ROOTS
OF
VIOLENCE
Krister Stendahl
ROOTS
OF
VIOLENCE
CREATING PEACE THROUGH
SPIRITUAL RECONCILIATION
FOREWORD
by James Carroll
PREFACE
by Brita Stendahl
INTRODUCTION
by Rebecca Pugh
by
Marc Brettler, Brandeis Universit y
Muzammil Siddiqi, Orange Count y Islamic Center
Rebecca Pugh, First Church in Ipswich
AFTERWORD
Pa r ac l e t e P r e s s
BREWSTER, MASSACHUSETTS
2016 First printing
Roots of Violence: Creating Peace Through Spiritual Reconciliation
Copyright © 2016 by The Estate of Krister Stendahl
ISBN 978-1-61261-815-9
The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc.
Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of
the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of
the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
Scriptures marked nrsv are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989,
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scriptures marked njps are taken from the Jewish Publication Society TANAKH translation
copyright © 1985, 1999 by the Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Stendahl, Krister, author.
Title: Roots of violence : creating peace through spiritual reconciliation /
Krister Stendahl ; foreword by James Carroll ; preface by Brita Stendahl ;
introduction by Rebecca Pugh ; afterwords, reflections by Marc Brettler,
Brandeis University, Muzammil Siddiqi, Orange County Islamic Center,
Rebecca Pugh, First Church in Ipswich.
Description: Brewster MA : Paraclete Press Inc., 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028404 | ISBN 9781612618159 (trade paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Peace--Biblical teaching. | Peace--Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC BS680.P4 S74 2016 | DDC 261.8/73--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028404
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published by Paraclete Press
Brewster, Massachusetts
www.paracletepress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword
JAMES CARROLL
1
Preface
B R I TA S T E N DA H L
5
Introduction
REBECCA PUGH
11
Salvation as Victory
15
Salvation as Nirvana
28
Salvation as Shalom
37
The Language of Violence and
the Language of Peace
51
Reflections
D R . M A RC B R E T T L E R
61
IMAM DR. MUZAMMIL SIDDIQI
71
DR. REBECCA PUGH
82
Notes about the Editing Process
88
Acknowledgments
92
Notes
94
Foreword
JAMES CARROLL
T
his book is a monument to Krister Stendahl’s
voice. That the writing here began as this
eminent scholar’s spoken word makes it all
the more precious because it rings with the immediacy
of Krister Stendahl’s living presence. He had a gift for
speaking as he thought, and the privileged ones who
heard him were buoyed by being invited into the working of a facile, original mind. It was because so much
of Krister’s teaching took place, as it were, on the fly
that his understanding, throughout a long career, continually renewed itself. But such spontaneity, of course,
achieved its rare gravity only because it was prepared
for by diligent study and masterful scholarship: on the
fly, perhaps, but never off the cuff.
Thus, in these pages, the reader feels nothing less than
the vivid nearness of the man, our dear companion on
the way. For legions of students, colleagues, dialogue
partners, and parishioners, Krister Stendahl’s presence was itself life-changing. In his own person, Krister
made his thinking and his believing radically available,
2
Roots
of
Violence
an act of supreme generosity. The two aspects of his
identity nurtured each other: because he was thought
embodied, he was faith-made-flesh. Across half a
century, his influence changed how Christians regard
their own tradition, which changed, in turn, the way
Christian faith is regarded by others. He made religious self-criticism a mode of religious commitment,
and then he went further by insisting, as a founder of
contemporary interreligious dialogue, that the truest selfcriticism takes place in the presence of “the other.” Krister
Stendahl was a giant on whose broad—if ever erect—
shoulders believers will stand for generations to come.
Krister’s watchword was peace—Shalom, Salaam. A
Swede who came of age during World War II, his conscience was braced by the Holocaust, which prompted
his readiness to investigate for complicity even the most
sacrosanct elements of his own tradition—the standard
reading of St. Paul, for example. Christian anti-Judaism,
which morphed into racial anti-Semitism, found its
greatest modern critic in this Lutheran theologian. His
being a pioneer in Jewish-Christian dialogue prepared
Krister then for an equally important role in a new—
and still self-critical—Christian reckoning with the
House of Islam.
Especially once religion re-emerged, in the twentyfirst century, as an engine of political conflict, this
Foreword: James Carroll
3
professor-priest devoted himself to the task of disarming
what he called the “antagonistic structures” of belief.
That was, for him, centrally a matter of finding a new
key in which to read the Bible. When violence became
the lens through which Krister re-viewed the texts,
two things became freshly apparent. First, the Bible is
rife with violence, but that is so because violence is the
problem to which the Bible is responding. Second, the
Bible tells the story of violence from the point of view
not of the powerful who inflict violence, but of those
upon whom it is inflicted. Humans are constitutionally
inclined (Original Sin?) to find the solution to the
problem of violence in yet more violence, but Krister
Stendahl, with intellectually honed clarity, but also
with
compassion
that
eschews
judgmentalism,
showed this to be the essential human error—tragedy
itself. He insisted that it is an error that can be overcome.
