More Church History: The Atonement and Western Penal Law (10)
One more historical note needs to be added: how the Constantinian shift
in Christian spirituality, from an initial profound disavowal of
state-sanctioned scapegoating violence, to an embrace of the very state
violence that killed its Founder, initiated also the devastatingly
punitive and retributive Western penal law system that has been in
place for almost a millennium.
From
a biblical/Christian concept of justice where the victim’s voice is the
primary voice and where a dynamic attempt at reconciliation,
restoration, transformation and shalom between offender, victim and
community is centre-stage, there was a progressive move to a concept of
justice where the emerging State is central and where the victim’s
voice is more and more silenced (11). The victim is displaced by the
King or Emperor responsible for ‘keeping the peace’ within the kingdom.
One author explains: …” ‘The [novel eleventh century] Gregorian
concept of the Church almost demanded the invention of the concept of
the State (Berman, 1983/1997, p. 404).’ ” And “as the [eleventh
century] Papal Revolution gave birth to the modern Western State, so it
gave birth also to modern Western legal systems, the first of which was
the modern system of [Church] canon law (Berman, 1983/1997, p. 115).”
There was also in the eleventh century the emergence of a theology of
satisfaction under the influence of the treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why
God Became Man) by Anselm of Canterbury. Explains one author: “However
broadly Anselm conceived justice, reason required that he stop at the
boundary of grace. God is bound by his own justice. If it is divinely
just for a man to pay the price for his sins, it would be unjust, and
therefore impossible, for God to remit the price. In Cur Deus Homo
Anselm’s theology is a theology of law.
“Before the time of Anselm (and in the Eastern Church still) it would
have been considered wrong to analyze God’s justice in this way. It
would have been said, first, that these ultimate mysteries cannot be
fitted into the concepts and constructs of the human intellect; that
reason is inseparable from faith – one is not the servant of the other,
but rather the two are indivisible; and the whole exercise of a
theology of law is a contradiction in terms. And second, it would have
been said that it is not only, and not primarily, divine justice that
establishes our relationship with God but also, and primarily, his
grace and his mercy; that is his grace and mercy, and not only his
justice, which explains the crucifixion, since by it mankind was
ransomed from the power of the devil and the demons of death – the very
power which had procured the slaying of Jesus in the first place but
which then itself was finally conquered through the resurrection
(Berman, 1983/1997, p. 180).”
Anselm’s theory profoundly influenced the Western “cultural affect” –
structural societal ethos – in all subsequent centuries. Although his
theology of ‘satisfaction’, of ‘atonement’ (12) was never proclaimed as
the official doctrine of the Christian church, it was widely accepted
both in Catholicism and Protestantism and was to have devastatingly
negative effects especially when applied to the criminal justice system
(13). Over the differing voices of many other Western Christian
interpreters, Anselm’s voice remained the strongest until well into the
twentieth century.
Comments one astute theologian: “For the Church Fathers, it is the
devil who – illegitimately – insists on the payment of the debt
incurred by humankind. Anselm inverts this. Now it is God who,
legitimately, exacts the payment of debt… In both Old and New
Testaments an indebted person could be ‘redeemed’ by the payment of his
or her debt. Jesus, following Deuteronomy, insists on the cancelling of
debt as a fundamental aspect of Christian practice. Anselm, however,
makes God the one who insists on debt. The debt humanity has incurred
must be paid with human blood. The God who rejected sacrifice now
demands it… From the start sacrifice and satisfaction run together…
The God who liberates from law is now, in Anselm, understood as
hypostasised, personified law… What remains… is a mysticism of pain
which promises redemption to those who pay in blood. In this move a
most fundamental inversion of the gospel is achieved, which prepares
the way for the validation of criminal law as the instrument of God’s
justice instead of what it is in the gospel, an alienating construction
which is at best a tragic necessity.
