Seán Ó Conaill – Jaja’s Question: A Blasphemous Theology?
If Catholic clergy cannot explicitly deny that God the Father needed Jesus to die to restore his lost ‘Honour’ are they silently endorsing and embedding this medieval theology? When this question turns up in a recent Nigerian novel Sean O’Conaill can’t resist speculating about Ireland’s responsibility.
“Of course God works in mysterious ways. Look what he did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own Son so that we would be Saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?”
This is the young rebellious Jaja, Nigerian son of a punctilious and abusive Catholic father, Papa Eugene – in the novel Purple Hibiscus (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Deep tragedy stalks the family. Eugene is trapped in post-colonial status anxiety and is never taught to recognise this malady for the sin it truly is. None of the clergy in the novel can rise to that challenge. Instead Eugene gets the front pew in Church as the model Catholic parent he seeks to be. His family must suffer mutely – until in the end a dam breaks.
Is that truly a disgraceful – even a blasphemous – inference: that God the Father sought and arranged the death of Jesus on the Cross? If so why, still, in the Jubilee year of 2025 can that not be emphatically stated, even in Ireland? As that inference occurred in this instance to a Nigerian novelist born in 1977 and raised in a Catholic family, this inevitably suggests that Irish missionary priests were complicit in its arrival in Nigeria. Even today the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1994 is most easily understood as verifying it (CCC 615). The abusive patriarch that Adichie describes is by all accounts an archetypal African scourge, so a theology of abusive patriarchy – of a Father God also bound to protect his own ‘honour’ by sacrificing his son – is easily assimilable.
Jesus proves otherwise by showing not the slightest sign of status anxiety himself – in any of the Gospel accounts – but this has still to be seen. Clerical status anxiety insists that St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theology of atonement must remain embedded, the permanent ball and chain that both hobbles mission and empowers reaction. Jesus’ celibacy remains the diagnostic sign of his holiness – not his refusal to join in the endless human game of ‘shame or be shamed’. His claim to have ‘overcome the world’ – i.e. the fear of what people will think – goes unnoticed, even at the zenith of the global attention economy – and so does the origin of all xenophobic victimisation in the status anxiety of the mob.
‘Sshh! Don’t say such things!’ No wonder Irish clergy have a phobia of theology, when the implications of a medieval theory that St Patrick knew nothing about are too troubling to speak about. That the Trinity could be bent instead upon freeing us from all fear of ‘what people think’ will probably be left to the novelists to reveal in the end. Even in Africa now people are reading René Girard – so it needn’t be true that any African clergy arriving here must be trapped in St Anselm’s mistake.
But what exactly are our own young seminarians learning and thinking – and saying – these times, about the reason Jesus died on the cross?
Did Jesus have to die? I am out of my depth here.
What has sprung to mind is one of the more profound moments in Lloyd Webber’s ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. Jesus is agonising in Gethsemane and he challenges the Father. Part of his prayer goes as follows:
Can you tell me now that I would not be killed in vain?
Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain
Tell me what’s the reason for your wanting me to die.
You’re far too keen on how and where but NOT SO HOT ON WHY.
I was always struck by that passage.
An excellent piece, Seán.
I haven’t really looked seriously at the present catechism (1994) but if it is still using Anselm’s idea of supstitutionary atonement then I am amazed.
I was under the impression that modern scholarship had found it to be completely untenable.
Even leaving the consensus of modern scholars aside, as an innocent, unquestioning Catholic, which I was well into adulthood, I was never convinced that we could or should be held responsible, inter generationally, for the sin of our (most likely mythical) ancient ancestor.
As an exile in Scotland I often brag about the wonderful scholar priests – and lay scholars and women too – that we have at home in Ireland.
And, Seán you must know that there are priests who will say that Jesus did not have to die to save us.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Matt 5:38-39)
Teachings such as these by Jesus surely raised the question of what he would do if and when faced with the reality of wrongful condemnation and death – and of how good could possibly triumph over evil if he offered no resistance.
We need to take most seriously the conviction of the early church that Jesus did indeed triumph – without the use of force – that a ‘new creation’ had begun with his crucifixion – and that the Father and the Holy Spirit had revealed themselves in this sequence also, as the necessary guarantors of Jesus’ victory and of our redemption.
