Abraham's Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (or via:
amazon.co.uk)
The LA Times had a book review today:
'Abraham's Curse' by Bruce Chilton: Violence, a familiar strain in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Quote:
. . . [ I]s a justification for violent martyrdom to be found in any religion that relies on faith rather than reason -- and has claims to be the only true faith? A spate of atheist writers have recently made that argument. Or does the flaw lie not in our creeds but in our genes? Are human beings simply a violent species, compelled to slaughter our children over and over again?
...
Chilton . . . sees human sacrifice -- as opposed to wars "fought for practical gain or defense alone" -- as an artifact of the rise of cities at the end of the Stone Age, a "cultural reflex" that "runs below conscious control and transcends individual psychology and the usual logic of ethical action." In Chilton's view, this is a hopeful diagnosis: Culture, unlike biology, can be changed.
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All this aside, Chilton sees the original story of Abraham and Isaac as opposed to human sacrifice. He thinks that later versions changed the story when sacrifice (in war) became socially desireable:
Quote:
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In the 2nd century BC, the Jewish Maccabees revolted against persecution by the Greek heirs to the empire of Alexander the Great. They waged guerrilla warfare with self-sacrificial intensity and won. This encouraged them to view the Abraham-Isaac story -- in Hebrew, the Aqedah or "binding" -- in new ways. They produced variants of the story that emphasized Abraham's nobility and Isaac's willingness to die. In some, Abraham kills his son, whom God later restores to life.
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I recall reading the opposite - that the earlier stories had Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and were later cleaned up. Is Chilton engaging in wishful (or politically correct) thinking?
There is a more critical review
here
Quote:
Chilton . . . begins by highlighting his long-standing disagreement with French cultural theorist René Girard. Girard's key insight is that violence against a scapegoat preserves social order in any time of crisis. Mythical thinking then conceals this violence, but echoes it in religious ritual, which also wards off future crises. Scapegoating generates religion. It therefore stands at the origin of all culture.
. . .
Against the Maccabees, Chilton prefers to moralize about how making suffering sacred is deplorable, because it entices more innocents to suffer. Girard's unsentimental point would be that, in a time of crisis, a violent Aqedah preserved Judaism. That's the function of sacred violence. It simply works in emergencies, like it or not.
. . .
He thinks the epistle [to the Hebrews] fatefully Platonizes Jesus's self-sacrifice, making cultish participation in martyrdom forever conjoined with Christian ideals of love. But this is typical of Chilton's tendentious way of treating Christian tradition. In his zeal to denounce violence in whatever form, he frequently distorts the historical development of orthodox Christian doctrine. He wildly paints early theologian Origen as a fateful influence sundering spirit from matter, exalting "typology over history." But French Jesuit Henri de Lubac definitively debunked this cliché in History and Spirit (1950). It's rather Chilton who deploys a single-minded Gnostic typology with the Aqedah, his own spiritualized prism for passing judgment on humanity's bloody history.
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02-26-2008, 12:20 PM
Bruce Chilton on Abraham and Isaac
