Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments catholic and gay by James Alison (Crossroad, 2001), 239 pp.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas affirms: “like all James Alison’s books, [this one] is almost frighteningly profound.” He says the author helps us to “discover how debates about ‘homosexuality’ can be repositioned from the stance of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ to ‘us’ versus ‘us’.” And so Alison does — in all these essays written over a six-year period of worldwide exile and pilgrimage. His witness is that “a heart-close-to cracking [and] threatened by confusion [is] necessary for participation in theological discourse.” Indeed, for him, “the words ‘Jesus is Lord’ becomes not a slogan, but a gasp.”
Reared as an evangelical Protestant, Alison is now an openly gay English Roman Catholic theologian, though when he uses the term “Catholic,” he’s “not sure whether I mean ‘Roman Catholic’ or simply Christian.” In his poignant call for “overcoming tit for tat,” he acknowledges that “the gift of the thought of Rene Girard [theorist of violence, persecution and scapegoating] underpins all the chapters of this book.” (This is a mixed blessing.) Recognizing that each of us is “partially excluded and partially an excluder,” Alison appeals for “unbinding our sibling rivalry and fratricide” fueled by self-righteous blaming.
Alison sees “the Jesus question” in first-century Palestine and “the gay question” today as “structurally similar.” The conservative establishment of Jesus’ day rejected him as substandard,just as today’s establishment rejects homosexuals. He finds it instructive that “one of the surprisingly few places where Jesus quotes Hebrew Scripture with absolute approval — and he quotes it twice,” is Hosea 6:6 [“I want mercy and not sacrifice.”] He notes that Jesus undoes the religious establishment’s “social construction of goodness.”
In the story of Nicodemus, Alison finds further biblical clues for navigating church issues of homosexuality today. For one thing, he sees there “a self-critical process of learning to find [oneself] to have been wrong about a whole number of presuppositions and teachings which [one] had regarded as sacred.” He also sees there the “uncovering [of] a number of elements in [one’s] own tradition which were of far greater weight and importance than [one’s] contemporary orthodoxy.” To some, this application is shocking. But so it was for Nicodemus as well. And for the transformed Paul: “His whole life and apostolic experience afterwards is marked by the collapse of a sacred world within which he had been an especially ferocious militant, a collapse produced by the recognition that in his zeal to serve God, it had been God whom he had been persecuting. … To each step of the clearer and more complete revelation of God, … there is a corresponding and simultaneous collapse of a whole series of elements which seemed to have been indispensable bulwarks of faith.”
Alison contends against the centuries-old “mechanism of violent exclusion dressed up as the word of God,” the “pathological loyalty” to religious institutions and the “pathological rejection” of faith that is a common and tragic reaction to such institutionalization. He well asks: “Do we find ourselves speaking in a way which allows us to keep our jobs or reputations, to hold on to our grievances and perceived victimary status, but not to communicate oracles of God? To what extent are we part of the problem, not part of the solution? … ‘Are we succumbing to the institutional tendency to bind up heavy burdens on people’s backs and not lift a finger to help them?’ ‘Have we been trapped by our own arguments into systemically straining out gnats and swallowing camels?’ ‘Has our insistence on a certain sort of continuity of teaching led us to confuse the word of God with the traditions of men?’” Alison asserts: “It is not an unchristian thing to do to be able to detect hypocrisy in the ranks of our religious authorities. It is not an unchristian thing to question the peculiar forms of structural blindness to which religious professionals are prone when we construct ways of living and modes of discourse which set us apart from others. On the contrary, such questioning is one of the most especially Christian things we do.”
The other side of this coin of questioning is the proclamation of grace. This, in Alison’s words, is “the lovingkindness and audacity of God who invites us just as we are … by means of the crucified and risen brother,” where “the dead and risen Christ offers … the means of edification … [to the] ‘bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench’ [Isa 42:3].” He adds that “no form of social and cultic belonging can survive the perception that our victim was in fact God himself, present in Jesus.”
Given our common ground in both sin and God’s grace, Alison hopes that “the real discussion about church teaching [might] get underway when we have done the hard work of ensuring that both our listening and our speaking are only at the fraternal level.” He looks forward to the time when “resentment finally packs it in, and we begin to be able to love beyond reaction [under] the real, non-resentful presence of the risen Lord.” It is then that, for us, “Jesus moves from being cardboard confrontational word to becoming living real interpretive presence collapsing group boundaries.”
“Frighteningly profound” indeed.
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