In the voice of Krister Stendahl himself, resonant
and strong throughout these pages, we hear the harmonies of reconciliation, the music of the man he was:
highly rational, yet attuned to the mystical; politically
responsible, yet grounded in a contemplative detachment; firmly Christian, yet prophetically ecumenical;
earnest, while imbued with good humor; painfully
aware of human self-destruction, yet stirring with
4
Roots
of
Violence
hope. Krister Stendahl was a man of peace—shalom,
salaam. We need him still. We need his voice. His
words remain.
w
Preface
B R I TA S T E H N DA H L
T
his is the story of a manuscript lost and found
and left unfinished. More curiously, it was
never written down onto paper by its author.
Its text was lifted from tapes sent to the lecturer who
put them in his closet where they rested, along with
many other tapes of others lectures he had given. At
one time he took them out and had them transcribed
and looked at what now had become a manuscript.
He sighed (I am sure) and tucked the bundle back in
his closet. When, years later, Rebecca Pugh came along
to study themes of violence and peace in Scripture,
the manuscript came out again. Perhaps with her help
there was a book in it, he thought. But I’ll let her tell
her story in her introduction.
The author was Krister Stendahl, my husband, a
professor at Harvard Divinity School for more than
thirty years and dean for eleven (1968–1979). Later,
as Bishop of Stockholm in his native Sweden (1984–
1988), he made much use of his unusual talent for
preaching, teaching, and lecturing. Words came easily
6
Roots
of
Violence
to him. Yet as a professor he had this anomaly: he
rarely sat down at his desk to produce the commentaries
like those which seemed to flow from the pens of his
colleagues. An intellectual restlessness made him incapable
of spending time repeating what others had written and
adding his own angle. What he wanted was to bring
about constructive new thinking. That itch made him
decide to accept the deanship, since an administrative
role forced him to make decisions and act on them
whether it meant the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of
others.
He communicated best through lectures, letters,
emails, notes, and telephone calls. He belonged to the
modern oral tradition. He felt the proximity of big existential questions and would never deny their reality, and
he conveyed this to students. His deep knowledge and
proficiency in several disciplines, and his keen awareness of the present, was an exhilarating experience. His
skill in the use of languages and his ability to shift style
from high to colloquial, done with humor and grace,
stimulated his listeners.
Over the years Krister gave lectures on the subject
“Roots of Violence in Scripture.” His first explicit attempt
was at Dana College, a small Lutheran school founded
by conservative pietistic Danish immigrants for the
education of ministers. These four sessions are the ones
Preface: Brita Stendahl
7
that were caught on tape, then hidden in his closet, and
now finally presented here. The first session was called
Salvation as Victory.
Krister is not speaking here about salvation as an
experience by an individual fighting sin and finding
forgiveness and peace in Jesus Christ, the Savior and
Redeemer. He is talking about the very real dangers
that are threatening humankind today. And how inadequate the language of Salvation as victory is. Krister
had grown up in the shadow of World War II. He
had seen the devastation of Germany and the newsreels from the opening of the concentration camps.
He had never been able to forget what he read of the
firestorms over Dresden or Tokyo. He had been deeply
shaken by the explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He was keenly aware of how life is threatened today
by ecological disasters and of course nuclear warfare.
He spoke up, against the violence in Scripture, where
God is on the side of the winner, as when the Israelites walked through the Red Sea by the help of God,
who then drowned the Egyptians. Krister points out
how dangerous the term victory is. Winning becomes
a kind of apocalypticism. What happens to the losers
is forgotten in the sport of victory. The Bible speaks
of the victims’ hatred of their enemy and their blind
lust for vengeance. The Book of Lamentations reveals
8
Roots
of
Violence
how war brings bitter fruits to those who have lost:
humiliation, starvation, exile, rape, torture. These are
all well known to us living in the twenty-first century.
How do we dare, says Krister, to speak of salvation as
victory and not remember the losers, the victims? How
do we dare forget how the spirit of vengeance is pining
to spring into action? And how vulnerable we all are?
In the following sessions of these lectures, Krister
asks whether there are other ways than victory for
speaking of God’s salvation. He reaches for the opposite pole of religious experience: Salvation as nirvana,
a via negativa. This is to disappear into God. God’s
mystery envelops me. In reality I am nothing. Monasteries and nunneries reverberate with this longing for
God, this “Cloud of Unknowing.” This is the way of
all the great mystics, not only in Christendom but in
Buddhism and Islam. There are mystics all over the
world. As Krister reminds us, God is God all over the
whole world, speaking and listening in all languages.
