with ‘Get behind me Satan; you are a skandalon to me.

Girard’s interpretation of this is that instead of imitating Jesus, Peter is expecting Jesus to imitate him. If Jesus succumbs to this temptation, it will probably initiate a cycle of infighting in which he and Peter become rivals for the leadership of a politicised messianic movement. However, Jesus, who has God the Father as his model of how to live, has nothing to do with violence and antagonistic desire. He shows the way to live a life free of the scandals that generate violence. However, if we instead choose possessive and antagonistic models we choose the ‘satan’ as our model who is scandal personified: hence, Jesus’ harsh rebuke to Peter.

Jesus question, ‘How can Satan cast out Satan’ (Mark 3:23) suggests the answer ‘He does this through the scapegoat mechanism. Satan is the instigator of the scandals that force communities to disintegrate – but also provides the mechanism for their pseudo-resolution. In exposing the mythical lie, Christ becomes a focus of division rather than reconciliation. In the Gospel of John Jesus testifies to the God of love who has nothing to do with our ‘sacred’ mechanisms of expulsion, violence and death – and yet everything he does has a divisive effect. Likewise, in Matthew 10:34 Jesus says, ‘’ I have not come to bring peace but a sword’’. Girard comments on this that ‘if the only peace humanity has ever enjoyed depends on unconscious victimisation, the consciousness that the Gospels bring into the world can only destroy it’. In this connection, he sees the apocalyptic dimension in the New Testament not as an alien element but as a revelation of the turmoil we need to go through as scandals proliferate, to reach a peace beyond the peace of victimisation.

Very importantly, Jesus’ death is described as a skandalon. Before the passion drama begins, Jesus warns his disciples – and especially Peter – that they will become skandalizien by him. An ironic reading immediately suggests itself – Jesus who has lived and taught us how to live without scandal is being made the scapegoat for scandals. For Girard this use of skandalizien also confirms that the force at work in the scapegoat lynch mob - in which violence spreads like wildfire through what Girard terms ‘mimetic contagion’- is indeed the same as the violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals. It is a type of violence that makes everyone the same, everyone blind. The crowd turned into a unified mob in the Passion narratives is a tinderbox of complex and envious rivalries for power both within and between groups comprised of rebels, collaborators and the occupying forces. The death of Jesus prevents a riot and brutal reprisals through its cathartic effect. The mob disperses peacefully. At the end of his Passion narrative Luke writes, ‘’And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other’’ (Luke 23:12). However, this camaraderie is a ‘satanic’ parody of Christian reconciliation being the cathartic effect of the scapegoat ritual.

Any reading of the atonement informed by Girard’s ideas will be non-sacrificial. Certainly

Christians say ‘blood shed for us’ but they mean blood shed once for all. They say ‘We are reconciled in his blood’, but they mean we are freed to live without the reconciliation that requires the blood of the scapegoat- victims of such acts will never be invisible again – they look too much like Jesus. We can turn to finding a new basis for peace, such as that found around the communion table***

Blessings

Dick

This thread looks fascinating… when I find a good block of time, I’m gonna try and read the whole thing. :wink:

Greetings … Dick

   (hearty applause smiley )  Thanks for the link to Girard !

Although I am not in agreement with him or Alison but .. .but ...  
  one idea I got from reading Alison concerns the ----  death of Jesus 

or more poignantly the death of the Son (God incarnated as human ) and the relationship with
the Father & Spirit at that time … or during that time …

 all the best !

Tell us more Jim –
I know that my favourite author who has been influenced by Girard is Mark Heim – and he’s absolutely clear that Girard has not said the last word on anything – but has had some important insights. And one thing I like about Girard is that rather than setting up a foundation to promote his ideas he set one up to discuss his ideas – and there has been a lot of cordial difference between the people who discuss these. So I’d be interested in a few pointers regarding what you disagree with him and James Alison about. I might well agree with you.
Blessings

Dick

me too!

i must say i like what i know of Girard’s ideas, but i agree, they are not the “last word”, but they to me have alot of important insight. i am not convinced ALL desire is mimetic, nor all conflict related to mimetic rivalry, but the scapegoat mechanism i think is casting the torchlight in the right general direction, at the very least.

and the fact there is cordial discussion rather than nasty disagreement seems a healthy fruit, and good fruit indicates a good tree, even if we don’t fully grasp everything about it (even the guy that found the tree and has been watering it, to stretch this metaphor quite a bit further than is wise! :laughing: ).