“The penal consequences of this doctrine were grim indeed. As it
entered the cultural bloodstream, was imaged in crucifixions, painted
over church chancels, recited at each celebration of the Eucharist, or
hymned, so it created its own structure of affect one in which earthly
punishment was demanded because God himself had demanded the death of
his Son (Gorringe, 1996, pp. 102 & 103).” By the birth of the
modern prison in the late eighteenth century, and persisting to the
present, what emerged was a penal system dedicated to a “mysticism of
pain” – with no redemption. (That’s why by contrast the Stephen King
novel and movie, The Shawshank Redemption, is so gripping!)
The scapegoat mechanism mentioned earlier as discerned by René Girard
is “simply a generative scapegoat principle which works unconsciously
in culture and society (14).” In the 1989 execution of serial killer
Theodore Bundy, hundreds of men, women and children camped outside the
Florida prison in a festive spirit one reporter likened to a Mardi
Gras. The same reporter described the event as “a brutal act.. [done]
in the name of civilization (15).” Bailie reflects on that commentary
thus: “It would be difficult to think of a more succinct summation of
the underlying anthropological dynamic at work: a brutal act done in
the name of civilization, an expulsion or execution that results in
social harmony. Clearly, after the shaky justifications based on
deterrence or retribution have fallen away, this is the stubborn fact
that remains: a brutal act is done in the name of civilization. If we
humans become too morally troubled by the brutality to revel in the
glories of the civilization made possible by it, we will simply have to
reinvent culture. This is what Nietzsche saw through a glass darkly.
This is what Paul sensed when he declared the old order to be a dying
one (I Cor. 7:31). This is the central anthropological issue of our age
(16).” (This was too, incidentally, the central motivation for Sister
Helen Prejean’s participation in the production of the movie Dead Man
Walking. She writes, in the book by the same title: “I am convinced
that if executions were made public, the torture and violence would be
unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions (17).”)
Girard’s serious engagement with the biblical texts led to a major
discovery for him: the Christian New Testament is the ultimate
demythologizer of all cultural norms of violence. “The third great
moment of discovery for me was when I began to see the uniqueness of
the Bible, especially the Christian text, from the standpoint of the
scapegoat theory. The mimetic representation of scapegoating in the
Passion was the solution to the relationship of the Gospels and archaic
cultures. In the Gospels we have the revelation of the mechanism that
dominates culture unconsciously (18).” In particular, this has led to a
totally nonviolent rereading of the atonement. Instead of a
scapegoating “satisfaction theory” one author designates a “mysticism
of pain which promises redemption to those who pay in blood (19),”
Girard claims “that scapegoating does not play an essential role in the
Gospels, whereas it has an enormous role in myths since it generates
them…. Christianity [witnesses] to the God who reveals himself to be
the arch-scapegoat in order to liberate humankind (20).”
Girard’s reading of the Gospel texts turns the dominant satisfaction
theory of the atonement on its head (21). He sees the scapegoat
mechanism operative in the crucifixion to participate in the universal
murderous lie upon which all cultures are founded and from which the
Jesus story is the ultimate liberation.
Another writer asks in application of the earlier mentioned Girardian
scapegoat theory, “Is it possible that what we call a criminal justice
system is really a scapegoat mechanism (Redekop, 1993, p. 1)?” He
continues later: “In a secular democratic society, nothing is as sacred
as the law code and the justice system which enforces it. The buildings
in which laws are made are the most elaborate and the courts in which
decisions are made about points of law are the most stately. Formality,
uniforms, and respect surround the agents of law (Redekop, 1993, p.
16).” He finally states baldly: “It is possible to think of the
criminal justice system as one gigantic scapegoat mechanism for
society…. [A] tiny percentage of offenders who are severely punished
can be thought of as a collective scapegoat for society (Redekop, 1993,
pp. 33 & 34).”
The entire Girardian project in reading the Bible points to a profound
nonviolent image of God. It discerns a dynamic of subversion within the
Judeo-Christian tradition itself whereby God is eventually shorn of all
violent attributes. It is a process “in travail,” whose culmination in
Jesus on the Cross is the ultimate negation of all violence in God and
hence humanity. Says one commentator: “The experience of being morally
shaken by a public execution is the beginning of an anthropological and
spiritual revolution for which the term ‘Christianity’ was coined
decades after the public execution of Jesus (Bailie, 1995, p. 83).”
