Jesus the Forgiving Victim Listening for the Unheard Voice An Introduction to Christianity for Adults edition by James Alison Religion Spirituality eBooks
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Jesus the Forgiving Victim Listening for the Unheard Voice is comprised of four books of essays.
Book One - Starting human, staying human
Every time we talk about God, we do so from a human point of view. Of course, everyone knows that, and yet it is amazing how often people jump straight into God-talk without examining what sort of animals are doing the talking – human animals, bodies run by desires, dependent, storytelling, animals, time-laden and place-sensitive. This introduction to the Christian faith starts from the assumption that as we become more aware of dimensions of being human that we in fact know already, so the life of faith which God births within us will become richer and
easier to explore and to live.
Book Two - God, not one of the gods
It can be difficult to find our way into the texts of the Scriptures because of the linguistic and cultural issues that separate us from the ancient world. We can feel as if we’ve stumbled into the middle of a heated conversation without knowing who the parties are or what they’re so worked up about. Here we approach handling the texts in a more relaxed way so as to get on the inside of some of the issues that the sacred authors were wrestling with. In short, we will be starting to read the Scriptures through the eyes of the Forgiving Victim, just as St. Luke teaches us to do. Our hope is that you will find biblical scholarship to be less frightening than it might seem and you will have acquired a bit more confidence to dabble for yourselves in these biblical texts without being scared of them.
Book Three - The difference Jesus makes
Here we try to catch some glimpses of the Master as we watch Jesus interpret the Scriptures to his own people. We look at what it means to find ourselves in the presence of the Forgiving Victim. Jesus’ protagonism causes the solid ground to shift beneath us as we become untied from the more destructive ways in which the “social other” runs us. Our old identity slowly falls away so that we can begin to tell new, more truthful stories about ourselves. As you read we hope you will discover for yourself some hints of how being forgiven enables our participation in a new unity; we will begin to discover a “social other” that is good for us, and find that we are no longer depending on keeping ourselves apart and needing others to be our fall guys. As we inhabit the texts of the New Testament we find ourselves called out to form a new people receiving our sense of self and our belonging from the Forgiving Victim in our midst.
Book Four - Unexpected Insiders
At this point in our journey we are discovering new dimensions of how we are insiders within a great shift old patterns of belonging are being undone from within; we can no longer so easily form identities over and against victims because the Forgiving Victim has called us into a new space. As we work through our desire and our belonging, what will the new shape of community take, one in which there are no longer insiders and outsiders, only those who are being inducted into a human story in which death does not have the final say? And how will we respond to the challenges that flow from this?
Jesus the Forgiving Victim Listening for the Unheard Voice An Introduction to Christianity for Adults edition by James Alison Religion Spirituality eBooks
This book is really a revelation. As one of the other reviewers mentioned, this may be an introductory book, but it is in no way simplistic or dumbed-down. Alison provides a very fresh take on the meaning and purpose of Christianity, one that I found to be very inspiring and thought-provoking. It also digests the often difficult ideas of Rene Girard into practical, easily accessible pieces.One should be warned--Alison does not present Christianity in its classic, "traditional" form, and in fact critiques those traditional presentations rather strongly. He also clearly rejects a literal reading of Scripture and embraces critical Biblical scholarship (especially with regard to the Hebrew Scriptures). People coming from more Evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds--or traditionalist Catholic or Eastern Orthodox backgrounds, for that matter--are going to find his presentation challenging. But he also doesn't rely on the standard "liberal" interpretation of Christianity either, and deals very directly with human sin, atonement, and other classical categories, if in a new way.
Bottom line--this is a wonderful and exciting book for people who want to take a look at Christianity with fresh eyes. Highly, highly recommended.
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Jesus the Forgiving Victim Listening for the Unheard Voice An Introduction to Christianity for Adults edition by James Alison Religion Spirituality eBooks Reviews
Alison has a gift for making complicated theological insights accessible to the ordinary reader. This book develops some of his earlier, more scholarly work for a general audience.
Tough reading, but well worth the effort. Fr Alison explores aspect of Catholic Christianity is a challenging way, that lays open the route to a deeper personal spirituality, to a more critical reading of the Bible, and a greater openness to God's work in the world, yesterday, today... and tomorrow.