But our world of the twenty-first century cries out
for present-day, hands-on help. Krister as grandfather and great-grandfather felt the precariousness
of the world’s present situation. He held the future
of children always close to his heart. Were it not for
God, the outlook was grim, possibly hopeless. The
catastrophes a thoughtless world had inflicted upon
Preface: Brita Stendahl
9
itself are daunting. The earth itself is dying through
climate change that humankind has created. Fear of
the future, however, did not paralyze Krister. For God
all things are possible. He loved to quote the rabbinic
saying, “Now is the time to do a new thing for the
Lord.” This was the time to turn from war to learn
peace. He had found that the very pronunciation of
the Hebrew word Shalom and the Arabic word Salaam
both were exuding peace, breathing peace. It is high
time that the three religions of the Book turn to each
other in peace. The expression Krister seemed to favor
as most as helpful was “mending the creation,” and I
heard him many, many times speaking of helping God
hold back evil forces as “Mending the Creation.” In
the beginning, as Krister told the story, God created a
good thing and he saw it was good. But soon it went
awry because of the people. And God got so angry
that he flash-flooded the earth, flushing the creation
away. At this point in a familiar story Krister paused,
reminding his auditors what happened next: that
when God saw what he had done, he repented and
promised never to do it again. The rainbow stands in
the heavens as a sign of God’s promise to the world.
A remarkable God who repents and changes his mind!
Today this God wants the help of the people to mend
the creation, which again has been mortally wounded.
10
Roots
of
Violence
The last part of the manuscript is full of ideas intended
to help in holding back evil forces, calling us to realize
that we are all in the same boat threatened by catastrophe.
The enemies who once were far away across the ocean
are now our neighbors living in the same city, perhaps
across the street. We had better begin to talk to each
other, get acquainted or we might destroy one another,
realizing too late that we are sisters and brothers. The
first commandment in the Hippocratic oath declares:
“Do no harm!” It is not so easy as it sounds but it is a
good beginning to mend what is hurting. Krister used
humor to lighten the burden of imagining the scope
of the crisis. That was a typical trait of his lively wit’s
ability to adjust to his audience.
The manuscript of these four lectures on salvation
offers a sketch that gives inspiring insights into the
thinking of a passionate scholar. Reading it, we are
invited to use our own minds and hearts to fill in its
gaps and to sharpen its contours, to think it over,
check it, and rethink it: how to mend the creation.
w
Introduction
REBECCA PUGH
K
rister brought out the “Roots of Violence”
manuscript fifteen years ago when he and I
were working on a paper on monotheism and
peacemaking. I had begun as his student and become
his friend, and he had preached at my ordination.
Now we were working together as I pursued a PhD
in education. At that time, the covert wars in Latin
America were bloody, and the overt war in Iraq had
drawn the attention of the world. Though the “Roots
of Violence” lectures were a generation old, they spoke
to the current situation. The September 11 bombings
brought our attention again to the “Roots of Violence”
lectures because they speak to religious righteousness.
We thought we could edit them so they could be offered
to the wider community. But they waited on the desk
as we deliberated about the format. Just before Krister
died, he said he would take the files to the hospital,
read them over, and give me a set of instructions. That
night, he wrote a letter.
12
Roots
of
Violence
Dear Generous Rebecca.
I have read and pondered now for some
time, and it is increasingly clear to me that the
chatty and somewhat undisciplined manuscript
is beyond redemption for just being edited into
a book manuscript. Which leads me to suggest
that—if you want—you are totally free to use
any of my ideas and incorporate them in a book
of your own…I appreciate so much your encouragement, but now it is up to your generation…
with affection, + Krister
After his funeral and memorial service, Brita called,
and we met to imagine how to respect Krister’s wishes
and bring forward the ideas of the “Roots of Violence.”
Brita and I combed through the notes and the chapters. With Brita’s translating, I was able to work with
Krister’s handwritten Swedish outlines. At times, when
the transcripts varied from the outlines, Brita helped
make it easy to see what Krister had first brainstormed.
There was another thing too. Over the five years that
the lectures traveled the world with Krister, they had
become interactive. Krister, speaking as a Christian,
had asked for the leadership of his colleagues from the
Muslim and Jewish communities. In the transcripts,
we have just the initial record: the text from the first
Introduction: Rebecca Pugh
13
delivery at Dana College. Yet we knew that Krister
had taken the ideas and adapted them, bringing forth
current political issues, listening to his colleagues of
diverse faiths.
We were grateful when Imam Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi
agreed to return to the dialogue in 2012 and add his
reflections, as he had done twenty-eight years earlier at
the University of California at Irvine when Krister had
come to bring this lecture series there. Dr. Marc Brettler,
Krister’s colleague in the Department of Near Eastern
and Judaic studies at Brandeis University, offered to
bring his comments too, as Rabbi Henri Front, who had
joined Dr. Siddiqi and Krister in Irvine, had passed away
and we could not reconstruct his words without notes.
