Roots Violence

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ROOTS OF VIOLENCE Krister Stendahl ROOTS OF VIOLENCE Krister Stendahl ROOTS OF VIOLENCE CREATING PEACE THROUGH SPIRITUAL RECONCILIATION

F O REWORD by James Carroll

PREFACE by Brita Stendahl

INTRODUCTION by Rebecca Pugh

AFTERWORD by Marc Brettler, Brandeis University Muzammil Siddiqi, Orange County Islamic Center Rebecca Pugh, First Church in Ipswich

Paraclete Press BREWSTER, MASSACHUSETTS 2016 First printing

Roots of Violence: Creating Peace Through Spiritual Reconciliation

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.

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

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Published by Paraclete Press Brewster, Massachusetts www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America Contents

Foreword JAMES CARROLL 1

Preface BRITA STENDAHL 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

DR. MARC BRETTLER 61

IMAM DR. MUZAMMIL SIDDIQI 71

DR. REBECCA PUGH 82

Notes about the Editing Process 88

Acknowledgments 92

Notes 94

Foreword

JAMES CARROLL

his book is a monument to Krister Stendahl’s voice. That the writing here began as this Teminent 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, con- tinually 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 self- criticism 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 con- science 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 twenty- first 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 over- come. In the voice of Krister Stendahl himself, resonant and strong throughout these pages, we hear the har- monies of reconciliation, the music of the man he was: highly rational, yet attuned to the mystical; politically responsible, yet grounded in a contemplative detach- ment; firmly Christian, yet prophetically ecumenical; earnest, while imbued with good humor; painfully aware of human self-destruction, yet stirring with 4 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e hope. Krister Stendahl was a man of peace—shalom, salaam. We need him still. We need his voice. His words remain.

w Preface

BRITA STEHNDAHL

his is the story of a manuscript lost and found and left unfinished. More curiously, it was T 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 exis- tential questions and would never deny their reality, and he conveyed this to students. His deep knowledge and proficiency in several disciplines, and his keen aware- ness 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 inad- equate 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 news- reels 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 Israel- ites 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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. Monas- teries 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e

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

rister brought out the “Roots of Violence” manuscript fifteen years ago when he and I K 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e

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 encour- agement, 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 chap- ters. 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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

et us start with a prayer I learned from the Jewish Hasidic tradition. It is short and to the L 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 Ken- nedy, 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 Victory 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 Victory 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 hor- ror 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 Victory 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 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 dis- persed 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 Chris- tian 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 Holo- caust, 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 Victory 23 threshold of the unthinkable. It was partly the tech- nological nature. It was partly the strange mixture of decency into this satanic thing (there were no burn- ing 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 supe- rior to lay people was “salvation history.” Some even thought it got more Lutheran if they said it in 24 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e

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 Victory 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 26 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 Victory 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.

w Salvation as Nirvana

n our reflections on whether the Biblical tradition contains germs that might contribute to an attitude Iof 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 29

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 30 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 Salvation as Nirvana 31 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. 32 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e

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 con- troversy 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. Salvation as Nirvana 33

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 34 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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 Norwe- gian 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. Salvation as Nirvana 35

“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 36 R o o t s o f V i o l e n c e 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.