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

That on the one hand. On the other, the resurrection is the event of forgiveness. Forgiveness occurs in the presence of the victim, not as the "same" to which envious rivalry invariably reduces its scapegoats, but as "other"; not as avenger but as "counsel for the defense." Thus on its "subjective" side the soteriology Alison presents has affinities with the one that is often coupled with the name of Abelard. Forgiveness is to do with memory; memory is the chief constituent of one's "self"; selfhood is mediated through minwsis; hence memory is constituted by cultural mechanisms rooted in victimage. To be forgiven is to have one's memory healed: the presence of one's victim in memory is then no longer an accusation or a threat, because memory is no longer so structured. Alison's exposition here, as he admits, is difficult. One wishes he had said more, or would say it. For surely a more crucial (in every sense) topic than forgiveness does not exist. The alternatives to forgiveness are the ones Nietzsche discerned: either ressentiment, which Alison would perhaps agree is a subtle form of scapegoating, or the iibernwnschfich willing of eternal recurrence, which he does suggest is a cosmic version of the same thing.

At all events the more immediate point to be noted is that neither the "objective" nor the "subjective" aspect of Alison's soteriology allows room at all for construing Christ's passion either as sacrifice, in the usual sense of the word, or as penal atonement. Insofar as such construals rest on the premise that God somehow approves of violence, they are themselves part of the he exposed in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. God, on the contrary, "is entirely purely gratuitous self-giving, and what that looks like in the midst of humanity is like a dead human victim, and what that says about our relationship to God is that we are related to God as to a dead human victim, either in ignorant complicity in the victimization or, from now on, in the beginnings of a penitent solidarity" (joy 83).

Such are the broad outlines of the theological canvas that Alison paints with Girardian brushes. it is a rich canvas, however, and the subordinate details are nevertheless important. The artist wants his work to be true to the whole New Testament, not just selected prooftexts, and true as well to the drift of the Church's teaching. Accordingly he has to deal with other themes than the ones on which he concentrates. Sometimes the result is incisive and convincing, for instance Alison's discussion of the wrath of God and of death as a specifically human reality, and especially his resolution of the "dilemma between grace as somehow 'owed' . . . and grace as somehow 'already imbued in the human"' (joy 45).

Sometimes it is not. The further from Girard he fetches technical terms, the less sure his handling of them and the less illuminating the result. Metaphysics in particular is not a strong suit. Alison takes from Zizioulas the phrase "ecclesial hypostasis" and from scholastic Trinitarian theory the notion of subsistent relations. But readers who know Zizioulas's Being as Communion may well ask how much of the original context in which "ecclesial hypostasis" has its meaning is taken over and tacitly assumed, and how much is overlooked, when Alison sews the phrase into quite a different fabric of terms. Meanwhile, readers who do not know that book may well be stymied. Likewise, "subsistent relation," which on the face of it is a contradiction in terms, belongs to a nest of concepts built up in order to give some glimmer of insight into the mystery of divine multiplicity. It takes further building to show that these subsistent relations make it possible to say that in God there are Three, and that they may suitably be named persons. By using the term in the way he does, to refer to a finite person as a "created subsistent relation," Alison seems to be piling one mystery on another to make a point that could be made more clearly within his own conceptual framework.