Theology and Ethics
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Those with eyes to see (Alison, 2005)

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The best analogy I know for Transubstantiation – the conversion, after consecration, of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ – is the phenomenon of “Magic Eye” images. These are glossy, colourful, two-dimensional pictures of what appear to be a series of wavy lines or patterns. For the viewer to get the “magic” effect, they should gaze upon the picture for some time, allowing the eyes to relax. At first there is a moment of dizziness as the stereoscopic functions of the brain kick in, trying to make sense of the two-dimensional surface, then, sometimes helped by the viewer moving the picture towards, or away from, the eyes, suddenly a three dimensional image is apparent. It has no necessary relationship at all to the content of the wavy lines or patterns. Indeed the wavy patterns simply yield and become the contours of, for instance, three dolphins leaping out of the water.

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Aboard the Disco Boat Queen (Alison, 2005)

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I’d like to know your reaction to what happened last year to Jeffrey John. As you know, he was appointed Anglican bishop of Reading, but because he is gay (though evidently celibate), there was a huge reaction from evangelicals, and he was forced to decline.
JA: I think that what the evangelicals got right and the liberals didn’t understand is that the appointment of Jeffrey John, an openly gay man, as a bishop was a de facto change of doctrine. I think it was desirable, but still, a de facto change of doctrine was sprung on people as though it were simply a matter of increased honesty.

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Staggered Vision (Alison, 2005)

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Staggered Vision. It’s what we get today in the gospel. In order to begin to make sense of what must be one of the most mysterious passages of writing anywhere, I’d like to try and fill in some of the background context. The background context is best known as Holy Saturday, one of my favourite days of the year. We had it yesterday. I think it’s my favourite day of the year because I’m essentially lazy, and it’s the day when God rests. All the readings and psalms are about God resting. And the reason why God rests is because on Good Friday he accomplished everything, he finished creation. He entered into death and made it untoxic. So on Holy Saturday a great quietness is over the earth, because of course, no-one else knows about this yet. It’s the great quietness of creation having been completed, of death no longer being the enemy of the creatures, but something that can be lived through and in, as part of being a creature. It’s death occupied by God. It’s where he fulfils what he says in Isaiah 25, which we get to hear echoes of in today’s gospel. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever. (Is 25:7)

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Show Us the Father (Alison, 2005)

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God’s not out to get you. He’s not trying to dragoon you into shape. He wants to enjoy you, to dwell with you. So he’s got many mansions, many dwelling places. He’s going to turn you into those dwelling places. Relax. Don’t be paranoid. And don’t think he’s out to get you. I’m going to show you that, by inhabiting death. You see, whenever in John’s gospel Jesus says: “I must go”; or “Where I am going”, this is Johanine code for: “I am going to death. I am going to inhabit death in such a way that it will be an empty trophy, and you will start to see the love, the generosity, the self-giving that went into making that available, so that you need no longer to be frightened of it. That’s because I’m not here to do a magic trick. I’m not here to wave a magic wand so as to “save” you. I’m here because the Father, the Creator, wants to get through to you to involve you in being part of creation from within. He knows that you’re so frightened of dying that you are refusing to take part. So actually, by my inhabiting death for you, the possibility is going to be opened up for you no longer to be frightened; and because of that, to dare to start to create things, and to do even greater works than the ones I have done, because the Creator will be able to work through you, opening up new things that none of you have been able to imagine yet. Many mansions that we don’t know about.”

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Wrestling with God and Men (Alison, 2004)

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One of the many treasures of this book, one of the reasons why I am convinced that this will be a bestseller as well amongst Christian lay people, is that it deals with issues that we don’t normally deal with and that actually, irrespective of whether we are religious or not, we don’t have the language to deal with, in both a very beautiful and a very rich way. And I think that one of the brilliant points here is the way you deal with abomination. You actually make a positive case for the use of the language of abomination, which I think is marvellous because it is only if people have something to latch revulsion, fear, anger onto, that they are going to be able to move on without thinking that someone is pulling a fast one.

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Befriending a Vengeful God (Alison, 2004)

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My real concern as a man of faith and as a theologian, it’s really about the linking of vengeance to God, the linking of violence to God, that God is a vengeful person whose vengeance needs satisfying in some way. And of course I think that that does have catastrophic results, enabling a whole lot of our behaviour to be somehow canonised by God rather than us undergoing the process of having our images of God pruned from our own violence so as to be able to appreciate someone who is entirely without violence, entirely unambiguous and entirely loving of us. My concern is not to go back into letting God be a function of our violent social life, rather trying to understand the way in which God, who is in no way violent at all, is trying to enable us to undo from within our own violence and come and live in a way that is peaceful.

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Some thoughts on the Atonement (Alison, 2004)

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I’m going to try to defend a thesis with you: that Christianity is a priestly religion which understands that it is God’s overcoming of our violence by substituting himself for the victim of our typical sacrifices that opens up our being able to enjoy the fullness of creation as if death were not. The first thing that I ought to do, therefore, is to give you a brief account of what is traditionally called the substitutionary theory of atonement; of what we are up against; of what a certain crystallization of texts has thrown up that has kept us captive; and how we are going to try and move from a two-dimensional account to a three-dimensional account and see that actually all the creative lines in that story flow in an entirely different direction.

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“But the Bible says …”? A Catholic reading of Romans 1 (Alison, 2004)

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What has pushed me in the direction of offering this reading is really two things: in the first place, I was brought up Evangelical Protestant, and this text, Romans 1, was really a text of terror for me, a text in some way associated with a deep emotional and spiritual annihilation, something inflicting paralysis. So, finding myself ever freer of that terror, it seems proper to try and offer a road map to others who, whatever their ecclesial belonging, may suffer from the same binding of conscience that a certain received reading of this text has seemed to impose. But there is a second reason, no less important to my mind: owing to arguments surrounding Episcopal appointments in the Anglican Church on both sides of the Atlantic, a huge amount of press has been generated in which it has been repeated ad nauseam that “The Bible is quite clear…” about this or that. Furthermore we are told time and again that those who think either that gay people should be allowed to marry, or that being gay should be no bar to Episcopal consecration, are in some way repudiating an obvious written sacred injunction. The impression that “the Bible is quite clear” has passed largely unchallenged in the media, which has found it easiest to present the argument as being between conservative people who take the Bible seriously (and are thus against gay people) and liberal people who don’t (and thus aren’t against gay people).

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Challenging deceptive sacrificial notions in Christianity (Alison, 2004)

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And is the crucifixion, James, a religious overcoming of violence, or is it more of the same?
James Alison: It’s the subversion from within of the typical human sacrificial mechanism. If you like, it’s the undoing of religion from within. Now whether you call that religion or not is another matter, I mean the tendency of it is the possibility of the creation of what we would call a benign secular. I think that’s one of the key questions which we’re looking at now, in a world that seems suddenly to have got a lot more ‘religious’.

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Human Sexuality… or Ecclesial Discourse? (Alison, 2004)

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The first point I would like to make is a little provocative, setting up a distinction between the thought of Freud and the thought of René Girard, whose disciple I am. Imagine a Freudian or a neo-Freudian looking at a rugby scrum. We can hear such a person commenting, after a bit: “Hmmm, lots of latent homosexuality around here”. Now imagine a Girardian or neo-Girardian gazing at the goings on at a gay sex club. Such a person might say, after a bit: “Hmmm, an awful lot of latent rugby playing going on here”.