Tag: <span>01 document</span>

Tag: 01 document

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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”.

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Following the still small voice: Experience, truth and argument as lived by Catholics around the gay issue (Alison, 2003)

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In the first place what I call “the gay thing” is something which has just happened, and is just happening, to all of us, whatever our own sexual orientation is. You can be as straight as you like, but being straight is no longer the same as it was when there was no such thing as “gay”. Our picture of what it is to be male or female has undergone, and is undergoing, huge changes which affect us not only from without, but from within. We find ourselves relating, whether we want to or not, with each other, and with ourselves, in new ways as a result of something which is far bigger than any of us and which is just happening. Now please note that none of this makes any claim about whether this change is good or not, nor does it make any claim about what, if anything we should do about it. It merely notes that it has happened and is happening to all of us, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

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Honesty as challenge, honesty as gift: What way forward for gay and lesbian Catholics? (Alison, 2003)

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This evening I would like to talk with you about honesty, not as about something obvious, but as about something problematic. This is not merely because it is difficult for me to be honest – and it is as difficult for me as for anyone else, but because I think that the notion is too important for us as Catholics, now, to be left without examination. That honesty has been important for those of us who are gay and lesbian is something which, while it is resoundingly obvious, has not perhaps been examined as closely as it might. The reason why I want to talk about it tonight is that I think we are so close to finding ourselves in an entirely new space in the life of the Church as gay and lesbian Catholics, that I’m very keen that we don’t stab ourselves in the foot, thus slowing down our getting there.

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Contemplation and monotheism: On the indispensability of irrelevance (Alison, 2003)

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What I would like to do today is to honour my compatriot, Julian of Norwich, by attempting to boost something which was dear to her heart: contemplation. I want to do this by taking a long way round to indicate that monotheism without contemplation is dangerous, and to ponder why this should be so. To put it in a nutshell, my claim is that monotheism is a terrible idea, but a wonderful discovery. So I am going to ask you to bear with me as I attempt to fly a series of kites with you, and see if, when they are all up there, we can make any sense of them.