With Siddiqi’s and Brettler’s remarks, we were able to
respect Krister’s wish to renew the manuscript. Indeed,
multi-religious dialogue was Krister’s legacy. To bring
this diverse conversation back to its rightful place in the
“Violence” lectures was in a sense to find the missing
piece.
In the lectures, Krister suggests a paradigm shift. He
redefines salvation, from the traditional landscape of
fleeing from Satan’s snares and winning the war to a
different kind of religious triumph. Salvation is still a
victory, but of another sort. It is not the triumph in a
conflict in which the victor rises up and the vanquished
14
Roots
of
Violence
is defeated. Rather, it is the resolution of a dispute in
which the competitors, side by side, take on a greater
enemy, which is violence itself. The “Roots of Violence”
lectures describe the tools for such a solution, embedded
in the scriptures and the traditions of the monotheistic
cultures. His message is clear. He wants embattled
communities to find victory over violence rather than
victory through violence. Concerned that the symbol
systems of conflict have become obsolete, he speaks
into the chaos and asks for a new way.
w
Salvation as Victory
L
et us start with a prayer I learned from the
Jewish Hasidic tradition. It is short and to the
point: “One thing I ask of you, Lord: that I
not use my reason against the truth.”
My topic is salvation as victory.1 I come to you
shocked by the escalating violence in the world around
us. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., changed the climate
of the land. We have witnessed hijackings, piracy, and
violence in all of its forms—violence in the streets
where there is not “an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth” but a life for the purse of an old woman. We
are surrounded by mass assassinations and executions,
deeds that we call “terrorist” if others do them and
“defense” if we do them. There is torture, which some
people try to dress up by saying that it is not so bad if it
is done by authoritarians, but it is bad when it is done
by totalitarians. But the thumbscrews feel the same no
matter who has put them on.
We have broken through a threshold. We have gone
past the watershed of what is bearable in terms of
16
Roots
of
Violence
violence. The unthinkable has become the actual. The
Holocaust was a stepping over the threshold of the
unthinkable for all of humanity. Now the unthinkable
is a household word, suffering language inflation in
thoughtless talk.
I ask whether there is a streak of violence in the
Biblical—in the Christian, the Jewish, and the Muslim—
traditions. If I were to call together a dialogue between
Muslims, Christians, and Jews, I would make this the
topic. Let us search our scriptures, our consciences,
and our history, and ask ourselves whether there is in
us a streak of violence, and what the resources are that
can be used to counteract it.2
The roots of violence is my topic: not the roots of
violence in others, but the potential roots of violence in
us. In the beginning we may lay them bare. In the end,
though, we will explore resources for overcoming the
violence. Indeed, these are resources that have made
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam so rich.
Of course, we don’t understand how there could be
anything wrong with us, because we love. Oh, we love.
But I looked at a textbook the other day, used in an
American high school. It said that America was discovered in the fifteenth century. It is obvious that when
Columbus came, there were already people here. So
somebody must have discovered it earlier. But we live
Salvation as Victor y
17
in a world where nothing happens until we come. Ask
the nations which have suffered our colonial expansion.
There are very few places in the world—especially in the
Protestant world (Catholic history is a little different)—
where it was the missionaries who came first. It was,
rather, the soldiers and the merchants. It is easy for us
to keep these things apart. We are spiritual and we have
separation between church and state (which sometimes
seems the only doctrine Americans believe in). But it
didn’t look like that to the native peoples here.
Don’t try to evade the problem here by saying, “Of
course, Christianity is always kosher. If anything goes
wrong, it is because Christians don’t live up to their
high ideals.” That is a little like the saying of G. K.
Chesterton, “They say that Christianity has failed; I
would rather suggest that it has never been tried.”3
That’s an awfully clever line, but it is not very convincing
after two thousand years. We have had a fair time to
show what we are.
One of the difficulties with being a Bible reader as I
am—one who, by profession and human curiosity, reads
the whole thing, and not just those golden quotations
that we often use as a kind of rhetoric around what
we thought already anyway—is that in many of the
most beautiful passages in the Bible there suddenly
comes a scream of violence. One of the most beautiful
18
Roots
of
Violence
psalms is the 139th: “O Lord, Thou hast searched me
and known me. Thou knowest when I sit down.” But
before we are through, it says: “O that Thou wouldst
slay the wicked. Do I not hate them that hate thee? I
hate them with a perfect hatred.” We soften “perfect
hatred” by saying, “Of course that doesn’t mean hatred.”
But there it lies.
