One Last Way of Thinking about “Blood”

Well, I’ve been looking at the doxology in Revelation 1:5-6, which reads:

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood,
and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father,
to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

So far, we’ve seen 3 different ways of looking at the word “blood” in terms of God’s great act of redeeming humanity- Anselm’s “substitutionary atonement,” Irenaeus’ incarnational theology, and Girard’s understanding of scapegoating (see the past 3 blog notes for more information).

Here is one last way of thinking about “blood” when we see references to it, such as in this doxology of Revelation 1. It is not unrelated to the previous ways of thinking about “blood,” but it is somewhat different.

Walter Wink argues that the two great and competing myths in our world today are “the myth of redemptive violence” and “the myth of redemptive suffering.” (We’re using ‘myth’ in its classic sense, as a great explanatory story behind the way we approach our world.) The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the subtext of virtually every Hollywood action film that has been produced. The hero is typically a normal enough guy, trying to live in peace and do the right thing. The villain strikes out and attempts to talk it out or normal attempts at enforcing the law fall short. Then, in a moment best articulated by Popeye (“I’ve had all I can stand, and I can’t stands no more!”) the hero pulls out the big gunnery and begins to blow the villain away. We leave the theater joyful, because the hero “saves” the day (significant word there) by overcoming the villain’s violence with greater violence.

If this myth were only a plot for Hollywood, there would be no significant problem beyond little boys that get all aggressive with each other at the bus stop following every new release. But, the myth does not stop at Hollywood. It is the unstated rationale behind wars and the industry that sustains war. The idea is that if the right person/country has the greater active or potential for violence in hand, he can use that violence (or the threat of it) to overcome lesser violence. Again, Wink calls this the myth of redemptive violence, because we think of it as having a good ending. Tragedy and unredemptive violence would be if the villains of the world could not be defeated.

On the other hand, Wink says that the cross is an example of “redemptive suffering,” where Jesus could have called 12 legions angels to come to his rescue (Matthew 26:53) but did not. He was an innocent victim, who overcame the violence of Rome by bearing it. His suffering itself is the redemptive act of God, not his greater act of violence. And this myth shows up in Jesus’ teaching as well- such as when he argues against the law of retaliation (“an eye for an eye”) and for “turning the other cheek.”

Contrary to our popular mythology, which sees suffering as a sign of weakness and waits anxiously for that “I can’t stands it no more” moment, the cross points to a different way where suffering itself is redemptive. And it is not a suffering to appease God’s anger and demand for satisfaction (similar to Anselm’s theory). It is suffering because Rome and other villains in the world are violent and they speak the language of violence to legitimate themselves. The cross is the ultimate answer to that violence. And that is why discipleship- following Jesus by taking up the cross- is the “narrow way” that is unpopular and often lonely.

Obviously, many Christians and churches have tried to transform the cross back into the myth of redemptive violence by subordinating the suffering Christ to the angry, Rambo-like Jesus who comes back on a white horse and kicks booty. The Christ of the cross- who suffered, died and was buried- becomes just a temporary picture of Christ, who really tried not to have to resort to violence, but- in the end- the lamb comes back as the roaring lion, etc. In my mind, that is one of the most shameful anti-Christian acts of subverting the true gospel message out there today.

Yet Another Way of Thinking "Blood"

I used to say—back in the 1980’s when it was timely and I was convinced that I knew everything—that the quickest way to end the cold war would be to simulate an invasion from Mars. Since that time, several Hollywood movies have expressed the same idea, only the rivalries have changed a bit. Think of all of the movies where brown, turbaned folks—typically representing an enemy of the US—joyfully cheer on the American heroes as they destroy the mothership of an even worse enemy from outer space. It’s the same kind of thing that would stop my brother and me from fighting whenever some kid that we both decided to dislike came on the scene. Oddly enough, both the rivalry and the spontaneous transfer of a rivalry to a third party are elements of the way that Rene Girard invites us to consider the doxology in Revelation that says Christ “freed us from our sins by his blood.”
You’ll need to google Girard to get a fuller (and perhaps fairer) description of his thought, but two of his ideas in general offer us a way of understanding the blood of Jesus differently than either Anselm’s substitutionary atonement (see the 5/20 blog post) or Irenaeus’ incarnational use (see the 5/22 blog post). What Girard describes is “mimetic desire” (mimetic means ‘imitative’) and “scapegoating.” “Mimetic desire” is what put my brother and me- or the US and the USSR, or Christendom and Islamdom- into conflict in the first place. (I just made up the word “Islamdom” as a way of separating the nobler aspects of Islamic faith from the political expressions of Islam that often overshadow the faith itself. That’s how I use the word “Christendom” also, by the way.) In mimetic desire, it is the desire to have what another has (and often not until the other has it) that lies at the root of many conflicts.
“Scapegoating” is the mechanism by which conflicting communities get beyond the impasse of their conflict and avoid totally annihilating one another. For my brother and me, it was a common enemy. For white, black, and brown faces in Hollywood movies, it is the amorphous ‘other’ inside of the enemy spaceship. And, in the absence of a well-timed common enemy, we create one by designating a ‘scapegoat’ or a sacrificial lamb, onto which we transfer all of our enmity and sins. Then, we kill or send away the sin-filled scapegoat and we ourselves emerge clean.
Girard shows that mimetic desire and scapegoating have been the “myths” at work in rivalries and religions for ages. But, he also argues that the death of Christ has exposed the sacrificial system by demonstrating that the ones who put the victim to death do not, in fact, emerge clean and forgiven, but are guilty of killing an innocent. To be “freed by the blood of Christ,” in Girard’s understanding would NOT be “freed because the gods are mollified by sacrifices.” We are “freed” because our whole scapegoating system has been exposed and now we have a choice between the need for scapegoating and the way of Christ which overcomes mimetic desire when we join the prayer, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
Rene Girard offers a way of joining the doxology and praising Christ for “freeing us by his blood,” which accepts that Jesus was the innocent sacrificial victim. But, unlike Anselm’s theory, God is not he one who was mollified by Jesus’ death. It was our tendency to scapegoat that was mollified and Jesus frees us by exposing that tendency and calling us to another way.
Next time, one last way of thinking ‘blood.’

