Lee Griffith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, 399 pp.
Reviewed by Wayne Northey
“What would this mean if it were true that we love God only as much as
the person we love least? Would it not mean that, when we have finally
won the victory in our war on terrorism, when we have finally managed
to exterminate all the thugs and Hitlers and terrorists, we will have
expressed nothing so much as our total confidence in the death of God?
(p. 263)” This is the heart of Griffith’s sustained thesis that “the
biblical concept of ‘the terror of God’ stands as a renunciation of all
violence – and of death itself" (inside front jacket cover).
Most
surprising about this book is its timing: “In an instant [after
September 11, 2001], the phrase ‘the war on terrorism’ entered everyday
discourse with a new and urgent meaning. In this book I do not seek to
exploit that urgency. Indeed, the title of this book was chosen and the
first draft was completed almost a full year before the events of
September 11. With the exception of these two paragraphs at the
beginning and a postscript at the end, the manuscript has not been
altered to cover these most recent exchanges of terror and
counterterror (p. ix).” In the very specific meaning of the term, I
consider this book providential. It is also prophetic in the truest
sense of that adjective: namely, a word from God to our present times.
Lee Griffith’s first book was published in 1993, and entitled: The Fall
of the Prison: Biblical Reflections on Prison Abolition. Christianity
Today magazine, despite its reflection of Evangelical Christianity’s
captivity to mainstream American culture (see on this sociologist Alan
Wolfe’s The Transformation of American Religion (New York: Free Press,
2003)), voted it one of the best books of 1993. Both books are tours de
force. Both are profoundly countercultural and deeply biblical in their
analysis, in the best spirit of Paul’s admonition: “Do not conform any
longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing
of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will
is–his good, pleasing and perfect will (Romans 12:2).” Both books are
destined therefore to be resisted and ignored by the vast majority of
us claiming to follow Christ. The author is a “teacher, author, and
social activist currently working with a mental health program in
Elmira, New York (inside back jacket cover).”
Griffith opened his first book with the memorable challenge: “The
gospel is profoundly scandalous, and until we hear at least a whisper
of its scandal, we risk not hearing any part of it (p. 1).” In The
Scandal of the Gospels, David McCracken follows Søren Kierkegaard in
seeing Jesus and the Gospels as quintessential scandal and offence. Lee
Griffith lays out the contours of this scandalous offence in the book
under review with reference to war. In “testing out God’s will”
concerning “the war on terrorism” he confronts us with our profound
addictions to lies and violence. It is up to us to “see” and change,
“hear” and understand.
The book is structured with a Preface, a Postscript, and five sections.
Given that the story of humanity can be understood as an endless stream
of acts of terror and counterterror, or as Empire seeking to impose its
will on all others, and “Empire striking back” (“counterempire”), there
is no lack of historical material to choose from! In the course of the
book, anti-Semitism, the “Christian” Crusades, slavery abolitionism,
and the contrary paths of nonviolence by Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and
Desmond Tutu are amongst those events and people discussed. Each
section begins with the “newspaper” of current events, goes on to a
relevant case study from church history, and concludes with
biblical/theological reflection. Though these three perspectives
constantly reprise and intersect throughout.
The author writes in the Preface: “I must acknowledge that what
initially set me to writing was not an academic interest in questions
of foreign policy or history or ethics. I was (and am) interested in
protesting violence – all violence, but especially that violence which
the governing authorities of the United States inflict in my name by
means of the resources I provide to those authorities. I am made
complicit in such violence… There can be no pretense to righteousness
or lack of complicity. One can only confess – and protest (p. xi).” And
so he does.