The following possibility then presents itself: that the Trinity were – and still are – intent on demonstrating the limits of the power ‘to kill the body’ that has always been wielded by ‘Pharaoh’ – i.e. ‘the kingdoms of this world’, the spirit of earthly domination – to open a horizon to human history that will always lie beyond erasure by that tyrannical spirit.
To put this another way, the purpose of the crucifixion / resurrection sequence was probably to demonstrate that the Kingdom of God cannot be either built or erased by force – that it lives on always in the faith, hope and charity of the people of God – in communion with the ever-present Trinity.
Constantine’s claim after 312 to a divine mandate for the use of force is a challenge to such an understanding – but as far as I know that claim was never verified by the church. It was also implicitly rejected by Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, and we all are well aware of the connection between Christendom and today’s alienation of so many from the Gospel – and the now obvious connection between political power and corruption.
St Anselm of Canterbury at the zenith of the church’s political power c. 1098 was far less aware of the problematic of a church resting on state patronage and the use of force. Instead his retributory theology of atonement helped to buttress that church-state alliance at the expense of a full grasp of Jesus insistence that ‘I and the Father are one’ – and of the call to non-violence. The couplet ‘Christus vivit’ so often used by Pope Francis needs now to be understood as the Father’s intention also.
Death has no dominion!
“Of course God works in mysterious ways. Look what he did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own Son so that we would be Saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?”
I doubt if any priest would say that God murdered his Son or that he did so to avenge his honour. I have never heard that preached.
However, let’s be careful not to perpetuate what may be a caricature of the great Christian discourses on those “mysterious ways” that combine deep humility in face of the mystery and some modest effort to make sense of it by using theological reason; and what also may be a caricature of mainline Christian preaching and doctrine today.
More and more I admire Charles Wesley as perhaps the greatest British theologian. He urged the Church of England to remember the Lutheran component in its heritage, but refused to break with that church even at the cost of a painful break with his brother John.
Newman struck the opposite note (in the Lectures on Justification, which was cited as one of his works at the ceremony making him a Doctor of the Church), denouncing Luther and Methodists as heresies, and reading Luther in the framework provided by Catholic polemist Robert Bellarmine, SJ. The tension between High Church and Evangelical Anglicanism thus persists to this day, and may have a lot to do with the threats of schism we hear again and again.
Charles Wesley expressed his theology mostly in hymns (and in fact we all know one of them: Hark, the herald angels sing… God and sinners reconciled).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQeIGbKqiw8&list=RD6HPKL1wOVXk&index=6
“I doubt if any priest would say that God murdered his Son or that he did so to avenge his honour. I have never heard that preached.”
And yet, Joe, there is no general shout of ‘blasphemy’ here to that suggestion, no priestly protest that God the Father could never have supported the crucifixion of his son to atone for our sins. Iggy admits frankly ‘I am out of my depth here’ – and you yourself don’t as yet state a clear position either way.
What does all of that tell you?
If it took until 1965 for the church to insist that the truth cannot be conveyed by coercion it follows that from c. 313 until 1965 it was possible to agree with Constantine that God did in fact approve the use of force to spread the Gospel.
That in turn made Jesus’ forbearance on Calvary a mystery – inexplicable in terms of the Trinity’s opposition to violence.
Did not Anselm resolve that mystery c. 1098 with Cur Deus Homo – the satisfaction theory of atonement – exonerating the church from any hint of a huge theological blunder in endorsing Constantine’s mistake – by implicitly attributing approval of the crucifixion to the Father also?
Already, in the wake of René Girard, there are Catholic priests who proclaim that the Trinity have been bent from the beginning on ending the reign of violence in the world, and that Jesus’ endurance of crucixion is the Father’s self-denial of violence also – His revelation of the origins of violence in our human rejection of the Kingdom of God, the reign of forgiveness. Constantine was simply wrong. That is my theology also.
In Bellaghy c. 2002 I was asked plaintively by a faithful grandmother in her eighties: “Did God the Father want Jesus to be crucified?” Why had she never heard a confident refutation of that inference in her own lifetime of church going? Wasn’t it because St Anselm and the Catechism had put almost all Catholic clergy ‘out of their depth’ – making reticence on the issue the safest option?
