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

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1999 by Hefling, Charles

Fortunately neither of these lines of thought is an essential component of Alison's position, which is rooted much more in psychological and phenomenological soil than in either patristic or Aristotelian metaphysics. That position can be brought into sharper focus by exploring two questions that arise from what I have said so far. First, granted that the passion and death of Jesus fit the pattern of Girard's mimetic theory, what makes this lynching in particular definitive? This is in part a question about the Christology that matches Alison's soteriology, and all three books address it. The second question is more specific to The Joy of Being Wrong. Granted again that in the light of mimetic theory the resurrection of the crucified Jesus says something about humans as complicit in victimization, what has this disclosure got to do with humans as such? This is a question about the theological anthropology that matches Alison's account-more specifically, a question about his views on sin, and most specifically on original sin. The next two sections will take these up in turn.

II

The intelligence of the victim, the awareness of God as forgiving victim and of the relationship between God and all other victims-this knowledge was Jesus of Nazareth's own knowledge. He had it, not of course as a list of propositions, but in and as imagination, the "eschatological imagination" that gives Raising Abel its subtitle. What Jesus knew, he knew "not because he was not human, nor because he was God instead of being human, but because his fully human imagination was capable of being fixed on the ineffable effervescence and vivacity, power and deathlessness of God in a way which seems almost unimaginable to us" (Abel 40). There is an echo here, and I suspect more than an echo, of the doctrine that Jesus, as human and in his earthly life, enjoyed the beatific "vision of God." Though scarcely anyone takes it seri*ously now, all that this doctrine really said is that the consummation which the blessed experience in heaven was experienced by Jesus before his death. What for us lies in the eschatological "future" was for him the present, and there would seem to be nothing against thinking of his human imagination as the mode or medium of the experience. Certainly this would fit with Alison's stress on Jesus' preaching as the announcement of a state of affairs that both is and is to come. The realization of a "realized eschatology," we might say, began in one man's imagination of God.

In that case, though, is Alison's Christology yet another variant on Schleiermacher's, such that Jesus' imagination is a kind of Gottesbetv,ufitsein that in itself makes him divine? Yes and no. The main trajectory he follows could be described as "from below upwards," if we may continue to use that overworked metaphor, but a movement "from above" is also present. it is not just that by being very, very human Jesus became divine, but that God the Son lived a human life. Although psychology rather than metaphysics does, as with Schleiermacher, provide the concepts Alison uses in developing his Christological views, it is not just any psychology but what he terms an "interdividual" psychology that corresponds to his understanding of human being as socially constituted. Personhood is an interpersonal reality; I be inasmuch as my being is evoked and mediated in minwsis. In applying this to Christology, Alison draws on jean-Michel Oughourlian, who has collaborated with Girard and shown the relevance of mimetic theory to phenomena such as hypnosis. The hypnotist produces in the hypnotized a new "self," which is suggested into being (for a brief time) by means of imitative desire. Hypnosis is thus an unusual but not atypical instance of the way in which the "I" is not simply given but bestowed by the other.