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A view from the stern: James Alison's theology (so Far)

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1999 by Hefling, Charles

James Alison is a godly writer. One of God's attributes in Alison's writings is effervescence, and the writing itself has the same quality. it has appeared, so far, in three books published in quick succession-a small one, Knowing Jesus, a middle-sized one, Raising Abel, and most recently The Joy of Being Wrong, a big one that began as a dissertation.* Each in its own way evinces a vivacious enthusiasm not commonly found in serious theology-and serious theology Alison's is, in every sense. On the theoretical side it develops and applies the work of Rene Girard, in the light of Alison's experience, on the practical side, of ministry among persons living with AIDS.

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The newest book,the big one, will be referred to most often in this article, partly because it supports, amplifies, and contextualizes the other two. Certainly Knowing Jesus and especially Raising Abel can be read on its own. But Alison's is a large project, and I, for one, found that re-reading Abel after The Joy of Being Wrong was published enhanced its value. The article has four increasingly specific sections. The first present an overview of Alison's theological position. The second and third section examine particular topics: Christology and original sin respectively. The fourth continues the third, posing some critical questions about the "fall" as Alison envision it. A fifth section follows by way of a coda.

As a disciple of Girard, Alison belongs to a company that includes Gil Baillie, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, James Williams, and Raymund Schwager, authors whose work his own both complements and compliments. As a group, all these writers are in a fundamental sense readers. They expound texts, principally narrative texts. In this they are emulating Girard himself, whose readings of Proust and Dostoyevsky, Cervantes and Flaubert, Shakespeare and-rather late in his careerthe Bible are justly acclaimed and widely studied. Alison too does his share of critical and insightful exposition in the books under discussion here, though his criticism is not of the kind that exegetical scholars apply, nor his insights those of a conventional historian. If, as Angustine held, Scripture is what Scripture means, what it means for Alison is known in the way it changes its readers. The "knowing Jesus" of his title is a knowing within an ethical and spiritual horizon opened up by a Girardian reading of the gospels, especially John. Yet this is not to say that Alison wants only to move from text to application, bypassing ecclesial, doctrinal, and traditional mediations of scriptural meaning. His approach, although it is unscholastic and sometimes antischolastic, is not antitheological. In the two more recent books his concern is to read Christian Scripture not only in the light of Girard's theories but also in conversation with some of the traditional topics of doctrinal theology: Christology, eschatology, Trinity, and redemption. The most recent of the three might be described as an eclectic yet coherent essay in systematics.

Alison's aim in The joy of Being Wrong is understanding. His subtitle, Original Sin through Easter Eyes, names what he chiefly wants to understand and hints at the perspective from which it will be understood. "Easter eyes" encapsulates the judgment, which has come to be associated with Karl Barth, that Christian theology can happen, as the New Testament itself could happen, only after the resurrection, because of it, and in its light. This means that, as Alison puts it in another metaphor, oddly mixed but suggestive, "the doctrine of original sin is the view on that which is passing away from the rear deck of that which is coming into being" (joy 182). The eschatological hour is coming and now is; and only insofar as it has come-insofar as we are "saved"--do we get a clear idea of what we have been, and are being, savedfrom. The resurrection is among other things a disclosure of the human plight that it displaces.

The methodological priority of the resurrection as the eschatological event explains in part the seemingly roundabout route that Alison takes towards an understanding of original sin, for it closes off the more straightforward option of following the Bible's own narrative sequence. Such has been the usual procedure, in catechesis and hymnography and not a little systematic theology. First comes creation, then the fall, then Christ, and finally the life of the world to come. Transposed into metaphysical terms, the route from Genesis to the Apocalypse begins with human "nature" as such, goes on to discuss original sin's effect on that nature, and moves from there to consider atonement, grace, and finally the beatific vision.

In contrast with this logic, Alison arranges his ideas according to what he calls an order of discovery. Knowledge of both "beginnings" and "endings," protology and eschatology, became possible only when Jesus was raised from the dead. Similarly, we know ourselves only at the point of transition from what we have been (but are ceasing to be) to what we are not yet (but have begun to be) - Thus Alison's procedure, broadly speaking, is to begin in nwdias res and move alternately "forwards" and "backwards," with the prospective movement at the fore in Raising Abel and the retrospective one in The Joy of Being Wrong.

A view from the stern: James Alison's theology (so Far)

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1999 by Hefling, Charles

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