These are four short books that will give the educated adult a different way of understanding the Bible, and especially the New Testament story of Jesus as "the forgiving victim." The first three are fairly clear, but the fourth volume becomes especially challenging.
An exciting excursion into God's love. Alison affirms God loves his/her creation because God is good. He steers clear of morality and moralism. This is a fresh and refreshing examination of grace. It challenges small and selfish understandings of God and dares us to relinquish an angry God who demands sacrifices, for One, the Other other, who embraces his creation and surprises it with grace upon grace. His name is Mercy. Alison does this using stories, interpreting biblical stories and inviting us to find Jesus here and now, as someone who accompanies and guides our choices after having assumed the role of victim in his crucifixion and forgiven his executioners. Alison argues that this defeats the role that redemptive violence has assumed in Western and World civilization for centuries. His is a stimulating, kind and interesting proposition. Well worth the consideration. Highly recommended.
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Alison's work is refreshing and eye-opening, making sense of things in an inspiring way, and laying to rest old systems of belief that help to perpetuate violence and retribution in society. While his other work can be hard to traverse in its scholarship and vocabulary, Jesus the Forgiving Victim is written for lay church groups uninitiated in theological jargon. Especially when experienced in a community (like a book club/discussion group) or in conjunction with the available videos, this is a most satisfying theology that starts from who we are as people, and from that scientific, anthropological foundation, makes a case for a God who created us for a different kind of life here on this planet, and personally shows us the way to make that happen.
Intellectually I appreciate Fr. Alison's use of Girardian concepts to explicate Gospel-based spirituality, with a thoroughness that escaped Rene Girard himself. The key thing seems to be to find a way to avoid society-destroying human propensities to rivalry without the violent forms of the sacred depending on the scapegoat mechanism.
Girard's analysis distinguishes between internal mediation, where A learns to desire X from his model B but A and B, who now both desire the same thing, become rivals for it, and external mediation in which the model B' is somehow so superior to A that they cannot enter into rivalry, though A can still learn to desire from the external model. This not only fits literary examples, such as Don Quixote's relation to the (even more) fictional Amadis of Gaul about whom DQ read but whom he never met, but also the relation of the putatively resurrected Jesus to his devoted friends.
Alison does not explicitly exploit this distinction in Girard but he does seem to respect it. He is a truly gifted storyteller who uses familiar experiences, creatively reimagined, to suggest how the liberating influence of Jesus transforms those who accept his good news without succumbing to dull moralism and a constant sense of not living up to the ideal. He made (some) sense for me out of many Biblical passages that would have otherwise remained entirely beyond the scope of a plausible anthropology (understood as a study of the human condition).
New to any in depth exposure to Rene Girard's "mimetic theory," I found myself throughout the book just shy of understanding what the author was advocating (proclaiming, actually), until the very end, when it began to dawn on me how liberating is his good humored and passionate approach to what many of us have heard before but never fully appreciated Jesus's death and resurrection as enabling the kind of trust that is, in effect, the end of what has been and often remains the history of the human race's theory and practice of "religion" as propitiatory victimization. Powerful, but it took for me a lot of effort that proved more than worth in the end.
This book is really a revelation. As one of the other reviewers mentioned, this may be an introductory book, but it is in no way simplistic or dumbed-down. Alison provides a very fresh take on the meaning and purpose of Christianity, one that I found to be very inspiring and thought-provoking. It also digests the often difficult ideas of Rene Girard into practical, easily accessible pieces.
One should be warned--Alison does not present Christianity in its classic, "traditional" form, and in fact critiques those traditional presentations rather strongly. He also clearly rejects a literal reading of Scripture and embraces critical Biblical scholarship (especially with regard to the Hebrew Scriptures). People coming from more Evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds--or traditionalist Catholic or Eastern Orthodox backgrounds, for that matter--are going to find his presentation challenging. But he also doesn't rely on the standard "liberal" interpretation of Christianity either, and deals very directly with human sin, atonement, and other classical categories, if in a new way.
Bottom line--this is a wonderful and exciting book for people who want to take a look at Christianity with fresh eyes. Highly, highly recommended.
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