He points out that the US since World War II alone has been involved in
“dozens of wars and invasions and covert interventions as well as
uncounted bombing runs and missile attacks (p. xi).” In the most
sustained, the Vietnam War, the lesson learned was to be quicker about
the dirty work, so that protest does not build up. And God is
invariably invoked in all these conflicts. He decries co-opting God to
the service of carnage, and to One “who intervenes in history through
warfare rather than… through resurrection and the renunciation of death
(p. xii).” In “testing out God’s perfect will”, Griffith states:
“Violence is inevitably a renunciation rather than an affirmation of
the will and freedom of God (p. xiii).” And he employs the Bible to
demythologize for him the contemporary most powerful cultural myth
makers, those who pound the drums of war. The book is “arranged as a
dialogue with newspaper, history, and Bible (p. xiii).”
In the first section Griffith posits the moral equivalency of
(non-state) terrorist and (state-sanctioned) counterterrorist,
underscoring Gil Bailie’s observation: “The growing sense of moral
symmetry between the criminals and the cops corresponds to what Girard
speaks of as the doubling effect of violence, the tendency of violence
to erase all difference between the adversaries while at the same time
enflaming the passions and causing the level of violence between them
to escalate…. (Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, New
York: Crossroad, 1995, p. 64)” This was certainly the case with the
notion of “just war”, a term Augustine of Hippo, an empire loyalist in
the fourth and fifth centuries, introduced to Christendom, borrowing
from Cicero. Augustine sadly was more an empire loyalist than a
biblical follower of Jesus, and foisted on Western Christendom its most
persistent and pernicious heresy (false choice): that one can actually
“love your enemies” by spearing, shooting, executing and bombing them!
This sophistry remains majority dogma for Christian believers to this
day. Astounding!
“All violence is an attack upon community. All violence by Christians
is also an attack upon the memory of Jesus (p. 48).”, Griffith contends
in Section II. Likewise, Griffith asserts: “Violence is a form of
proselytism which preaches that there is no God. The preachments of
violence are more effective than televangelists, more zealous in
winning converts than those who sell religion door to door. As we wait
for God, terror surrounds us with a message offered as holy writ: ‘God
is not.’ (p. 68).” While American evangelists preach Jesus, what they
are clearly selling is American hegemony. And the message is not lost:
it is better to become an American than a Christian if one would avoid
American exported violence the world over.
Section III treats of ethical dualism. In particular, Griffith sees the
US as self-righteous to the core, declaring all other nations or
political interests “unjust” if opposed to America’s. Not only, that,
but America repeatedly decries the “terrorism” of former massively
subsidized allies such as Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Manuel
Noriega, etc., etc., etc. He writes: “When there is a problem, America
goes to war because the world is viewed as ripe for conquest rather
than ripe for redemption (p. 76).” And those who have bought into this
kind of self-righteousness (the vast majority of Americans, including
Christians), do not wrestle with an “Ethical dualism [that poses]
questions about how to avoid demonic actions oneself, but rather about
how to oppose the demonic actions of others (p. 83).” And so, for
instance, the US spends an obscenely disproportionate amount on weapons
of mass destruction in order to rid the world of the same! “This is a
portrait of addiction: The United States spends more on the military
than the next fifteen nations combined (p. 84).” And one might add: it
is many times over the world’s major arms dealer with the concomitant
global terror that monstrous reality facilitates.
Griffith quotes Abraham Heschel that humanity’s greatest problem is not
that of evil but of our relationship to God. And in that relationship,
the “enemy” is the gatekeeper: “Though it is maddening, what I owe to
God is intertwined with what I owe to my enemy. And the hope too is
intertwined. Hope is not possible for me unless it is also possible for
the most demonic of my adversaries (p. 125).”
So just what is the “terror of God”, is the burden of Section IV. It
is, to begin with, not according to the “court theologies” of historian
Eusebius or theologian Augustine, and their myriad imitators. In their
biblical perversions, orthodoxy poses no threat to empire, whereas the
biblical texts bristle with it! And the doctrine of hell, one of
eternal conscious torment for the unrepentant, was a key orthodox
doctrine that “… kept the rabble in line (p. 175).” Hence, the doctrine
of hell, which in traditional orthodoxy is a doctrine of terror,
elicited a “homiletics of terror (p. 176).”, as exemplified in Jonathan
Edwards of the First Great American Awakening, and a host of imitators.
