James Alison Quotes

It is in this wrestling that Jacob 'prevails with God', and realises that he has seen God face to face. He has overcome not God but his own rivalry. After this mysterious struggle he was able to recognise his wrongdoing and look his brother Esau in the face. Thus he was able to learn to live in peace with his brother—and become Israel, a community of brethren.

Elijah, when he entered into rivalry with the prophets of Baal became one of them, because God is not to be found in such circuses, nor in the murders which go along with them. At the end of his undeceiving, Elijah is more Yahwist, more atheist, less of a shaman, less of a sacrificer, because God is not like the gods, not even so as to show himself superior to them.

The function of the Church’s doctrine of original sin ... is to keep alive the beam in my eye ... God keeps alive the beam in my eye by making that beam a living Cross, a beam on which there hangs a murdered victim.

What is new is that this sort of belonging to a group defined by an inherited paternity is shown to be an idolatrous belonging, and by idolatrous, understand a belonging demanding sacrifice. Jesus appears in the midst of such a group and, by showing up its structure for what it is, provokes it into tightening its group frontiers, into acting ever more obviously according to sacrificial type. And the threatening, destabilising element in Jesus' teaching and mode of acting out is that he refuses to concede any divine element at all to inherited group belonging.

We cannot understand the preaching of the resurrection if it is understood as a miraculous moment which founds a new religion. If it is taken thus, we are in fact denying the force and efficacy of the resurrection. For the resurrection brings about the definitive installation in our midst, as a constructive hermeneutical principle, of the cult of Yahweh who knows not death, and who is worshipped in a continuous apprenticeship in participating in and not being scandalised by the collapse of the sacred. A sacred whose secret is always the victims which it hides, and on whose sacrifice it depends.

The structure of our desire, which precedes our consciousness, is murderous. That desire ensures that our cultural constructs, our language and our knowledge are radically inflected by the lie which fails to recognise this, fails to see God in humans who are 'other', or ourselves in our victims, which is to say the same thing.

The only places in the gospels where the paternal voice of God appears independently of Jesus is precisely to indicate that it is to Jesus that we must listen, and that in him God is glorified.

In a world where nobody understood the viewpoint of the victim, we would all be right to side with the victim. But we live in a world where almost nobody 'comes out' as a Pharisee or a hypocrite, and it seems to me that the way to moral learning proceeds in that direction.

There is nothing harder than to be told that what we hold sacred is an idol. (64).

Sin ceases to be a defect which excludes, and comes to be participation in the mechanism of exclusion.

Now, here is Jesus' point: he is not only the culmination of the project, but the project itself, God made brother, offering us to become siblings, but vulnerable to fratricide.

Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, one which demands human sacrifice, so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion.

But as we become stronger, more capable of words, happier in our discovery that God does indeed love us, then might it not be important that we learn to withhold the excessive tribute of our resentment from something which doesn't really exist?

God has not the slightest difficulty in bringing to a fullness of creation the person who is in some way incomplete and recognises this. The problem is with those who think that they are complete, and that creation is, at least in their case, finished.

The problem is that this 'being identified with the victim' can come to be used as an arm with which to club others. The victims become the group of the 'righteous just' in order to exclude the poor Pharisees, who are never in short supply as the butts of easy mockery.