310 - Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross

Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross
By Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1992. 230 pp. $24.95.

What sort of response to the reality of violence in our world is consistent with Paul's teaching of the cross of Christ as the center of the gospel? Robert Harnerton-Kelly's appointment at the Center for International Security and Arms Control (Stanford University), together with his fine training as an interpreter of the New Testament, puts him in an excellent position to address that question.

He does so by means of an adaptation of the theory of René Girard. Girard has developed a bold synthesis that relates sacrifice, the place of desire in human society, and the revelatory value of the Bible. Girard commences his analysis with a discussion of desire, which he understands to be flawed from the outset. The seed of destruction within desire is that it is "mimetic": One imitates a model whose passions can never be one's own, and, therefore, the model is, at the same time, a rival. In Girard's analysis, mimetic desire is a threat to the very existence of human society because its natural conclusion is the displacement (that is, the destruction) of the other, who is both model and rival. The desire to have what the other has-a basic human passion-is the root of violence. It is both ineluctable and incompatible with the existence of human culture. Sacrifice for Girard is the symptom of communal violence and-at the same time-the means by which society attempts to conceal and avert violence. The violence of society is imputed to a person or animal who is the sacrificial victim. The ritual act of killing that victim, which is then deified in view of the killing's apparently beneficial effect upon society, both restrains and

312 - Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross

assuages the communal violence that is at its root. The Bible, particularly the New Testament, is held to be especially revelatory both in laying bare the truth that sacrificial victims are innocent (from Abel to the servant of Isaiah 40-55, and on to Jesus) and in pointing forward to the liberation from violence (and therefore from sacrifice) that love makes possible.

Hamerton-Kelly largely accepts Girard's theory and makes Paul's theory of the cross its classic expression. Indeed, Paul is here a conscious apostle of what might be called anti-violence, turning from the Judaism that made him a persecutor. But Hamerton-Kelly also departs from Girard at two key (and related) points. Hamerton-Kelly holds that the flaw of mimesis can be set right by obeying the fundamental prohibition of Genesis not to attempt to become God. For Girard, by contrast, enhancing the difference between the person who imitates and the one imitated (which he calls "external mediation") is a matter of degree, not kind. Hamerton-Kelly, in other words, is a formal theist, where Girard is not. For Hamerton-Kelly, therefore, an ethic of imitatio Christi or imitatio Dei, the soteriological key to human survival and progress, is the divine cure for our defect.

Personally, I can only applaud Hamerton-Kelly's departures from Girard, in that they are related to suggestions I have recommended in discussion with both Girard and Hamerton-Kelly at Stanford (Cf. The Temple of Jesus [1992]). A genuinely mimetic theory will need such tinkering, and more. But it would have been helpful to readers to have assumed less familiarity with Girard's work and, more expressly, to have indicated fresh thinking.

Hamerton-Kelly's book is rich in insight and promise; the reader should be prepared to grapple with the fundamental issues which the author thinks through. Among the many questions which remain with me, three stand out in my mind: (1) If one accepts, with Girard, that "the sacred" is a figment of our violent origins, how can "divine love" be invoked as the solution of our existential uncertainty and our social problems? Formally, what distinguishes "the sacred" from "the divine"? (2) According to Hamerton-Kelly, Paul accepted the doctrine of Israel's election in an excess of nostalgia; but what is the proximate source of the imitatio Dei Jesus articulated if it is not the religion of Israel (complete with sacrifice and observations of sanctity)? (3) When homosexuality is here characterized as a defect of mimesis, is Hamerton-Kelly reverting to a construction of natural law in a new key?

If Rene' Girard occupies Barth's position in a new orthodoxy, then Hamerton-Kelly has Brunner's, and we may all profit from coming to understand them both.

Bruce Chilton
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY