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Things fall apart...
the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned...
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
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 Accounts of what can no longer be termed "unspeakable" acts of
violence and terror assault us daily. Newspapers and televi sions
capture the carnage and chaos that increasingly suggest the near-death
of civility and the sure unraveling of the fabric of culture and
society. How are we to understand the escalation of violence that
threatens us as individuals and as a society? What are we to do
in the face of the societal and cultural disintegration that follows
in the wake of such terror? This worldwide escalation of violence,
and the unsettling questions it raises, is the subject of Gil
Bailie's book, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (Crossroad,
1995).
Disturbingly relevant in the wake of the June bombing of the United
States military installation in Saudi Arabia and the July bombing
of Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, Violence Unveiled warrants
our attention on three counts: first, because it is a literate,
riveting, persuasive, passionate, and intelligent work; second,
because it is likely to play a significant role in reshaping public
perceptions of the links between religion, culture, and violence;
and third, because it is a deeply disturbing book that veils a
subtle, but no less dangerous, Christian supersessionism and triumphalism.
 I first heard of Violence Unveiled in June of this year at the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological
Society of America. An interest group, convened to discuss theological
responses to Bailie's book, generated intense and animated conversation
long after the session ended. Clearly, Violence Unveiled had gripped
the imaginations of my colleagues, and seemed to me well on its
way to becoming the book to read if you could read only one book
this year outside your discipline.
Critical reviews only confirmed my intuition: professional praise
for Violence Unveiled has been impressive; criticism of it, sparse. Perhaps because
I am leery of anything that comes so highly recommended, I was
completely unprepared for what I read. Violence Unveiled is, in
a word, remarkable. Bailie brings to his analysis of the interplay
of violence, culture, and the sacred a breathtaking command of
myth, poetry, the Bible, history, literature, and current events
that is reminiscent of Susan Jacoby's intelligent and still relevant
study of the relationship between justice and vengeance, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (Harper & Row, 1983). So captivating is Bailie's prose, so impressive
the breadth of his knowledge, so compelling his argument, and
so timely the topic that I fear the Christian supersessionism
and triumphalism so deeply embedded in Bailie's argument will
go unnoticed by the general reader.
Supersessionism (also known as displacement theology), along with
the triumphalist view that accompanies it, is a collection of
attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes that has plagued the Church
for two millennia. Sustained by a naive and pre-critical understanding
of history, the Gospels, and the relationship of the two Testaments,
supersessionism holds that God repudiated the Jewish people because
they rejected Christ. As a consequence of that rejection, God
invalidated the covenant with Israel, replaced the Law of Moses
with the Law of Christ, made a new and eternal covenant with the
Church, and made Christians the exclusive and rightful heirs of
all God's promises.
Historically, the twin ideologies of Christian supersessionism
and triumphalism have supported a "teaching of contempt" for Judaism
and the Jewish people that has marred the history of relations
between Jews and Christians in violent and tragic ways. Eradicating
such erroneous "teaching" continues to be among the greatest challenges
facing the Church in a post-Shoah world. The enormous ambiguity
I feel toward Violence Unveiled rests on an uneasy sense that,
at root, Bailie's solution to a world marked by escalating violence
itself veils an anti-Judaic attitude that has traditionally fostered
habits of hatred and legitimated demeaning and deadly acts of
violence toward the Jewish people for two thousand years.
In Violence Unveiled, Bailie makes accessible to a wide audience
the ground-breaking work of the French cultural critic and theorist,
René Girard. At the heart of Girard's theory is the contention
that violence undergirds the foundations of culture. According
to Girard, human beings are mimetic by nature, that is, we imitate
those we most love by desiring what the beloved desires, and now
possesses. That is to say, human beings are deeply driven by the
desire to possess what belongs to the beloved. Desire turns to
envy; envy, to rivalry; and rivalry creates an untenable conflict
at the heart of our most intimate relationships, namely, the conflict
generated by feelings of intense anger and rage directed at those
we most love for possessing what we most desire. Such deep conflict,
if left unresolved, undermines the stability of society and threatens
its very preservation. Girard maintains that society attends to
this conflict, and the destructive, violent impulses it generates,
by creating the cultural myth of the scapegoat--the witch, the
heretic, the outsider, the disease-bearer, the Jew--who is arbitrarily
identified and selected as the source of the conflict. Ridiculed,
tortured, expelled, murdered, or sacrificed, the scapegoat both
satisfies and discharges the violence embedded deeply in our psyches
while simultaneously keeping safe so-ciety's most important relationships.
Scapegoating thus prevents the chaos and disintegration that would
otherwise follow when imitative violence is left unchecked, and
spirals out of control.
For Girard, religion plays an essential role in the cultural myth
of the scapegoat. Its societal function is to create, maintain,
and mediate a sacrificial system that ritually and symbolically
reenacts the violence done to the scapegoat. Religion successfully
mediates the cultural myth of the scapegoat by veiling the violence,
which is integral to the myth, under the mantle of the sacred.
With the violence thus concealed, the scapegoat undergoes a curious
transformation. By delivering society from its most destructive
impulses, the scapegoat is transformed from the "despised and
rejected" of the people to the "savior" of the people. The sacrificial
system that is at the heart of religion is thus structured around
rituals that symbolically reenact the necessary violence that
saves society from itself. Participation in these rituals satisfies,
sustains, and, perhaps most importantly, contains both the individual
desire and the cultural necessity of imitative violence. In so
doing, religion legit-imates violence by veiling it with the status
of "sacred."