Since Constantine pragmatically and politically, and since Anselm
theologically, the church has inconceivably claimed legitimacy for the
very violence that killed its Founder! It further arrogated to itself,
and society under its influence, that same rightfulness. This is the
most amazing inversion of Christian spirituality in the long history of
the Church.
René Girard, and the plethora of articles and books inspired by his
writings, point to a reading of God in the Christian Scriptures “which
is absolutely incompatible with any perception of God as involved in
violence, separation, anger, or exclusion (Alison, 1996, p. 48.).” Read
as fundamental texts of cultural deconstruction, the Christian
Scriptures emerge as radically demythologizing texts (22).
The highly violent nature of the Western legal tradition would have
been vastly different had this arguably more faithful reading of the
founding texts been dominant. That is in fact the burden of Timothy
Gorringe’s masterful work, God’s Just Vengeance (1996), which
profoundly critiques Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the atonement.
So instead of a merciful and compassionate God as revealed in Jesus the
Christ, the Christian “god” became a severe judge (for the past
millennium the dominant Western image of God) bent on punishment and
almost literally ‘blood-thirsty’. Christians who used the Cross to
scapegoat the Jews, to lead Crusades and persecute others totally
reversed what the Cross had originally stood for in Jesus’ death and
resurrection. “ ‘Quick, head off, away with it, in order that the earth
does not become full of the ungodly.’ The voice is distinctly Martin
Luther’s. Rulers are the ministers of God’s wrath, Luther insisted,
whose duty it is to use the sword against offenders. They are ‘God’s
hangmen’ (Gorringe, 1996, p. 131).” Luther is merely representative of
Protestant and Catholic violently punitive church theory and practice
dominant since the 11th century.
Vern Redekop in the book earlier quoted (23) has best explored the
implications of Girard’s New Testament reading for criminal justice.
The ‘modern prison’ was to drastically grow during the 19th century as
the new form of punishment but the punitive attitude in the church
remained alive and well. As Gorringe says: “For those who hope to find
in the witness of the church some signs of the work of the Holy Spirit
an examination of the role of the church in the penal debates of the
nineteenth century is depressing indeed. From start to finish the
bishops proved staunch supporters of flogging and hanging. When the
Duke of Argyll echoed Luther in calling society a minister of divine
justice in imposing capital punishment, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop
of Oxford, cried, ‘Hear, hear!’ In a debate on flogging in 1883 the
Bishop of Rochester, in an extraordinary unpleasant intervention, said
that offenders should be ‘scoured to the bone’. In the prison chaplains
were not simply functionaries, but often did their best to extract
confessions of guilt, and in attending executions gave divine sanction
to legal violence (24).”
Through the centuries, the restorative voice of the gospel did not die
completely and found deep echoes in the Anabaptist tradition for
instance, and elsewhere, but, in the words of the Most Rev. E.W. Scott,
“[..] all too often the State has claimed divine authority for legal
actions for which no such authority exists. In this process the Church,
which should have been challenging or critiquing the civil authority
from a Biblical perspective, has too often allowed itself to be
‘domesticated’ and has blessed and sanctioned when it ought to have
challenged (25).”
In the first centuries CE, as the Church and the State were defining
their own identity, they engaged in a duet of cooperation. In the
twelfth century, the duet truly became a dual where the dividing lines
of power were clearly drawn. It led, during the modern period, to full
disengagement. Over the centuries, in the area of criminal justice, the
Christian church moved from a theology of grace and servanthood to a
theology of law and punishment. Will the Restorative Justice treasure
remain deeply buried or will the Christian church have the courage to
raise a prophetic voice within the criminal justice system? A decisive
answer is urgently needed.