Another Way of Thinking "Blood"

In my last post, I briefly described Anselm’s theory of substitutionary atonement and I said that it seems to be the church’s most popular way of describing Christ’s redemptive work today. It would seem then, when the doxology in Revelation says that Christ “freed us from our sins by his blood,” it is referring to the cross, where Jesus was mangled horrifically and left to bleed and suffocate on the cross. Likewise, we popularly think that whenever we take the bread and wine, remembering the words of Christ that describes them as “my body” and “my blood,” we think the reference again is to that horrific blood-letting on the cross. That’s the insistent theology behind songs that I grew up with, like “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,” and “There’s Power in the Blood.”

However, there are other ways of understanding “blood” references in the Scriptures- and they’re not all just products of unbelieving modernists who reject the truth and try to make Christianity more palatable to an unbelieving generation (which seems to be the assumption behind another fairly popular song, “I Still Believe There’s Power in the Blood.”) In fact, long before modernism became a problem, a very orthodox voice in the Christian Church spoke of the “blood of Christ” quite differently than the popular way of speaking about it today. I’m thinking of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons in the 2nd century.

Irenaeus is a key figure in church history for several reasons. He is one of the first to identify nearly all of the books of what we now call the New Testament; he names the first 12 Bishops of Rome as successors to the Apostles and the standard of true Apostolic teaching; and he gives a rationale for the number of Gospels in the New Testament, as well as some explanation of their unity among their differences. These arguments and recollections are found in his books called “Refutation and Overthrow of the Knowledge Falsely So Called,” but- thankfully- the books are typically called by the Latin title, “Adversus Haereses” (against heresies). In these books, Irenaeus is strongly arguing against a number of innovative “heresies” that were present in the still young church.

For our purposes, Irenaeus describes the “blood” of Christ (a term that he uses often) as a way of talking about the humanity of Christ, his incarnation, rather than his crucifixion. One of the heresies that he was taking on was the Gnostic thought that Jesus was never truly human, because material things are evil and the true Word of God could not be truly found within a material human body. Some even argued that Christ practically came down and stole a body so as to ‘appear’ to be human and suffering and dying and so forth. When Irenaeus argues that the “blood” of Christ is redemptive, he is arguing that the incarnation of Christ, when “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14), is God’s redemptive act in history. Therefore, Jesus is the “second Adam” that redeems the sin of the first Adam. (Irenaeus goes on to describe Mary as the faithful virgin whose act of obedience in bearing Jesus is what saves us from the disobedience of the virgin Eve.)

The point is that whenever Irenaeus refers to being redeemed by the “blood” of Christ, he is referring to the true humanity of Jesus as God’s way of salvation. Therefore, when we eat and drink the bread and wine/body and blood of Jesus, we are participating in the new humanity that Jesus brings. (I think it was Karl Rahner, the excellent Roman Catholic theologian of the late 20th century, who said that Jesus could have died of old age and still would have been God’s atoning sacrifice for us, because the incarnation is that act by which God redeems human life. He was self-consciously echoing Irenaeus’ Christology when he said that.)

So, when Revelation says that Jesus “freed us by his own blood,” we ought not automatically to think that it is a reference to the bloody cross. It might be at the other end of the Jesus spectrum- a reference to his blood-filled veins at birth.

More later…

"Blood" in the Bloodiest of Books

In my last post, I noted the doxology (a song of praise) that John offers in the opening sentences of Revelation:

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood,

and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father,

to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

I noted that biblical writers often turn to the doxological voice when the narratival or didactic voice seems unable to adequately grasp or express the subject at hand.