Regarding Girard – I don’t think that all desire is mimetic/rivalrous. I think we are also born with healthy and non-competitive desire – but a lot of our desires do get twisted into competitive desire; and we can see the scapegoating mechanism again and again today, where a community binds itself together in exclusive inward ‘love’ by hating together in expelling a scapegoat – even if the founding murder at the dawn of civilisation is not something we can prove beyond doubt.
Another criticism of Girard is that he views all ancient (and modern) myths as somehow negative. But James Alison’s use of Margaret Barker seems to suggest that this is not necessarily so; it’s just that ‘bad’ myths can cover up sacred violence an can be seen perversely as something positive just because they are myths – and this has often seemed a problem to me with some of the insights of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. But as some Girardians argue – and I think rightly – but as well as twisted myths we also get real wisdom in most ancient cultures too that points, however shadowy, towards the truth of God as love and human beings as made in God’s image. We also get myths in travail – as the old sacrificial stories are questioned and modified to take account of a growing sense of justice and universality (for example this certainly happens in what the classical Greek tragedians do with the archaic Greek myths)

I love Girad’s his interpretation of the sacrifice of Christ as an unmasking of the scapegoating mechanism too – for this mechanism is behind all forms of unjust and arbitrary ‘sacred’ power. Ti seems to me to be an important insight that is compatible with both the moral and victory theories of atonement. Also, I love his emphasis no ‘wrath’ as being a human problem rather than an attribute of God.

But Girard is not the universal key – the universal key is the revelation of God’s love in Jesus

Blessings

Dick

hothorsegz at gmail com if interest to keep in contact since can’t send

greetings isp not sending but phone ok for now
if someone would like to help me
will appreciate very much thanks maybe this forum could have rss feed
sometimes Net is random haha
i think has to do with bandwidth
blessing to everyone

Hi Jeremy -

Very impressed by your knoweldge of and empathy for the mythic symbolism in Hebraic religion!

:smiley:

Here is an excerpt from a blog by David Marshall, an open evangelical Christian thinker in the mould of C.S. Lewis who is an expert in Chinese culture and religion, and respects Girard. It seems pertinent to our conversation (of course there is no need to agree with him on everything – I don’t; but I think he shows a good combination of holding fast to truth with open mindedness)

.
**Yesterday, a Christian philosopher named Jeff Cook posted an interesting article on Patheos called "They Don’t Believe Because Your God Isn’t Desirable…

Anyway, it was a pretty good article (also hike, see photo above), making the case that pure reason is not enough, that we must also show why faith in God is desirable, indeed why God is desirable. This should be no great shock to followers of one J. Christ, who defined the ethical tradition of his people in terms of “love God, and love your neighbour as yourself,” breaking the former down as follows:

With all your heart, mind, soul, and strength…

Anyway, a visitor calling himself (herself?) Rupaul challenged Cook on pluralistic grounds: not that “all religions are equally false,” but that they are, if not equally true, more-or-less equally useful. He (she?) expressed ideas one often meets in a thoughtful tone.

I responded briefly on that site, but would like to go into more detail, here.

I don’t have a crystal ball either. But people are aware there are lots of world religions with rich traditions, and it’s not clear that one particular religion has the answers. Metaphysically, they can’t all be right, of course. But most people, not the least Christians, aren’t looking for metaphysics, they are looking for ways to live their life, or to make sense of the suffering in their life.

Notice, first, the words “people are aware there are lots of world religions.” This comment may reflect the common pluralist notion, popularized by philososopher John Hick, that world religions are a new challenge to Christian theology. The metaphor Hick uses is the Copernican Revolution. Once upon a time, everyone thought the sun and planets circled the Earth. But then Copernicus discovered that Earth is nothing special, and all the planets really circle the sun. In the same way, Voyages of Discovery showed the West that our tradition is nothing special, that there is a world “out there” of profound truths and deep insight, the world of “pagan” religions. One religion is no better than another, Hick (and other pluralists) conclude: all are reflections of The Real, of whom the Christian God is just one image.