There is an excellent Chaplaincy document that reads in part:
“Restorative Justice can help reduce the level of pain so that healing
may begin to take place, but it should never be forced on anyone. If it
is embraced freely, it can have deep and lasting effects on individuals
and communities. Our goal is to seek Shalom, harmony and security for
all, with reconciliation and healing replacing revenge and pain.
“We believe that the search for true and satisfying justice is forever
linked to the spiritual growth of all concerned. The path of
over-incarceration, of a vengeful spirit and a punitive mentality, can
only dry up the soul of our country (A Call for Justice, Interfaith
Committee on Chaplaincy in the Correctional Service of Canada,
September 1997).”
From Matthew 5 – 7 and Luke 6 to Romans 5:6 – 11 and 12:1-21; from 2
Corinthians 5:11-21 to Ephesians 2:11- 22 and 5:1 & 2, and in many
other passages of the New Testament, one can recapture the heartbeat of
God for restoration, reconciliation and peaceful communities. Although
other passages such as Romans 13, 1 Peter 2 and Titus 3 were often read
politically and used to justify wars, crusades and vengeful attitudes
towards offenders, we are not left with an irreconcilable dilemma.
“Our fundamental hermeneutic principle must be derived from the overall
direction of the New Testament documents. The central story they tell
speaks of God’s movement ‘downwards and to the periphery, his
unconditional solidarity with those who have nothing, those who suffer,
the humiliated and injured’. This represents a diametrically opposite
perception to the Roman view, which assumed that, as Caesar once said
to his rebellious soldiers, ‘as the great ordain, so the affairs of
this world are directed’. The crucifixion of Jesus, on the other hand,
constitutes ‘a permanent and effective protest against those structures
which continually bring about separation at the centre and the margin.’
It is this protest rather than an endorsement of expiatory sacrifice,
which is the heart of the New Testament witness. Turning Christianity
into a cult centred on an expiatory death achieved long ago, and
honoured in the present by other – or inworldly asceticism, represented
an easy option, a refusal of the costliness of the gospel ethic, of a
realization of the Jubilee prescriptions. The recovery of a text of
protest and critique would serve to create quite different mentalities
and structures of affect from those avowed by Christendom (26).”
Over the last twenty-five years, in many countries, there have been a
number of initiatives challenging us to go beyond a retributive justice
to a Restorative Justice. These initiatives have been emerging signs of
hope calling for a radical reengagement of the Christian faith in
criminal justice issues from a Restorative Justice perspective. A brief
mention of some of these trends seeks to open vistas on the new
paradigm:
Victim Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORP): Pioneered by Canadians
over twenty-five years ago, the VORP programs demonstrated that there
are better ways than incarceration for many types of offenses. Used at
first in property crimes, the Victim Offender Mediation Program (VOMP)
(27) in British Columbia, Canada is ample proof over the last several
years that, properly done, victim offender mediation can be
successfully applied in the most serious of cases.
Church Council for Justice and Corrections (CCJC): Relentlessly through
the years CCJC has engaged the churches of Canada on a journey of
rediscovery of the theological/biblical foundations of a more
satisfying, transformative, real justice. CCJC played a significant
role in the abolition of capital punishment in Canada and has provided
the churches with many valuable hands-on tools in the area of criminal
justice (28).
CSC Mission and NPB Mission: The missions of both the Correctional
Service of Canada and the National Parole Board are a commitment to
enlightened corrections where offenders, victims and the communities
must be treated with respect and professionalism of the highest order
(29).
New Partnerships: As never before, new partnerships between various
government departments and the private sectors are being formed to move
forward a Restorative Justice agenda. Circle sentencing, family
conferencing, restorative parole, etc. are now the subject of daily
conversation in many government quarters. There is locally, under
Correctional Services Canada, a “Restorative Justice Council” composed
of government and non-government persons. It promotes the Restorative
Justice agenda widely throughout federal Corrections on the West Coast
(30).
Community Chaplaincies/Circles of Support: These growing initiatives
seek to involve the faith communities in playing a more significant
role with offenders and victims and ensuring that crime is returned to
the communities for creative solutions (31).