Where exactly do you stand?
The trouble, Sean, is that you are confusing us all by seeming to amalgamate two different things: on the one hand a caricature of God as murderer of his Son, which I don’t think normal, sane Catholics subscribe to – to ask us to shriek “blasphemy” about this savours of a “when did you stop beating your wife?” fallacy. IF there really was a widespread presentation of the redemption in these terms today it would certainly deserve excoriation. I don’t think the Catechism contains such as caricature.
On the other hand you seem to throw out the baby with the bathwater — if you were attacking a mere caricature, no one would object, but it is not clear how far your critique extends — St Anselm is one of your targets — and it is difficult for anyone to assess that polemic without studying the text of Cur Deus Homo — it is a bit like feminist theologians who throw Augustine, unread, out the window; moreover, it is not clear if you are arguing against central texts of the New Testament itself, such as Mark 10:45, Romans 8:3, John 3:16 or 1 John 2:2.
You might say we should start all over again on the basis of Rene Girard, but I doubt if his framework will bear the weight of such a task. A theology of the Atonement is one of the many desiderata of current Christian thinking, but please note that theology is not going through a glorious period — people even say that Catholic theology today is bankrupt. A deep reflection on the status and function of our Atonement-language in its many historical variations might need to invoke Buddhist reflections on “conventional truth”. Have a look at this: https://academic.oup.com/fordham-scholarship-online/book/42893
So, Joe, no one will ever know, with any clarity, where exactly you yourself stand on the meaning of the Easter events?
You will never tell us whether on the one hand you think we should interpret Jesus’ acceptance of crucifixion as obedience to God the Father’s refusal of the option of violence, or, on the contrary, as submission to God the Father’s need for a divine victim to satisfy divine justice?
You know well how heavily Christian fundamentalism depends upon that second interpretation – but still you leave open the possibility that God needed Jesus to suffer to balance the scales of divine justice – because our own sufferings are insufficient?
Isn’t it from indecision and prevarication on this question that doubt and suspicion and revulsion, rather than prayer, faith and hope, arise?
In the third Christian Century – prior to Constantine’s ‘revelation’ – Origen wrote as follows:
“Jesus, our Lord, conquered not by fighting but by dying; he overcame not by inflicting wounds but by receiving them. In his cross is the true victory, where violence is excluded and death itself is defeated.” (From Homilies on Joshua – Homily 15)
Note the clear implication there that the Resurrection was Jesus’s reward – from the Father – for REJECTING violence. Does it truly not matter whether we think of God the Father as abetting violence or as rejecting it?
Please do not respond with references to other sources. What do YOU believe?
“”whether on the one hand you think we should interpret Jesus’ acceptance of crucifixion as obedience to God the Father’s refusal of the option of violence, or, on the contrary, as submission to God the Father’s need for a divine victim to satisfy divine justice? You know well how heavily Christian fundamentalism depends upon that second interpretation – but still you leave open the possibility that God needed Jesus to suffer to balance the scales of divine justice – because our own sufferings are insufficient?”
Again, just consulting what I’ve always believed, I would say that God allowed his Son to be a victim of human violence and the Son accepted this as the will of God. Why did God allow it and why did the Son accept it? There’s a discourse of “sacrifice” running through the whole Bible. Jesus’s suffering and death are seen as a sacrificial offering. I think that Jesus himself saw his forthcoming death in that light, if we take Mark 10:45 as the actual words of the historical Jesus–“to give his life a ransom for many”–like the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53: “upon him was the punishment that made us whole… the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”. The non-violence of Jesus in the Passion is modelled on the non-violence of the Suffering Servant.
To say that God allowed his Son to die is a bit tepid. The suffering and death of his Son is a supreme positive redemptive action on the part of God. God descending to the depths of human weakness in a radical kenosis, which paradoxically is the most stunning demonstration of his love of humanity, his condescension to our weakness, and his true omnipotence.
The text you quote from Origen is beautiful. The book of Joshua is a pretty genocidal one and Origen insists that it must not be read literally and “carnally” in the manner of the Jews (sorry, but Origen talks like that, and we need to overcome this). He writes the name “Joshua” as “Jesus” throughout his homilies (as does the Septuagint), and this helps his interpretation of the destruction of Israel’s enemies as a tale of Christ’s non-violent, spiritual victory.
Of course our own sufferings by themselves would be useless, but if we unite our sufferings with those of Jesus then this mysterious logic comes into play: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” (Col 1:24).
Suffering and death, which are fearfully negative things, become positive and redemptive for the Christian. It’s a paradox and a mystery. To suffer is a miserable fate, but it is a privilege to suffer with Jesus Christ.
I have to give “references” for all these thoughts, because they come directly or indirectly from Scripture. Why did Christ have to die? Scripture replies: he died for you, because he loved you, and showed God’s love for you by shedding his human blood so that the world would be fully reconciled with God. It sounds like sheer nonsense, yet it has made sense to Christians at all times.
Thanks, Joe.
As for that theme of sacrifice, Raymund Schwager SJ persuaded Rene Girard that Jesus had brought the concept of sacrifice to a 180 turn away from priestly sacrifice of SOMEONE ELSE – e.g. Abraham’s putative sacrifice of Isaac. As in the case of the widow’s mite, the sacrifice that is pleasing to God, is the giving of ourselves, at some cost, for the sake of others – so we mustn’t see in Jesus’ sacrifice any lack of love on the part of God the Father. On the contrary, God is embodied in Jesus as the spirit of self-sacrifice, the only gateway to the future, and to Paradise.
For Christian fundamentalism it is the violent shedding of Jesus blood by his enemies that constitutes the saving sacrifice. On the contrary it is only Jesus’s utterly non-violent offering of himself – in opposition to violence – that was pleasing to God. How I wish that this obvious distinction was more often seen and emphasised.
The clear implication of Jaja’s protest in ‘Purple Hibiscus’ is that he had never heard that distinction being made in church or school, and that his anger arose from the violence of his own rigorous father, Papa Eugene – who saw no moral error in that violence either.
I was not aware that Schwager (himself influenced by his compatriot von Balthasar) was an influence on Girard rather than merely a disciple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymund_Schwager Their correspondence (published) begins in 1974 and Schwager’s book “Must There be Scapegoats?” was published in German in 1978. That was also the year of Girard’s “Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde” in which Girard is interviewed by two eager disciples (perhaps enacting mimetic rivalry) and sees Christ as ending the regime of sacrifice. I met Girard at that time thanks to Richard Kearney and queried his dismissive attitude to the notion of sacrifice. (We also chatted about Proust, since I had visited Illiers-Combray that day, and we agreed that it spoils the novel to do so.)
I wrote a brief piece on “The Riddle of Sacrifice” in The Crane Bag, vol. 3, 1979, in which I noted with bemusement that the Council of Trent was unable to give a definition of “sacrifice” (unfortunately a typo had me saying the opposite!) Later I taught Girard’s famous book, “Violence and the Sacred,” published in French in 1972. It’s essayistic and somewhat flimsy, like another famous French book I also taught, Denis de Rougemont’s “L’amour et l’occident” (1939). Girard began as a brilliant literary critic, and his mimetic theory was conceived in his study of Proust and Stendhal, and this is both a strength and a weakness. Walter Burkert is a more straitlaced and solid scholar of the same themes (in Greek tragedy). Girard did not address theology in 1972 so his book of 1978 probably marks his flamboyant entry onto the theological stage, and I now see that this was probably under Schwager’s influence, so it may be that Schwager is the true originator of the “Girardian” account of the sacrifice of Christ (as well as the one who prompted Girard to correct his 1978 views later). I haven’t much appetite for von Balthasar’s “Theodramatics” and I’m not sure if I could tackle Schwager either at this late stage.
In 2004 in London at Heythrop College I heard René Girard admit that his contention in “Things Hidden” (1978) that the crucifixion of Jesus was not a sacrifice was his ‘greatest mistake’. Schwager was, I believe, the one who persuaded him of this.
And yet we need to see that for Pilate, Herod and Caiaphas the crucifixion was not a ritual sacrifice either. It was a political solution to a political problem, the releasing of communal tension in the elimination of the challenge posed by Jesus, especially in his provocative behaviour re buying and selling in the Temple.