To a large extent, Hick’s Copernican Revolution is falsified by one simple fact: early Christians of the Alexandria School were aware, not only of Greco-Roman polytheism, and all the cults that jostled for attention in late Antiquity, of Egyptian or Mesopotamian gods, or even of the theistic schools of Greek philosophy. They also refer to Hindus and Buddhist beliefs. Augustine also responds in City of God to a vast sweep of human thought. He defends the Gospel as the true revelation of God, but also fits truths from other schools into the Christian system, dialoguing with Plato, Epicurus, Varro, Plotinus and Porphyry.

I would agree with Rupaul that there is a lot in other religions about “how to live one’s life” that is worth adopting. Clearly, early Christians thought so, too, because they adopted quite a bit of Platonic and Stoic ethics. Mateo Ricci wrote a book called On Friendship that went through many editions in China 400 years ago. The book was mostly composed of quotations from ancient Greek and Roman pagan philosophers. Great modern Christian apologists like GK Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and the Chinese evangelist Yuan Zhiming, also gladly accept moral truth from non-Christian sources – often fruitfully. “All truth is God’s truth,” or as Augustine put it, “[a] true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found . . . ”

I think most people ARE looking for truth (whether or not you want to reduce that to "metaphysics), or should be looking for truth, however inchoatly we may seek it. For example, one reads the Gospels and recognize the “power” of Jesus words – which means one recognizes that they not only fit the reality of what we are as humans, and explain it more deeply, but help us lead our lives in light of what we now recognize as truth. As CS Lewis put it (I paraphrase), “I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see all things.”

*Christianity does have answers for that (multiple answers, since the pluralism outside Christianity is matched by the diversity inside Christianity). *

Matched, perhaps, in number of denominations. as the number of branches on a large spreading western maple may match the number of bushes on the hillside around it. But churches that are truly Christian, like the branches on that tree, take nourishment from the same source, and are founded on the same (“genetic”) truth, and therefore share more in common than flora growing from other roots.

*But the argument from diversity is more like arguing about which the “best” language. The one you grow up in is going to seem natural and obvious, but as you grow up and learn about others you realize that they all seem that way to people who grow up speaking them. This is really the challenge for orthodox Christianity; people “learn to speak” other religious forms. This started in the US with the transcendentalist movement, after Indian scriptures began to be translated into English. *

I’ve read some Indian Scriptures, both Hindu and Buddhist, and find them not so much speaking a different language, as often saying different things. But the funny thing is, when we read the Indian Scripture from a Christian point of view, I believe we can make better sense of them, and even “save” more of them, than we can from either a Hindu or an atheist perspective.

For instance, the most ancient Indian Scriptures talk incessantly about sacrifice. Mohandas Gandhi was repulsed by this, and vehemently rejected blood sacrifice. (Even while feeling that he, himself, might act as a sacrifice for the butchered animals, and also for India.)

The complex set of traditions called “Hinduism” seems too often be in conflict with itself, over sacrifice, and other things.

The Gospel makes sense of both sacrifice, which Jesus fulfilled on the cross, and the disgust over sacrifice, which it helped end in much of the world. That is because Jesus was seen as the fulfilment of sacrifice. The perfect having come, the reality that sacrifice symbolized, it was no longer necessary to sacrifice animals, and those customs were discontinued.

I could give other examples from Indian tradition, and have. Indian tradition as a whole, seems for some to make best sense in light of the Gospel of Jesus, which both critiques and fulfils, challenging error and injustice, and bringing to consummation. This is why J. N. Farquhar called Jesus the “Crown of Hinduism.” This is how Clement of Alexandria came to understand the multi-cultural “Greco-Roman” world, which as he pointed out, was really constituted from the contributions of dozens of different cultures. Christ, he believed, lent the various schools of the philosophers new unity.

My only point maybe is that most people “outside” traditional religion, at least in North America, are likely to find debates about philosophy irrelevant, but that they would find messages about Christ’s love inspiring. So far I would agree with you about that, I just wouldn’t expect that to lead them to traditional Christian “belief”.

Yet one of the most insistent messages of the New Atheists, and one with which I and most other Christians fully agree, is that “truth matters.” God gave us minds because He wants us to think, and the desire to rationally understand the world is, in fact, a noble and inescapable human need. We may suppress this desire, but it is with us from childhood, which is why we ask our parents so many questions, and why some of us become scientists and scholars. But the thirst for truth is in not limited to those few, nor is it even always strongest among them.