Today, I want to look a little at the content of this doxology. In particular, I want to ask the question, What does it mean when the writer says that Jesus "freed us from our sins by his blood"?

- Some translations read "washed us from our sins" instead of "freed us from our sins." That translation is based on a faulty reading of two very similar words, one of which means "to loose" and the other of which means "to brighten." The oldest manuscripts here are pretty well agreed that the verb is "to loose" or to set free. It's the same verb that is in Rev. 5:2, which refers to breaking a seal, but not the verb that is in Rev. 7:14 or 22:14, referring to washing robes.

- We tend to read every reference to the "blood of Jesus" through the eyes of a 12th century archbishop of Canterbury named Anselm, who articulated a thorough argument for what is often called "the substitutionary atonement theory" of salvation. Roughly and simplistically , Anselm's argument goes like this:

When humanity sinned, God's justice and honor demanded that there be a price paid. Namely, the violation of God's honor demands death. And, because God is just, God cannot simply say, "Oh, never mind. Let's just hug it out." God is just, therefore, God must be against sin and must punish sin, even with the awful price of death.
However, God is also a loving God. And, in an extreme act of love, God sent Jesus, his only son, to be our redemptive substitute. Therefore, when Jesus- who alone is sinless in all of humanity- was put to death on the cross, he was dying in our place, for our sins.

When we read this doxology from Revelation through Anselm's argument- which, in my experience, is the most popular way of understanding the redeeming work of Christ in the church- then it seems that the song is about being washed in the blood of Christ and being cleansed by it. But ... there are other voices in the Christian tradition which have given us other ways of understanding references to the "blood" of Christ and, consequently, the work of redemption in Christ. But, since my 'blackberry friends' have been complaining about the length of my posts, I'll explore a couple of those other possibilities next time.

Ciao

Back to Revelation!

I've taken a break (3 months, wow!) from dealing with "left behind" sorts of things in order to reflect on my recent trip to El Salvador. I'm now ready to get back into reading the biblical texts that pertain to what is generally called "eschatology" (doctrine of last things) again.

I left off in the first chapter of Revelation, noting that with phrases like "the faithful witness," "first-born of the dead," and so forth (1:5) the writer of Revelation ("John") is squarely within the Christology (doctrine of Christ) of other New Testament authors. And while John has some unique and ambiguous phrases in his references to Christ, most of his references can be related to either texts from the Hebrew Bible or texts from other "apocalyptic" writings within about a 300 year span (150ish BCE - 150ish CE).

In Revelation 1:5-6, there is a doxology about Christ. It goes like this:

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood,
and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father,
to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

While these words don't necessarily rhyme (and the Greek text is even worse!), there is actually a tune that puts these words into song and it's quite singable. I'm singing it now, but you don't get to hear it- sorry.

I think the presence of doxologies is VASTLY underappreciated in the New Testament. Oh, sure, we're accustomed to admiring the singfulness of the Psalms. But, when it comes to the New Testament, we generally think in terms of two types of writing: The narratival type of the Gospels and Acts; and the didactic type of the letters. But, there are times when narrative or didactic language is simply insufficient to express the wonder and power of what the New Testament writers are trying to say. For that, writers turn to doxology. What I like to say is, “When words fail, why not sing?”

Paul turns to doxological language at several key points in what is, perhaps, his most didactic letter- Romans. See especially Romans 8:31-39 as an example of Paul, breaking out into singing while addressing the unfathomable love of God.

That’s what John seems to do here- early!- in Revelation. Simply introducing Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, is enough to get John going with singing praise. That is key to understanding everything else that follows about Jesus in this book. Here is the one whose nature can only be express poetically in song.

We’ll look more closely at the words of the doxology next time.

A Little Bit of Fun

My SPAM file is always much larger than my inbox- an enduring testimony to the human propensity of taking a good gift, like the internet, and using it for inane purposes. Occasionally a real message gets thrown into the spam file, so I have to go through it and pull out what I want to save. It’s usually a yucky adventure, but somewhere along the line, I decided to make the best of it by collecting interesting spam headings that appear back-t0-back. Here are some actual spam headings that I found as I was emptying my files. As you will see, some of these headings go back a few months, but, taken together, they cover just about all of the major topics of spam messages except for the notification that a widow in Nigeria wants to give me a billion dollars.

How do I get out of debt: Unbelievable savings on generic meds

Debt elimination 101: Casino directory

To get out of debt: You can order anti-depressants

John McCain’s creative thinking: No study! Buy university diploma degree

Clinton reaches out to Obama: Help stop premature ejaculation

John McCain’s Monday with beach babes: Extreme hurts

The U. of Iowa offers concentration courses for religious service: Win big money

Sometimes, a single heading needs no accompaniment to be funny: "French have more sex in surveys than any other country."

And and finally, a single headline that demonstrates how even spammers have some degree of creativity and humor … “Sarah Jessica Parker arrested for gross negligee”

Enjoy!