Restorative Justice Week: This yearly event in November is proving to
be one of the most effective educational tools to sensitize people of
faith to the challenges of doing justice in a biblical way(31). There
is also an annual Restorative Justice Conference hosted by Ferndale
Institution in Mission, open to the public(30).
A Call to Justice: This 1997 proclamation by the Interfaith Committee on Chaplaincy in the
Correctional Service of Canada deserves to be publicized more widely as
it is a call to Restorative Justice by rediscovering our spiritual
roots(31).
These are but a few examples among many initiatives engaging the
churches in a reexamination of their attitudes in the criminal justice
system.
William Stringfellow has written: “There comes a moment when words must
either become incarnate or the words, even if literally true, are
rendered false (1973, p. 21).”
At the end of our journey toward the understanding of the spiritual
roots of Restorative Justice within Christianity, if it is true that
the Christian Church:
* lost its ‘scriptural’ understanding of justice,
* was deeply influenced by the Roman slavery concept of law,
* fell prey to a theology of punishment and vindication,
* and must rediscover the richness of its heritage,
then, such a recovery is a call to repentance and conversion, to creativity and community.
A call to repentance and conversion: As a Christian becomes a pilgrim
on the roads of history and realizes how the message of Christ was
subverted, misused to oppress, there is a call to humble repentance and
personal conversion. It should lead to a commitment to influence
through servanthood and not through power and to daily seek a change of
heart as the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of
every human being.
A call to creativity: As Christians return to the spiritual roots of
Restorative Justice they will be challenged to discover new ways of
doing justice. They will have to learn to dream new dreams and pursue
new visions. It is a call to co-operation, partnership in new creative
ways.
A call to community: Most fundamentally, Restorative Justice is a call
to build new communities where acceptance and reconciliation are
realities. Restoration and reconciliation are lived in the community of
the covenant of love between God and humankind. Being a follower of
Christ is far more than experiencing a personal conversion. It is
becoming part of a community committed to justice in a world of
injustices, a community committed to listening to all sides when crime
happens, a community committed to truth beyond the guilty/not guilty
dichotomy and a community committed to offering opportunities for
reparation and peacemaking so that offenders and victims find healing
in a community of hope.
“Assured of God’s justice and undergirded by God’s presence, they [the
Christians] are to break the cycle of violence by refusing to be caught
in the automatism of revenge. It cannot be denied that the prospects
are good that by trying to love their enemies they may end up hanging
on a cross. Yet often enough, the costly acts of nonretaliation become
a seed from which the fragile fruit of Pentecostal peace grows – a
peace between people from different cultural spaces gathered in one
place who understand each other’s languages and share in each others’
goods (32).”
The God of Jesus Christ calls us to nothing less.
Conclusion
In 1993 Lee Griffith published The Fall of the Prison: Biblical
Perspectives on Prison Abolition. His is a tour de force on a
spirituality of penal abolition (33). The book’s opening shot is: “The
gospel is profoundly scandalous, and until we hear at least a whisper
of its scandal, we risk not hearing any part of it (Griffith, 1993, p.
1).” He presents his thesis in beguilingly simple terms: “Ultimately,
there are not two kingdoms but one – the kingdom of God… ‘Freedom to
the captives’ is not proclaimed [by Jesus] in some other world but in
our world. The matter finally comes down to a peculiar question: Are
there prisons in the kingdom of God? And if there are no prisoners
there and then, how can we support the imprisonment of people here and
now? For in fact, the kingdom of God is among us here and now
(Griffith, 1993, p. 28).”
How indeed can a Christian spirituality, responsive to the liberating
thrust of the New Testament founding texts, so utterly contradictory to
state-sanctioned scapegoating violence, support penal (pain delivery!)
justice? That is the “peculiar question” this paper leads to.
