We make monsters out of ISIS because we want to say that they have intentionally done what they did. We can say of our military that they do not intend collateral damage. Thus their violence is bad but ours is good or neutral. In our legal system it is always about connecting intention and action. The two go together. So if we believe that anothers violence is intentional but ours is not (or our is just reactive) then we are let off the hook. What is nobodys violence is intentional? What if like Jesus we decoupled intention and violence altogether as in father forgive them they dont know what they are doing. This is the first literary allusion to the nonconscious and it is tied directly to the problem of violence done to an innocent victim. From What the Facebook?: Action and Intention in Atonement About a month ago when explaining how God forgives sin, it occurred to me that one of the keys to understanding this is Luke 23:32 “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” I have often observed when quoting this text, that Rene Girard notes that this is “the first literary allusion to the non-conscious.” Long before Freud, in other words, the Gospels make our non-conscious selves the centerpiece of reconciliation. In the West, particularly within Evangelicalism influenced by the work of Jacob Arminius, we have tended to attach God’s forgiveness to our ‘conscious’ choice to repent. We say “God forgives us if or when we repent of our sins.” In a class I once took with James Torrance on Calvin, Torrance observed that Calvin taught the distinction between legal and evangelical repentance. Legal repentance says “If you repent, you will be forgiven.” Evangelical repentance says “Because you are forgiven, therefore repent.” You can see the difference. Now it is true that Calvin tied this into his doctrine of election so that the elect, who have been chosen to be saved from all eternity, would realize that they had been forgiven and could therefore change their ways. Let us take this insight of Calvin and move it away from any notion of election or limited atonement and ask this: On the cross, Jesus sought for and assuming that God hears the prayers of his Faithful One, proffered forgiveness to his persecutors long before any of them even thought about repenting, indeed, even in spite of the fact that they might never repent. That is, they stood forgiven by Jesus and his Abba apart from and prior to anything they might know or do. As far as the Trinity was concerned these murderers were forgiven. The most heinous crime in human history, the killing of God’s emissary, was an act of forgiveness and reconciliation. Paul can say that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God’s self, by not counting their sins against them.” In other words there is no account keeping in heaven when it comes to our sins. How might this occur and how might we follow Jesus in forgiving others? In his allusion to the nonconscious it seems Jesus decoupled action and intention. There seems to be a recognition on the part of the Crucified that whatever it is that is done (the sinful act) cannot be attributed to the person as though a person “chooses” sin; rather what is recognized is that what we do stems from deeper parts of ourselves than even we realize. Thus Jesus uncouples action and intention. Our legal system, in its search for justice has found the need to keep them together. Premeditation or the belief that planning precedes action is necessary to convict a criminal of a crime. A defense attorney will often seek to show that an accused client did not “know what they were doing” thus uncoupling action and intention. In these cases the accused is remanded to mental health institutions and authorities rather than penal institutions. When we accuse one another of hurting us “on purpose” we bring together that which God has decoupled in Jesus. We need to believe that people hurt us on purpose in order to blame them (and thus justify punishing them). If like God, we learn to dissociate sinful actions from intentionality, we may just discover the freedom we have in relation to others, knowing that the self that we know as our ‘self’ (our ego) is but the tip of the iceberg of our greater self (which is the sum of all our relationships and their influence on our life). So also the ‘self’ we know as the ‘other’ is but the tip of the iceberg of all their relationships and influences. We often do and say things and when confronted later say ‘I didn’t mean that.” What we are acknowledging is that our action didn’t match our intention. In addition, the ‘other’ may have unconsciously misrepresented our action and intention due to their own different or even broken grids. Therefore forgiveness occurs because God has recognized that we experience so much of life, not as conscious autonomous beings, but as non-conscious relational beings. Forgiveness is the act of saying to the other “I know that what you do is not something you would choose to do if you were free and that you are in bondage to the ‘principalities and powers’ of the influences and relationships that have ‘determined’ your life.” Forgiving others, as God forgives us, is to recognize and act upon this uncoupling of intention and action so that when we are hurt by others we may say to ourselves (and to them) “I forgive you because I know that it is not you who is acting this way but that you are acting out of the bondage of all the confused and painful relationships in your life history.” Thus, we are called to forgive others as God has forgiven us, freely, graciously, and unconditionally. We stand in a posture of forgiveness in relation to all, before, prior to and apart from any acknowledgment of sin or repentance. The ‘other’ is forgiven, even as we are forgiven. This is the extraordinary freedom that allows repentance to come into being without coercion, with no fear of retaliation, but motivated entirely by love. It is not like a confession which we are forced to make. True repentance is never experienced as a command but only as a gift which is lived into true reconciliation. What if we stopped connecting the actions of ISIS with intentionality and instead saw them as under the sway of the violent sacred, and like us, they too need to be forgiven?
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:18:20 +0000
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