“Love God and love your neighbor” is all God wants anyway, does it matter if a person also believes in, say, reincarnation? (Sikhs are monotheists but believe in reincarnation, and their tradition/metaphysics is every bit as sophisticated as Christian beliefs. They feed the poor, also.)

But Jesus said “love God with all your mind” as well as “all your strength, soul, and spirit.” So even looking just at this verse, “kindness” in the general sense is not ALL God wants of us. He also wants us to seek truth.

And I have argued that the Gospel has uniquely blessed the world, as God promised to Abraham at Mount Moriah.

Truth matters, not only in the sense that God gave us minds, and wants us to use them. It also matters, in the sense that what we believe, affects how we live. For instance, the Aztecs were wonderful polytheists. Only they believed that the gods required human blood to renew the universe, which is why they built pyramids and captured tens of thousands of enemy soldiers. (War was convenient for both, since their enemies and neighbors shared similiar ideas, from the Andes to St. Louis.)

So I do care that reincarnation is false. I also care that after the idea arose in Indian civilization, so did the idea of karma, and with it, caste and gender discrimination as horrendous as anywhere in the world. And it is an objective historical fact that those practices were first challenged by Christian missionaries, like William Carey, and quasi-Hindu followers of Jesus, like Ram Mohan Roy.

“Love” means, among other things, seeking and then teaching the truth. There is much truth in all the world’s great traditions, I admit gladly. But I believe Jesus is the incarnation of the divine Logos, and the redeeming, often challenging truth, who calls on us to “repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” not just to trot off to the right building on Sunday and sing orthodox praise hymns. He wants to remake us, and to remake our world, into something better.

One of the things I believe we can learn from other religions, or rather relearn, is the Taoist concept of wuwei, “lacking force,” “without striving.”

Ancient Christianity fused with the Emperor Cult of Rome, then borrowed liberally (too liberally) from Greco-Roman and Germanic warrior traditions. As a result, we often tried to force people to believe correctly. Charlemagne forced the Saxons to convert, Inquisitors forced Jews to believe in orthodoxy, Conquistadors imported the idea of holy war to the New World. (Not that the mesoAmericans didn’t have their own ideas on the subject.)

Much of this was a terrible perversion of the Gospel. Already Augustine justified abuse of the Donatists, who themselves seemed to have overlooked what Jesus said about forgiveness.

The Chinese evangelist and philosopher, Yuan Zhiming, argues that God raised up Lao Zi as a prophet to the Chinese people, to bring them to Christ. He also believes the concept of wuwei, as exemplified by Jesus, is exactly what China now needs, in seeking reform.

Over the past several hundred years, thanks to Christian thinkers like Las Casas, Milton, William Penn, John Locke, and others – and yes, some Enlightenment thinkers have contributed – we have begun I think to understand politics with more of the respect for free choice that Jesus himself exemplified. It does Truth no dishonour to admit pagans sometimes see it more quickly than we Christians. After all, the hero in the story Jesus told after telling us to “love God, and love people” was a Samaritan, who “loved his neighbour as himself,” while the Pharisee and the Levite passed by on the other side. **

Its interesting about Ghandi hating sacrifices. I unfortunately know almost nothing about him. Im assuming he was a hindu? The reason I say that is that the buddha and zoroaster both came out of polytheism and created a monotheism. Both of them were then co-opted by the deva worshippers after their deaths. Jesus came and revealed the light and look how quickly it was co-opted by the TOKOGAE eaters.

The story is always the same. Come out of her my people. So quickly after the embers fade and the camp is left cold. The new wine is then codified, doctrinized, petrified. Why because people choose what they can reason touch and understand. They say no Moses you go before us. Tell me what God says. I cant go there. Why? Fear of death…for adam.

