Addiction and Sacrifice: An Analogy ... This link takes you to a critique of a debate between the lovely Brian McLaren and Andrew Wilson. Heres my critique of that critique! Might it help to look at this through an analogy? In our lives we know that God starts with us where we are and gradually changes us to be more like Him. On the way at different stages a lot of imperfect parts of our life are left until the right moment to be dealt with. We know this from pastoral situations too, that if we (or God) addressed everything at once that needed to be changed, people couldnt cope, it would be too shocking. So whatever our issues are, a lot of them get dealt with later, layer by layer, whether its our greed, materialism, addictions, etc, etc, etc. If God dealt with everything at once, we wouldnt cope, meanwhile He sanctifies us and matures us gradually. Hence an addict who ideally shouldnt be an addict can still be a disciple, on the way to not being an addict eventually. At this point harm reduction, accommodating and continuing the damaging behaviour but reducing the risk, is a valid approach. I think its consistent and valid to interpret elements of the Biblical narrative as God dealing with fallen humanity in the same way, and I think the sacrificial system is a classic example of this. Since cultures of the time directed sacrifices at their gods, and since it contained some very dangerous and evil practices like child sacrifice, God permits, limits and defines the use of sacrifice, ruling out child sacrifice in the Abraham/Isaac story, and giving instructions about how sacrifice was to be used as a holding pattern until the ultimate deliverance from sin once for all comes in the person of Jesus. Along the way there is accommodation of an existing cultural religious practice; harm reduction (no child sacrifice); transformation, definition and instruction (including the meaninglessness of sacrifice performed out of self righteous ritual and heartless observance); and then stirrings of prophetic critique pointing forward to ultimate redemption which ends the need for the practice by the self-sacrifice of Jesus, with the whole practice undermined and ended by the resurrection: Gods end in the process is life, not death. I think that this type of trajectory interpretation (as proposed by Wink, Girard, Hardin, Boyd, Zahnd, Beck, etc etc - i.e. not something devoid of theological debate, dialogue and foundation) is a valid way of addressing the issue youve focused on without seeing different elements of Biblical content as being at loggerheads/logjam with each other. thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/wilson_debates_mclaren
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 09:14:04 +0000
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