In premillenarian teachings of the “rapture” (where all true believers
get out of harm’s way before, literally, all hell breaks loose on
earth), “the saints are akin to an audience at a horror movie, floating
at a safe distance while being thrilled by scenes of the terror
suffered by others. Both military superpowers and the raptured
righteous claim the right to float unscathed above a world of suffering
humanity (p. 178).” “Theological terrorists [purveyors of traditional
doctrines of hell and more recent extra-biblical inventions like the
“rapture”] claim that the war is at the behest of God and that God will
rescue them from this world on which they war (p. 179).”
So what is the terror of God? “It is upon the least lovable people that
God heaps the burning coals of love (Romans 12:20 – 21). This is the
terror of God. This is the fire of hell, the eternal torment. Those who
would reject all love are forced to endure it…
“It is God who crosses the chasm. It is God who decides to go to hell armed with the burning coals of love…
“This is the terror of God from which we cannot hide because, in Jesus,
God invades not only the earth but hell itself. God is the one who
decides to go to hell. Hallelujah and amen (pp. 184 & 185).”
There is an extended treatment of John’s “Revelation”, which , in
Griffith’s reading claims that “Every drop of blood that is shed
confirms [all empires’] ultimate defeat, confirms that their fate is
already sealed (p. 211).” And all empires great and small, past and
present, are built upon bloodshed: “You must never look too closely at
the making of sausages or empires. You will be repulsed (p. 204).” Like
the dog’s nose rubbed in its own feces, John the Revealer does just
that to all empires. Reflecting the biblical understanding, Griffith
notes: “All nations bear the mark of the Beast. It is only the
idolizing of the nation itself that could lead Americans or any other
people to believe that their nation is exempt in this regard (p. 215).”
Then he quotes from Unveiling Empire (Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony
Gwyther, Orbis Books, 1999, p. 183): “In the Bible, there is really
only one story: that of a people struggling to leave empire behind and
set out to follow God (p. 215).”
He completes this section with two personal experiences. One was
listening to a commencement address by William Stringfellow at a
theological college, which was a “renunciation of all triumphalism, be
it academic, ecclesiastical, economic, political, or military (p.
216).” Griffith continues: “It was a reminder that the saints are not
raptured out of terror and into victory. It was a reminder that Easter
is preceded by the cross, that God’s cause is not served by the
righteous who are triumphant but by the faithful who are defeated (p.
216).”
The final section seeks to take one “Beyond Terror and Counterterror”.
Griffith states: “The greatest concession to terrorism is mimesis, and
it is also the most frequent concession (p. 220).” In other words, all
violence, as Jacques Ellul contended, is imitative and not original.
Invariably, one, a nation, all, become what is hated. “You have
defeated us Nazis”, declared one war criminal to the Allied prosecutors
at Nuremberg, “but the spirit of Nazism rises like a Phoenix amongst
you.” This in particular is the burden of the brilliant research of
René Girard, namely the unmasking of this kind of universal imitative
violence. In the words of one Girardian interpreter: “[Girard]
accomplishes this revelation by applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to
social phenomena… The scapegoat mechanism is one side of the great
either/or of human existence: either a society will sacrifice victims
to meet the psychological needs arising out of its ‘ontological
sickness,’ [Kierkegaard’s term] or human beings will follow the way of
the Kingdom of God, which is the way of love of the neighbor (The
Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil,
Charles K. Bellinger, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 79).”
Griffith calls ultimately, for imitation of Christ: “Rather than
peddling fears and threats of damnation, the church is called to
witness to the one and only sufficient antidote to terror – the
resurrection of Jesus… the ministry of the church is not to preach and
practice fear, but to preach and practice the defeat of death – indeed,
to preach and to practice the reconciliation that has already been
accomplished by God (p. 251).” Griffith cites three Christ-imitators in
the church, from the three major divisions of Christendom, as mentioned
above, to illustrate this call.