Hi Jeremy -

I’m no great authority on Ghandi - but he was a Hindu Reformer and was morally influenced by other traditions. He was inspired by Jainism in his practice of harmlessness and non-violent protest against British Imperialism. And he hugely inspired by the example of Jesus – especially the Sermon on the Mount. Here is something I have found concerning his views on sacrifice:

gandhitopia.org/profiles/blo … ess-kali-1

There is a famous Goddess Kali temple in Kolkata. It was then the practice to sacrifice goats there to propitiate the goddess.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Navajivan on dated 7 November 1920 that there were many who felt satisfied at having saved one of the goats which were to be slaughtered in sacrifice to Mother Kali. Had the goat been saved in the right manner, I would have felt very happy, but in saving the goat they hurt many human beings. For saving the goat, force was used against these. This is not Hinduism. The nonviolence it teaches does not enjoin the saving of a goat by beating up or threatening human beings. The multitude of lions, tigers and wolves swallow up innumerable goats and other animals; we do not kill them to stop them doing so. A good many snakes sting and kill animals and human beings, but the Hindus not only abstain from killing them, they actually consider it a sin to kill them. On what grounds, then, can we use violence to save a goat?

Shimla is named after Mother Shimla, as Mumbai Bombay is named after Mumbadevi and Calcutta after Kali. All the three goddesses have proved faithless or, maybe, the devotees have forgotten them. The mere thought of the Kali temple fills me with horror. How can the place be called a temple at all? In literal truth, rivers of blood flow there every day. Who knows what the thousands of goats slaughtered there in the name of religion say in the court of God? How infinite is Mother Kali’s patience? Does she really demand cruel sacrifice? People who offer them tarnish her sacred name.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Young India on dated 6 October 1921 that that being my conception of Hinduism, I have never been able to reconcile myself to untouchability. I have always regarded it as an excrescence. It is true that it has been handed down to us from generations, but so are many evil practices even to this day. I should be ashamed to think that dedication of girls to virtual prostitution was a part of Hinduism. Yet it is practiced by Hindus in many parts of India. I consider it positive irreligion to sacrifice goats to Kali and do not consider it a part of Hinduism. Hinduism is a growth of ages. The very name, Hinduism, was given to the religion of the people of Hindustan by foreigners.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Navajivan on dated 9 October 1921 that Mother Kali demands no animal sacrifices. If anything, she wants us to sacrifice ourselves. It is only by slaying our Sins, our evil that we can make ourselves fit to stand before her. To those Hindus who desire to offer a sacrifice on the eighth day, I suggest that they should, dressed in hand-spun khadi, take a pledge to follow truth, practice non-violence and strive to subjugate the body. Anyone who does so will certainly be offering the purest sacrifice and such a person will also have become fit for swaraj. I, therefore, hope that, should the priest be obstinate and stick to his intention to kill a goat, no Hindu will visit the temple and be a party to the sin of offering the sacrifice and thus blaspheme against God.

Mahatma Gandhi spoke on 11 April 1926 that As we have the word yajna in our language and the practice is enjoined in our dharma, so the Bible and the holy books of the Jews too have each a corresponding word, and an idea similar to that of yajna. We find three things in the Koran: (1) animal sacrifices, on the Bakr-i-Id day; (2) it refers to a practice which also obtained among the Jews, a father sacrificing his son—Ibrahim does this; and (3) Ramadan, which is a form of sacrifice, that is, parting with or giving up something which is dear to us. In the same way, we see in the Bible the meaning of the term sacrifice expanding after Jesus. He told the people that they could not realize their aim by this sacrifice of animals, that for performing a sacrifice in the right sense of the term they would have to do much more than kill animals. He told them that it was not a sacrifice to destroy other lives, that one should give one’s own life as sacrifice. With that idea, he sacrificed his own life for the eternal welfare of the world, for its spiritual welfare, for washing away its sins and not merely for feeding the people. Among the Hindus, too, the practice of human sacrifice was prevalent at one time. Then followed animal sacrifice. Even today, thousands of goats are sacrificed to Mother Kali.