Or take Psalm 137, which is a powerful piece of
poetry. “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down
and wept. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a
foreign land?” It ends on the note, “Happy shall he be,
who takes your little ones, O Babylon, and dashes them
against the rocks.” In some of the liturgical editions,
that one line is cut out, and for a reason. But it is there
in the original.
What about the mighty words in Psalm 58? “O God,
break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of
the young lions, O Lord! Let them vanish like water that
runs away, like grass to be trodden down and wither.
Let them be like the snail which dissolves into slime.”
That’s a pretty good picture of hell. “Like the untimely
birth that never sees the sun. . . . The righteous will
rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his
feet in the blood of the wicked.”
And “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence
of my enemies.” Right in that wonderful Psalm 23, we
Salvation as Victor y
19
find the glee of the righteous. Tertullian wasn’t so far
off when he said, “Nothing contributes more to the
joy of the saved than to see the pain of the wicked in
hell.”4 It’s part of our tradition. And if you haven’t seen
it, it has yet been seen by those who look at us from the
outside. There is no way of eradicating it.
Some may say, “Oh, that’s the Old Testament. But
Jesus, as over and against that Old Testament God of
wrath, Jesus is the God of love.” But it is not the Old
Testament which speaks about the gnashing of teeth in
hell. All the hellfire and brimstone is in the teaching of
Jesus. It was picked up by the medieval Church.
Not Paul. He had studied theology. He knew that
if you played up the negative side of things too much,
you had trouble with the theoretical doctrine of God’s
omnipotence. If Satan had such a free hand, the omnipotence of God was in danger of being infringed upon.
Paul was a theologian. But Jesus spoke the language
of the people. And so there was brimstone and hellfire
and gnashing of teeth.5
What was it Paul said? “Don’t seek your own vengeance.” Don’t pursue enemies with your own little
popgun when the atomic blast is around the corner.
“Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord. And therefore,
when your enemy is hungry, feed him. When he’s
thirsty, give him to drink. This is not in order to help
20
Roots
of
Violence
him. But thereby, you are collecting coals of fire on his
head, so that he gets his retribution later on. This is
part of the “Good News,” as they say.
There is a streak of violence, and it is not only violent language and violent thoughts. It is right there in
the Book of Revelation—this kind of a script for a horror movie, with the woes and the bottomless pit and
the whole thing. It lies there. What shall we do with it?
At least this much we can say, that the Bible is not a
Sunday school book. The pictures are very adult: they
represent at least an R-rated view of the world, and
entertain an outpouring of human emotions of hatred
and violence.
My first suggestion is this: Ever since Exodus, the
founding event of the Biblical tradition, salvation has
been understood as liberation from slavery, and as
victory over the oppressor. That is what liberation
theology means, and that is why we think of salvation
as the victory of everything good. But I want to suggest
that such a portrayal may also be the very reason for
the violence in the Bible. The glorious notion of salvation
as victory has an ugly downside. The vanquished. The
Egyptians. The fact that our religious symbol system has
as one of its most basic metaphors what I call “salvation
as victory,” leads to the question, “What happens to the
vanquished?”
Salvation as Victor y
21
This also goes for the question of resurrection.
When resurrection thought was born, at the borderline between the end of the Old Testament period and
early Judaism, its point was victory, the victory and
restoration of the martyrs. They were, you know, those
holy ones in Matthew 27 who didn’t quite know their
time and so came rushing into the resurrection early,
already on Good Friday. Resurrection meant that God
was not going to forget the martyrs. God was going to
vindicate them.
But there are two extensions of that thought. On
the one hand, you vindicate the martyrs. On the other,
you get more and more interested in what happens to the
rascals. This culminated in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
When people think about Dante, they always think
about Purgatory or Hell. I’ve never heard of anyone getting
high on the Paradiso. That’s dull. But the capacity for Hell
in our imagination is unbounded. That happens also
in the church. That’s why the Hell Department grew;
it developed in different stages. The Roman Catholics
were the nicest ones. They created a kind of motel with
different floors. It didn’t have any Biblical basis, but it’s
a nice thought, compared to the Lutheran doctrine that
a lot of people go straight down, like a rock.
Unless we smoke out the dangerous side to victory
language, we might be in trouble. Let me give you a
22
Roots
of
Violence
striking example of the limits of victory language. In
New Testament times, when Jerusalem fell, when the
Jewish nation came to an end, when the Jews were dispersed and the Romans plowed up the Holy Place, it was
said to be a great moment of victory for the Christians.
That’s how they interpreted it: that it proved they were
right and the Jews were wrong, that the Christ killers
had been the God killers. The whole history of Judaism
and Christianity is conditioned by this way of reading
the calamity in Jerusalem as a Christian victory.