In Violence Unveiled, Gil Bailie argues that Christianity has unveiled the violence
at the heart of the sac-rificial system. Relying on Girard's theory
of the relationship of violence, culture, and religion to analyze
contemporary American life, Bailie turns to the Bible for his
solution to the problem of the escalating violence that threatens
us. He contends that, beginning in the Hebrew Bible, and coming
to full and definitive completion in the New Testament, the mythology
of scapegoat sacrifice was ultimately exposed and thus rendered
ineffectual by a tradition that gradually took the astounding
position of identifying with the victim. According to Bailie,
the death of Jesus completed this gradual move. It definitively
broke humanity's need for and reliance on the sacrificial system
that both satisfied and perpetuated our violent nature. Like many
before him, Jesus was offered as a sacrificial victim and scapegoat
in the interest of society. The unique and ongoing contribution
of Christianity begins, however, with a post-resurrection community
that definitively broke the cycle of violence by refusing to veil
Jesus's death in lofty religious rhetoric. Instead, it testified
without equivocation that Jesus had been murdered at the hands
of an unjust society. The resurrection, Bailie tells us, is a
bold proclamation announcing that the cycle of sacred violence
has been broken and can remain so if we renounce and reject the
power of imitative violence; if we seek not to exact vengeance;
if, instead, we become makers of peace. Having exposed, or demythologized,
the myth of the scapegoat, Christianity holds out to the world
its best hope for breaking the cycle of violence by offering an
alternative, nonviolent way of living.
I conclude this review of Violence Unveiled by noting two assumptions
that undergird Bailie's thesis, and about which I have serious
reservations. The first is his understanding of the Bible, especially
his assumption concerning the relationship of the two Testaments;
the second, his contention that Christianity, having irrevocably
unveiled the violence at the heart of all religions, and thus,
at the heart of all cultures, offers humankind its best hope for
breaking the cycle of violence that continues to threaten its
very existence.
First, Bailie's solution to the problem of the escalating violence
that threatens us turns on his understanding of Sacred Scripture,
and it is this that I find most problematic, and most dangerous,
about his project. For Bailie, the Bible is a unified story that
tells of the gradual unfolding of God's self-revelation to humankind,
a story that came to its definitive and full expression in Christ
Jesus. The Testaments are thus inextricably bound together by
a single story-line. This "single story" reading of the Bible
implies that Israel's story, although an essential part of God's
story, is, nonetheless, an incomplete one; that the "New" Testament
(and, by implication, Christianity) is, in fact, the "final" chapter
that completes God's story begun with Israel. Without the New
Testament, the Hebrew Bible (and, by implication, Judaism) is,
by God's design, "incomplete." That is to say, Judaism and the
Jewish people can never fully enjoy what God initiated with them
at Sinai because Sinai's fulfillment was accomplished in and by
Jesus alone, and preserved forevermore, and fully, by Christianity.
My concern with such supersessionist and triumphalist notions
is that they privilege Christianity over all other religious traditions,
thereby creating an ethos that allows Christians to view the "other"
in ways that have proven to be both dangerous and deadly. Without
diminishing the real and difficult issues that Christianity and
Judaism must resolve as regards the way in which each understands
the relationship of the two Testaments, and, by implication, the
relationship of the two faiths, it is, I believe, to the detriment
of both traditions if either argues that God's love, mercy, and
goodness are exhausted in one's own story, or that each has nothing
enduring to learn from the other about the One who is creator
and sustainer of all that is.
The second assumption that undergirds Bailie's argument, and about
which I have apprehension, is his assertion that the post-resur-rection
community broke the cycle of violence preserved in the sacrificial
system of first Century Common Era Judaism by refusing to speak
of Jesus's death in traditional religious terms. That the nascent
Christian community turned instinctively and quite naturally to
its own religious tradition in its struggle to understand the
meaning and significance of what had been revealed regarding Jesus
of Nazareth is beyond dispute. What "language" was it to use if
not that of the Hebrew Scriptures? In the biblical idiom of the
only scriptures it had, the Christian community found poetic,
metaphorical, and theological motifs through which it could articulate
what was at the heart of its religious experience. Bailie seems
to suggest that, unlike the sacrificial language of the Hebrew
Bible that veils the violence at the root of religion, the sacrificial
language Christians use to talk about the meaning of Jesus neither
veils nor conceals violence, but instead, clearly and unambiguously
reveals the mystery of God. But Christianity is preserved and
embodied by a people and by institutional structures that are
always in need of self-critical examination and reform, always
in need of the self-correcting power inherent in a people who
understand the sinful, and thus ambiguous, ways in which they
witness to the love and mercy of God. The power of Christianity
to be an instrument of God's redeeming love for the world resides
not in its perfection, nor in its unambiguous proclamation. The
power of its witness rests instead in its ability to know itself,
like Peter, as one who has betrayed the Lord, but who in his brokenness
knows the God of all hope as one who always works with the weak
of the world to repair and redeem it. Supersessionist and triumphalist
thinking sells Christianity short by neutralizing its own capacity
for self-critical, and thus, self-correcting, reflection.
These reservations notwithstanding, I recommend reading Violence
Unveiled. While I have serious doubts regarding Bailie's theological
"solution" for our violent world, his analysis of the erosion
of our social stability remains compelling. Recognizing that we
shall not long survive in a world marked by escalating violence,
we may be tempted to turn to solutions that are themselves violent.
Violence Un-veiled argues convincingly that our cries for vengeance,
understandable though they may be, are not viable alternatives
to the violence that surrounds and threatens us. Gil Bailie does
not flinch in setting before us this harsh fact.
This article will be published in an upcoming issue of New Theology
Review. |