Yajnas are also performed for securing the fulfillment of many worldly desires. The root word in the English term “sacrifice” had a good meaning; it meant “to sanctify”. In Sanskrit, yaj means “to worship”. In the Old Testament, the word for yajna means “to renounce”. But the underlying idea, that all actions performed for the good or service of others are forms of yajna, will be accepted by everyone. Maybe our motive in sacrificing an animal is that of public good, for instance, securing rainfall. The motive in this may be that of public good, but it is not a true sacrifice in which we kill other creatures. We may tell ourselves that we have made a sacrifice in paying for the goat, but the crores of other Hindus are not likely to share that belief.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote an article in Young India on dated 8 December 1927 that did he not know that the animals were sacrificed to be ultimately eaten? Why do they sacrifice thousands of sheep and goats to the Goddess Kali in Calcutta be it said to their discredit and the discredit of Hinduism in spite of having received this message from the Hindu of Hindus Gautama? Do they throw the carcasses away in the Hooghly? No, they eat every bit of the meat with the greatest delight, thinking that it has been sanctified because of the presentation to Kali. So the Buddha said, if you want to do any sacrifice, sacrifice yourself, your lust, all your material ambition, all worldly ambition. That will be an ennobling sacrifice. May the spirit of the Buddha brood over this meeting and enable you to measure and assimilate the meaning of the words that I have spoken to you.

Mahatma Gandhi discussed before 20 December 1928 that He next turns to a khadi worker who is also accompanying him. He must agree to go to Calcutta2 where he is wanted in spite of his disinclination. If we could transform Calcutta we should transform the whole of India, he argues. He himself would go there and make it the center of his activity, but . . . And he then gives out this sorrowful secret that he has harbored in his bosom all these years of his life. It is the Kali temple.

There lies my difficulty. I cannot bear the sight of it. My soul rises in rebellion against the cold-blooded inhumanity that goes on there in the name of religion. If I had the strength I would plant myself before the gate of the temple and tell those in charge of it that before they sacrificed a single innocent animal they should have to cut my throat. But I know that for me to do so would be an unreal, a mechanical thing today because I have not yet completely overcome the will to live. And till I can do that I must bear the cross of my imperfect existence.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in CWMG, Vol. 44 on pages 266 that Kalicharan Benerji had spoken to me about the Kali temple, which I was eager to see, especially as I had read about it in the books. So I went there one day. Justice Mitter’s house was in the some locality, and I therefore went to the temple on the same day that I visited him. On the way I saw a stream of sheep going to be sacrificed to Kali. Rows of beggars lined the lane leading to the temple. There were religious mendicants too, and even in those days I was sternly opposed to giving alms to sturdy beggars. A crowd of them pursued me. One of such men was found seated on a verandah. He stopped me, and accosted me: ‘whither are you going, my boy?’ I replied to him. The terrible sacrifice offered to Kali in the name of religion enhanced my desire to know Bengali life. I had read and heard a good deal about the Brahmo Samaj. I knew something about the life of Pratap Chandra Mazmudar. I had attended some of the meetings addressed by him. I secured his Life of Keshav Chandra Sen, read it with great interest, and understood the distinction between Sadharan Brahmo Samaji and Adi Brahmo Samji. I met Pandit Shivanath Shastri and in company with Prof. Kathavate went to see Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, but as no interviews with him were allowed then, we could not see him. We were, however, invited to a celebration of the Brahmo Samaj held at his place, and there we had the privilege of listening to fine Bengali music. Ever since I have been a lover of Bengali music.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Hindu on dated 7 February 1934 that I understand that here you offer as sacrifice to your God buffaloes or other animals in order to appease Kali. You must not, for one moment, imagine that God can ever be pleased by sacrifice of animals. There are savarna Hindus, so called, who also resort to this barbarous practice. But, the entire world over, it is now recognized that there can be no religion in sacrificing animals. I should like you; therefore, to think that there can be no virtue in offering animals as sacrifices to appease Kali, or any other goddess or god. After all, there is but one God, whether you worship Him as Kali or whether you worship Him as Vishnu or Shiva or Brahma, no matter by what name, but, there is only one God, and that God is the God of Truth and Love, not of vengeance. Therefore, I hope that, henceforth, there will be no two parties amongst you, but that you will all unite in order to stop this animal sacrifice in the name of God.

Mahatma Gandhi spoke on 30 September 1941 that One who serves the cow must take cow’s milk only and not goat’s milk. I take goat’s milk out of my helplessness. But the members of the Cow-protection Society must take only cow’s milk and ghee and use only leather made from dead cows and buffaloes. Where even cows and buffaloes are being slaughtered, how can one get leather made from dead goats? Mankind has till this day taken it for granted that the goat is born only to be butchered. Today being Dussehra, in Calcutta thousands of goats must have been sacrificed to Goddess Kali.