Two thousand years later came the Holocaust. And
few Christians had the gall to praise it as a great Christian victory, but there were some. We had as a student
at Harvard Divinity School, Susannah Heschel, the
daughter of the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel.6
Susannah met with one of our evangelical students,
and his comment to her was, “Now, after the Holocaust, you must understand that it is time for you to
turn to Christ.” There were relatively few who thought
that way about the Holocaust. The whole Christian
tradition, theologically and conceptually, is shaped by
the belief that the Holocaust caused by the Romans
in the first century was for the glory of Christ, but we
could not bring ourselves to say it about this other one.
There are many reasons for that. It was partly the
magnitude. It was partly the breaking through of the
Salvation as Victor y
23
threshold of the unthinkable. It was partly the technological nature. It was partly the strange mixture of
decency into this satanic thing (there were no burning ovens within the German realm; only in Poland.)
It was partly the gruesomeness. As Rubenstein has
rightly pointed out, this was not an event in Jewish
history only.7 It was a quantum jump, a crossing of
a threshold in the history of human violence. It also
became clear that our old ways of dealing with evil,
saying God either sent it as a punishment or allowed it
for educational purposes, became offensive in the face
of the magnitude of what happened—we lost our taste
for playing the winner.
Now, the victory language. Let’s ask ourselves
whether there are other options. I think many of us
know what it means to think about God as the one
who turns things upside down, so that justice flows
and crime doesn’t pay. But let’s watch the language,
lest we play into violence by our very mode of thinking
and being.
I suggest a couple of alternatives. One is highly
theoretical and directed to those who have studied formal theology. When I studied theology, one
of the fancy phrases used by pastors who felt superior to lay people was “salvation history.” Some
even thought it got more Lutheran if they said it in
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German: Heilsgeschichte. Salvation history centers
the whole enterprise on the fact that God is working
out salvation in history. Bultmann even knew where
the midpoint was and how much overlap there was.8
And so we got it all straight: Everything was salvation
history, and those benighted old liberals were wrong
because they had not understood this. I loved it. And
the fallen man in me still loves it somehow. But I come
now to think that there is a flaw here: It is not God’s
victory. It is a victory of small human minds.
The other alternative is that, rather than seeing the
Bible as a blueprint of history, we find the lesson in
the stories. In Biblical studies and elsewhere, the first
two letters of the word history fall away. This is to
understand that God deals with us not through items
plotted on grandiose historical charts, but through stories. The teachings of Jesus at their innermost core, of
course, are stories. We call them “parables” so they get
a little more dignified, but they are stories, and they
are funny. All of them are funny. The Jews have always
used a little humor when speaking about God, because
otherwise people might think the speaker is saying they
know how it really is. If you put in a little humor it is a
kind of flag saying, “I’m just telling a story.”
You remember how Jesus spoke about the sower who
went out to sow and some fell on the stony ground and
Salvation as Victor y
25
some on the road and some on thistles, and only a wee
bit fell on the good ground. So that seemed to make it
all worthwhile. Now, nobody laughs when I tell that
story in church, because most of us are trying to figure
out what kind of ground we are, and that’s not a very
funny thought. But Jesus was saying that of course no
farmer is like that. I mean, farmers don’t do that. They
didn’t do it then, and they don’t do it now. I mean
that’s not what one does. But God is a little funny. A
shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness
to run after one had the wrong cost-benefit analysis.
Apparently God did not go to Harvard Business School.
The story is something other than saying: “I came
up with this idea as The Central Thing in all theology.”9 It involves something much smaller, a word of
wisdom and truth and compassion. We are interested
in the story.
There is a significant thing that happened with Judaism,
after the fall of the Temple, in the year 70 of the Common
Era. Most theologians will tell us, and I think rightly, that
one of the great gifts of the Biblical tradition is the concept
of not just some saga with nothing new under the sun, but
that things are puttering along, going someplace. This is
the concept of history.
This is what it says in the textbooks, that history is
one of the great things of the Old Testament. But at the
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moment the Jewish world collapsed, the Jews made a
surprising theological move. They moved the center of
gravity, the theological center, the organizing magnetic
field, from a preoccupation with history and eschatology to the timeless, ever present Torah, Law. To questions
of ethics. To questions of the right way of living. To the
question, “How do I walk rightly with God?” They
had wonderful ideas about the Messiah and the Messianic
banquet, but they did it in a playful way. It was not
what one died for. One died for right acts.
This was the move that placed ethics as the center
of human concern, over against the speculations of
history. This was what made Judaism centered in the
question of Halakhah, the question of how I should
act. Perhaps they had read Job and found, as had Job’s
friends, the little creeps, that human speculation about
the historical drama was beyond their limits. The “only
one thing” the Lord required of you was that you were
faithful. It was a major move.