A contemporary theologian writes: “…the human walk… begins in slavery
and ends in freedom, and [its] point of progress at every moment is
faith (Johnson, 1990, p. 11).” That is the quintessence of spirituality
arising from the Judeo-Christian narrative. It shouts from the
housetops: “Freedom for the prisoners (Luke 4:18)!,” and “It is for
freedom that Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1)!”
René Girard states: “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; it is not a chronologically progressive process, but 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, 1987, p. 141).”
If Girard is right, part of that “cultural upheaval” is penal abolition
and transformative justice.
One writer commented on Griffith’s book thus: “Jesus said he had come
to proclaim release to the prisoners. In The Fall of the Prison Lee
Griffith makes what Jesus meant altogether clear. Now it is for us who
have ears (quoted in Griffith, 1993, back cover).”
Indeed! What is needed is a spirituality of transformative justice with ears – then hands and feet!
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ENDNOTES
(10) Throughout this section, I am drawing fairly extensively upon Allard and Wayne Northey (2001).
(11) This process is well described in Van Ness and Strong (1997).
(12) There have been four discernible views of the atonement in the
history of the church (Bellinger, 2001, pp. 134ff), of which the
second, the “satisfaction theory,” has been the most dominant in
Western history since the 11th century. “The second group of theories
may be said to have originated with Anselm, who saw sin as dishonor to
the majesty of God. On the cross the God-man rendered satisfaction for
this dishonor. Along similar lines the Reformers thought that Christ
paid the penalty sinners incurred when they broke God’s law (Morris,
1974, p. 83).”
(13) The main justification [for “new concepts of sin and punishment
based on the doctrine of the atonement”] given by Anselm and by his
successors in Western theology was the concept of justice itself.
Justice required that every sin (crime) be paid for by temporal
suffering; that the suffering, the penalty, be appropriate to the
sinful act; and that it vindicate (“avenge”) the particular law that
was violated. As St. Thomas Aquinas said almost two centuries after
Anselm’s time, both criminal and civil offenses require payment of
compensation to the victim; but since crime, in contrast to tort, is a
defiance of the law itself, punishment, and not merely reparation, must
be imposed as the price for the violation of the law (Berman,
1983/1997, p. 183. Italics in original; boldface mine).”
(14) Williams, 1996, p. 294.
(15) Bailie, 1995, p. 79.
(16) ibid, p. 79.
(17) Prejean, 1993, p. 197.
(18) Williams, 1996, p. 263.
(19) Gorringe, 1996, p. 102.
(20) Williams, 1996, p. 263.
(21) This is the sustained presentation in I See Satan Fall Like
Lightning (2001). See also Bellinger (2001), “Conclusion: The Healing
of the Soul,” pp. 134ff.
(22) This theme of “demythologising” or “demystification” is especially
developed by René Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001). See
in particular Chapter 11, “The Triumph of the Cross,” pp. 137 – 153.
(23) Redekop (1993).
(24) Gorringe, 1996, p. 211.
(25) Scott, 1981.
(26) Gorringe, 1996, p. 82.
(27) For a copy of two evaluations of this program, and more on the
program itself, write: FRCJIA, 101 – 20678 Eastleigh Cres., Langley BC,
V3A 4C4, CANADA.
(28) One of its most helpful resources for this discussion is Satisfying Justice (CCJC 1996).
(29) May be ordered from CSC Chaplaincy, 340 Laurier Ave. W., Ottawa
Ontario, K1A 0P9, CANADA. Of course theory, as talk, is cheap! It’s how
these statements are lived out that makes the difference!
(30) A Restorative Justice guide was produced by them, which may be
ordered by contacting: Nellie Taylor or Edi Martin: Phone
(604)826-5765; Fax (604)826-5519; Box 50, 33737 Dewdney Trunk Road,
Mission BC, V2V 4L8.
(31) For more information, please contact: CSC Chaplaincy, 340 Laurier Ave. W., Ottawa Ontario, K1A 0P9, CANADA.
(32) Volf, 1996, p. 306.
(33) He has subsequently published The War on Terrorism and the Terror
of God (2002), that does to the theme of state violence/terror what his
first book does to state prisons.