For Girard this was scapegoating, an archetypal example of an archaic pattern of response to cultural crisis. For Schwager it was also, for Jesus, the setting for the institution of a new Covenant and the culmination of the evolution of archaic religious sacrifice from an evasive victimisation of someone else (or of some other creature) into non-violent self-giving. He persuaded Girard to this perspective – to me a consoling proof that academic disagreement need not always deteriorate into endless rivalry.
Girard’s belief that archaic ritual religious sacrifice evolved out of this kind of unrehearsed scapegoating is also dramatically supported by that one story, but of course this is not conclusive on its own.
Is Ireland seeing more violence – e.g. against incomers – BECAUSE far fewer ‘go to Mass’? We obviously need to sit together, synodally, to discuss what ‘going to Mass’ really means. Those who have put themselves out to welcome refugees are ‘making sacrifice’ also – and ‘making peace’ – but do homilists notice and point to this as an example of the essential priestly offering of the laity, to be brought to the altar with the other Offertory gifts?
Time for all of us to be fully ‘mindful’?
Schwager is deeply influenced by von Balthasar’s Theodramatik (5 voll, from 1973) as the title “Jesus in the Drama of Salvation” (1990, translated into English 1999) suggests. I looked at the first volume of Theodramatik and found that it is a discussion of drama on the broadest basis, starting from Hegel’s discussion in his Aesthetics. 600 pages is the usual length of Balthasar’s books, and this first volume is only the Prolegomena to the properly theological following volumes on the drama between God and Christ in the incarnation and passion (and even within the immanent Trinity). The discussion is all over the place, with countless summary declarations on every imaginable playwright (Beckett, O’Casey and Behan make brief appearances). All of this is supposed to lay open the space of theatricality on the basis of which the divine drama is to be set forth. Balthasar studied Germanistik in his formative years, which yielded his first mammoth publication, Apocalypse der deutschen Seele (1937). It is a very colorful account of how the German soul is revealed in Idealism, Goethe and the Romantics, Wagner and Nietzsche. Do not expect sharply focused close readings; his musing on literature aims at a broad vision of the evolution of the German soul. Then, as a Jesuit, he studied philosophy and theology, but with a distance from strict academic method. He never broke with his distinctive manner as a Germanist. His intellectual climate is a Goethean world-wisdom rather than disciplined philosophy (though he recycled a feeble early work on truth within the last section of his trilogy, namely, the Theologik). His volumes on metaphysics in the first section, the Glory of the Lord, are a sort of aesthetic take on philosophy. The fascination with Balthasar among Anglophone theologians is in part due to the way he transmitted basic bourgeois German culture, which seemed fresh to them. John Paul II’s and Ratzinger’s intense promotion of Balthasar as the most cultured man of our times, at the expense of more standard theologians such as Rahner, Congar, and Schillebeeckx, änd of course Kung, had a stifling effect on theology. Balthasar could be relied on to support Rome and to dismiss critical questions as stemming from what he called “the anti-Roman affect.” See Tom O’Loughlin’s interview with Karen Kilby:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=hans+urs+von+balthasar+wikipedia&view=detail&mid=3CA0C6B3293CAA467F8F3CA0C6B3293CAA467F8F&FORM=VIREA last interview with Balthasar shows him as a defender of theological conservatism: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=hans+urs+von+balthasar+wikipedia&view=detail&mid=F26E8F1021AB0E388818F26E8F1021AB0E388818&FORM=VIRE
His best books are those that focus on an individual figure: Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor. Barth, Bernanos (though his 600 pages book on Bernanos is faulted for imposing a theological grid on the literary texture of the novels; I would say he projects a sanitized version of Bernanos).
I have an outline grasp of Schwager’s five-act dramatic schema of the Gospel – with the Resurrection as last act – and as revelation of God the Father’s rejection of the violence of the vineyard owner in the parable of the stolen vineyard.
This sits squarely with René Girard’s contention that Old Testament references to divine violence (e.g. in Joshua) are human projections – due to imperfect ‘inspiration’ – and that the overall arc of the Bible is towards vindicating God the Father as bent on leading us towards ‘the kingdom’, in perfect peace.
You will find a succinct account of Girard’s debt to Schwager in Cynthia Haven’s intellectual biography of Girard – ‘Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard’.
I doubt that Girard ever got around to reading Balthasar ‘neat’ – and your brief account of the latter confirms my own belief that I never will either!