The Christians moved the opposite way, picking up
history, eschatology, salvation history.10 They have
gotten a lot of good mileage out of it. But it’s a dangerous thing. When the great Assyriologist Thorkild
Jacobsen was asked to give a speech at the conclusion
of a Jewish Christian colloquium, at Harvard, he stood
up. He read a lament over the fall of Nineveh. “This,
Salvation as Victor y
27
to my knowledge,” said Thorkild, “was the first time
that a people tried to use direct historical events for
theological theories. You Jews and you Christians are
the heirs to that tradition. And that explains some of
the greatest things with you, and some of the worst.”
Then he sat down. Jacobsen knew that playing with
history, and playing with victory and defeat language,
assigning oneself usually to the “right” side, breeds
violence.11
I think I have reason to speak with a heavy heart.
May God be with us, and grant us the grace to put
right what is wrong.
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Salvation as Nirvana
I
n our reflections on whether the Biblical tradition
contains germs that might contribute to an attitude
of violence, we raised the problem of the vanquished.
There is not only heaven but also hell. There are the
saved and the damned.
This is clearer when you look at the opposite extreme.
You could say the idea of nirvana is the purest example
of such a religious system, where salvation is not that
they might have life and have it galore, as it says in
John 10:10, but rather the via negativa, salvation by
negation. In Buddhism’s intense form of via negativa,
anything the human mind clings to has the potential to
pollute the soul; even clinging to God is an affirmation
of the ego.
Describing salvation as the dying away of everything that pertains to the ego is not unknown in the
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Mysticism
is to a very large extent losing oneself in God, being
absorbed by God, dying away from the world. It is no
coincidence that mysticism and asceticism usually go
together.
Salvation as Nirvana
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The via negativa, being absorbed in the One, with
its strong Platonic and Neoplatonic roots, comes out
of Hellenistic culture. Paul is a specialist in this department. Paul is the one who reminds Christians that we
are groaning with the creation. Paul is the one who
doesn’t want us to forget that whatever the outcome is,
the struggle is still going on. But note that he does this
in a way that recalls the theology of the cross rather
than the theology of glory.
He does this, especially, over and against Johannine
theology.12 In the Gospel of John, things are glorious.
Jesus knows everything. When he says “I thirst” on the
cross, John is anxious to say, “Of course, Jesus was not
thirsty. How can God be thirsty? But Jesus said this in
order to fulfill the scriptures.” The Jesus in the Gospel
of John hardly touches the ground. In the Gospel of
John, Jesus never dies. He says the time has come for
him to be glorified. And when Jesus cries the last word
on the cross, it certainly is not the “Lama, lama, lama
sabachthani?”—“Why have you forsaken me?” But it
is “I made it.” “I conquered.” “It is accomplished.”
There you have the victory. Even the cross isn’t allowed
to be a cross, but rather a catapult into glory. Indeed,
it is as Irenaeus13 called the cross, “A crane toward
immortality.” That is a theology of glory. Sometimes
when I am down, I like it, because people can wallow
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too much in this world’s misery. But Paul was afraid of
that kind of theology. He saw it as his task constantly
to rub our noses in the ground, that we remember we
are still groaning with creation.
Paul had a funny way of using even “glossolalia,”
the speaking in tongues, to make that point. Speaking
in tongues has a democratizing effect in the church. We
word-slingers have an unfair advantage until others
who are not so good with words get a little help from
the Holy Spirit. But Paul also saw that people got high
on speaking in tongues, feeling that they were better
Christians than the others. In Romans 8 he says, “And
so it is that we sometimes are so weak that we don’t
know what to pray. And then the Holy Spirit comes
to our assistance and intercedes for us by unspeakable
groans.” Glossolalia becomes a sign of our weakness,
rather than proof of our glory.
In the truly Pauline Epistles, Paul never says we
have died with Christ and we have risen with Christ.
He says we have died with Christ and we shall rise
with Christ, in the future. On the borderline between
Paul and the Pauline tradition, in Colossians 3, he
says, “You have died and your life is hid with Christ
in God.” He is constantly watching so that we don’t
get too much victory, because that would overstate our
actual situation. That is the theology of the cross. That
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is the theology about which the gospel spoke. It is an
antidote to any theology of victory.14
All of us who have sound insights into the theology
of the cross will find that the cross is still the deeper
and smarter way to victory.15 I think about that sometimes when I listen to sermons or meditate on Good
Friday.16 Because that was the day when love, even the
love of God, was defeated, trampled underfoot. Had
not God started something new on Easter, love’s labor
would have been lost, even God’s love’s labor would
have been lost, as it usually is in the world.17 The dying
is the real thing. Here is a major theological challenge
for Orthodox Christianity: if you “up” the divinity of
Jesus, his death is not a real death. If Jesus knew all
along, then his death was easy. Yes, there was pain. Yes,
there was thirst. Yes, the vinegar was vinegar. But two
days is a short eternity, and then the victory is there.