Griffith sums up this section: “In effect, the resurrection is God’s
war on the terrorism of both guerrilla bands and nation states (p.
269).”
The postscript deconstructs the most widely stated commentary on
September 11: our world has changed forever. On the contrary, states
Griffith, apart from the Western cultural centrism that views this
event as the greatest of all disasters to befall the 21st century so
far (what amazing cultural hubris!), nothing with relation to terror
and counterterror has changed, nothing at all. He provides a long
litany of ways in which “there was no change”. “And so the anguish of
September 11 is only compounded by this realization of how very little
has changed. Despair attends the awareness that we are confronted not
by a new story but by a story which is very old – as old as the
slaughter of the innocents, as old as the senseless murder of Abel. All
killing is fratricide, is sororicide. Cain kills Abel. There is nothing
new (p. 276).”
“It is God who brings the only surprise into this story. It is a
surprise which is new and hopeful but also maddening as God spares
Cain… That is the only surprise in the story of Cain and Abel, and it
is the only hope (pp. 276 & 277).” Then Griffith states simply: “We
must move into hope (p. 277).” And the book ends with two words: “Take
hope (p. 278).”
The New Testament theologian who first told me of this book, an
accomplished scholar, said he is not given readily to jealousy, but
wishes he could write a book like this! The writing and research are
invariably precisely on target. There is no faltering. And the writing
is elegant yet accessible throughout.
The book could have been strengthened by greater interaction with the
vast body of writings by and about René Girard and his scapegoating
theory. Charles Bellinger, quoted above, argues that Girard is the
greatest living theorist on violence. He is also, together with the
vast body of research inspired by his theories over four decades, the
most hopeful about the way out of the human morass of violence. Girard
writes: “In the Hebrew Bible, there is clearly a dynamic that moves in
the direction of the rehabilitation of the victims, but it is not a
cut-and-dried thing. Rather, it is a process under way, a text in
travail… a struggle that advances and retreats. I see the Gospels as
the climactic achievement of that trend, and therefore as the essential
text in the cultural upheaval of the modern world (Hamerton-Kelly,
Robert G., ed. (1987). Violent Origins, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, p. 141).” His most recent book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
(Orbis/Novalis, 2001), is a theological gem in this regard, due in part
to its profound attention to anthropology, sadly so seldom the purview
of theology!
A Political Science professor and friend argues that “confession and
protest” are not enough, but political engagement is called for. Yet,
if all nations are sullied by the mark of the Beast, as claims
Griffith, then are not all politics magnetically oriented towards
violence? How can one renounce violence and participate meaningfully in
the public square of political life without being drawn in to its
greasing the gears, if that grease is ultimately, inevitably as bottom
line, violence? Surely we have in the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and
Martin Luther King Jr. participation in the political process to effect
profound societal change in the direction of nonviolence. Yet neither
was a politician. One could therefore have wished for more discussion
on the pragmatics of nonviolence.
Finally, one wonders at the relative paucity of historical and current
witnesses for nonviolence. In particular, I stand amazed at the grand
lacuna of nonviolent witness in most of church history. In the words of
New Testament theologian Richard Hays: “One reason that the world finds
the New Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies
incredible is that the church is so massively faithless. On the
question of violence, the church is deeply compromised and committed to
nationalism, violence, and idolatry… This indictment applies alike to
liberation theologies that justify violence against oppressors and to
establishment Christianity that continues to play chaplain to the
military-industrial complex, citing just war theory and advocating the
defense of a particular nation as though that were somehow a Christian
value (The Moral Vision of the New Testament, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996,
p. 343).”
This book was not voted by Christianity Today as one of the best books
of 2002. Given its indictment of Evangelical America’s and others’
commitment to the way of violence rather than to Jesus, this is perhaps
one of its most significant endorsements.