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

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1999 by Hefling, Charles

Between human persons, the formation of "I" or self or identity is always ambivalent, for reasons discussed below. That is, the desire each of us receivesfrom the other is not wholly pacific but includes elements of rejection and denial of that very other. Not so, Alison speculates, with Jesus. We may "see Jesus' human self as being 'suggested' I . . into being by the Father," through ordinary human psychic means, except that in this case a "completely non-rivalistic imitation is at work.... There is no sense in which Jesus tries to forge his own identity over against that of his Father" So far, it sounds as though a human Jesus gradually acquired a "divine" identity. But then comes the twist. We can "affirm the hypostatic union as being the 'hypnotizing' into historical being of the person of the Son ." (joy 54-55).

As far as it goes, this is an illuminating proposal. It would need to go further, perhaps, in order to shed light on the hypostatic union. TO mention a couple of the further questions that arise, we may quite well grant that the "ordinary psychic means" obtained with Jesus, who was "like us in all things apart from sin." But a human hypnotist uses finite, physical means-audible words, visible gestures-to bestow on the hypnotized patient a "self." How does God the Father do it? Does be do it within the coinherence of the Trinity, hypnotizing the alreadybegotten Son? And, once he has done it, can we avoid the conclusion that where the Son is concerned there are two "selves," two persons, a historical one as well as an eternal one, pretty much as Nestorius thought? Or, instead, did the Trinity lose one of its eternal persons for a time, through the coming-into-being of the historical self of Jesus?

But Alison is not writing primarily on the Trinity or even on the Incarnation per se, and the niceties of time's relation to eternity and finitude's to an infinite God are not his chief concern. It is at all events Jesus' own oneness with the Father, with the nonviolent God for whom death simply does not be, that entered the world in and as the good news he preached. Much of what Alison has to say in all his books takes the form of showing how the apostolic witness of the epistles as well as the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels makes excellent sense when interpreted as the working-out of the theme of pacific imitation of deathless divine effervescence. Indeed I would say that the expository sections of those books are the strongest and most valuable. But because they are expository there is no very good way to convey where their strength lies, since it depends on the concrete particularities of whatever passage is being expounded. At the beginning of one chapter in Raising Abel (and at a corresponding point in The Joy of Being Wrong) Alison advises his readers to keep their Bibles open and refer to them as he goes along. The advice applies more generally.

A special interpretative difficulty arises, from the standpoint of Christology, when it comes to the passion narratives. The roles of Pilate and Caiaphas and the mocking crowds present no problem; they were doing what lynchers have always done, and for the usual "reasons." Yet God made of this lynching a self-disclosure. How? Plainly it will not do to think that the Father was complicit in sending Jesus to his death. Are we then to think that Jesus himself was complicit? That would scarcely fit with his non-rivalistic imitation of the Father in all things. Making a victim of oneself is still victimization, and Alison pointedly observes that to flaunt one's difference from others, thereby courting and provoking a rejection that will in turn confirm one's "special" status, is merely internalized scapegoating. Once sacrifice is unmasked and known for what it is, self-sacrifice falls under suspicion as "the self-canonization of the self-victim" (Abel 184). The only alternative left open would seem to be that Jesus' eschatological imagination, his pacific mimesis of God, gave rise to the intelligence that his own being lynched would be God's self-revelation. Then the question is, how can death, violent death, disclose non-violent deathlessness?