One of the most interesting questions in Christian
scripture is, what is its centerpiece? Is it the salvation, or is it the debacle, the death?18 Had God not
started anew, there would have been nothing. That’s
very important. That’s why Paul never says “Christ
rose.” It always says in truly Pauline language, “And
God raised him.” Christ is never the self-propelled love
missile. No. He is a new creative act of God. This is the
theology of the cross.
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There is another strange note in the theology of the
cross, one of the strangest verses we encounter in Paul’s
thinking, 1 Corinthians 15:25:
For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed
is death. For “God has put all things in subjection
under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are
put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not
include the one who put all things in subjection
under him. When all things are subjected to him,
then the Son himself will also be subjected to the
one who put all things in subjection under him, so
that God may be all in all. (nrsv)
Origen19 was labelled a heretic during the Arian controversy for his claim, based on 1 Corinthians 15, that
Jesus was subordinate to God in the Trinity. It took a
long time before they sort of re-honored him. Truth
is hard. When Paul says, “I am sorry to say that there
are some who do not believe in the Resurrection,”
he means they do not believe in the Resurrection as a
future event. Paul says, “Now I will tell you how it will
look on the last day. Finally, the Christ, the son, will
lay down all before the Father and God will become
All in All.” It is as if Christ disappears.
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If I were to explain what Paul had in mind, I would
have to tell it as the rabbis tell stories. The story would
go something like this: It is the Judgment Day, or the
Last Day. And there we are, the Lutherans up front
through justification by faith. And it looks just as we
had thought. There is God. There is Christ on the
right side. As we look around, there is everybody else.
There we are, all the humans. And if you love your
dog very much, who knows, he might even be with
you. I don’t know. There’s no Biblical basis for denying
it. We look around. There are the Presbyterians. The
Episcopalians. The whole menagerie. The Jews and the
Muslims, and the Buddhists, who thought that there
would be nothing. And the Christians turn to the others with that supercilious smile, by which to say, “You
see, it is as we said, and isn’t God gracious to have
you here also?” It is then, when they look back toward
God, that there is no Christ to see. Because even Christ,
even the glorified Christ, steps aside, and God becomes
All in All. This is the ultimate theology of the cross.
No, the via negativa is that enormously strange way
in which even one’s religious victoriousness is dying
away. In On the Bondage of the Will Luther speaks
against Erasmus. He says, “If God wants to send
me to Hell, then that’s salvation for me, because it’s
always salvation when God’s will is done.” Now, that’s
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a tour de force. It’s a little like Paul when he says, “I
wish I were anathema and cast away from Christ, if
that could help the missionary effort.” It is having died
away from even one’s religious victoriousness.
This God-centeredness about which Luther spoke—
“God’s will be done and that’s all that matters”—seems
weird in our era. When I was young I sang a Norwegian song:
God is God even if all land were waste;
God is God even if all human beings were dead.20
To be concerned only with God, to be absorbed into
God, to lose oneself: that is the way of the mystics.
A mystic is a person who by practice, by prayer,
by meditation seeks union with God. Time and space
disappear; there is neither before nor after, but only a
single, ever-present now, the now of God, because for
God there is no before and after, but only essence and
existence. It is among the mystics, by and large, that
you find the strongest voices for peace in the fullest
and deepest sense of that word—the drastic longing to
die away from human passions of hatred. In a certain
sense, the mystic also wants to die away from the human
passions of love, because it is impossible to die away
from one passion without dying away from another.
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“When I have you, I am asking about nothing else
in the world,” says the psalmist. That’s the mystic. In
the ultimate state the mystic does not even say that any
more, but is absorbed. When Jesus says, “Strive first
for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all
these things will be given to you as well,” he describes
doing things out of their essence, salvation as nirvana.
According to Jewish tradition, Moses came down
and found the people fooling around with the golden
calf—it was actually a bull, but the Bible is a little
skittish so it’s called a calf—and Moses got angry so
he smashed the tablets, and had to go up and get a
second edition. And that second edition, thought the
rabbis, was different than the first. Because it was now
taking into account the stubbornness of those golden
calf dancers. Thereby the pure expression of the will of
God had been tainted by the evil that it would have to
try to counteract. The new set of commandments was
constructed to be a counterbalance to the human greed
and insecurity and lust that the golden calf dancers had
shown. So it is with the via negativa.
Remember the story when David went out to meet
Goliath? Saul said, “Why don’t you take my armor? I
have wonderful armor and Goliath is big.” David was
tempted to take that armor but said, “No, I had better take just my little sling. Because that is what I am
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used to, and that is authentic with me.” The mystics
are among us; they have a voice and we should listen
to them. Blessed be the mystics, for whom via negativa
is an open possibility.
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