{"id":294,"date":"2012-09-28T12:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T12:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=294"},"modified":"2019-11-22T16:39:58","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T16:39:58","slug":"the-sin-of-being-offended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=294","title":{"rendered":"The sin of being offended"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Slightly revised version of blogpost written in 2006<\/a>, after the Muhammad cartoons)<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Should a Christian be offended by blasphemy, in the way that various Islamic groups have \u2013 according to the official story – been offended by an obscure film on YouTube? I believe not, and I\u2019d like to explain why.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There is no shortage of material that could be cited as offensive to Christians but I\u2019d like to focus on the graphic novel \u2018Preacher\u2019, written by Garth Ennis, partly because it is a cartoon\/ comic, and partly because it is a work that I am familiar with.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To understand \u2018Preacher\u2019 you must imagine a tale composed of a blend of three other stories, but then put through the blender of a particular film. The three stories that \u2018feed\u2019 it are: Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood western; Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (although it predates the Da Vinci Code \u2013 it\u2019s actually drawing on the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail); and Anne Rice\u2019s \u2018Interview with a Vampire\u2019; and all of this is then fed through the stylistic blender of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d. It is certainly blasphemous, also obscene, disturbing and very funny. I believe it also makes some interesting theological points \u2013 not as profound or interesting as I had once hoped, when I was first reading it, but interesting nonetheless.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The basic plot is this: an angel and a demon come together and conceive a child; when the child is born it is immediately expelled from Heaven, and God vanishes from His throne. Genesis (the child) plummets to earth and is \u2018united\u2019 with Jesse Custer, a preacher (probably Episcopalian) who was raised by some rabid and violent fundamentalists in the Deep South of the United States. You could say he has some problems with his faith\u2026 However, once Genesis is united with him, he gains the Word \u2013 the power to command people to do whatever he tells them. Through various adventures involving the Priory of Sion and his best friend, an Irish vampire, he ends up producing a confrontation between God and the Angel of Death. God, of course, isn\u2019t the God that a \u2018normal\u2019 Christian would recognise \u2013 God is schizophrenic, in the popular sense, in that there is sometimes a raging Old Testament father figure full of righteous anger, and sometimes there is a radiant New Testament figure seemingly all sweetness and light. The end of the tale is the death of God \u2013 and the continuance of the world without Him, seemingly all the better for it.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Ennis grew up in Northern Ireland, and there is clearly a kinship between the God in \u2018Preacher\u2019 and the attitudes of someone like Ian Paisley. I had hoped that there would be something theologically creative at the end \u2013 that was what kept me reading \u2013 along the lines of Genesis becoming a renewed God, essentially a retelling of the Christian story but in a modern idiom. Instead, Preacher is profoundly atheistic, and is in fact much more of a story about the importance of friendship than anything about theology. It remains deeply memorable, and the set-up I think is wonderful, but in the end there is little engagement with \u2018mainstream\u2019 Christianity \u2013 Christians within it are portrayed as either fundamentalist fascists or as idiots, and the ethics that are vindicated are those of the western, ie righteous violence.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Now, in the face of such a sustained and offensive criticism \u2013 how should a Christian react? Should a Christian shun any contact with such writing, with a view to avoiding \u2018contamination\u2019 from its blasphemy? My reading of Christianity, influenced from what I know of the work of Ren\u00e9 Girard, is rather the opposite, and that the degree of our \u2018offence taking\u2019 is the degree to which we remain to be converted to the gospel.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A key word in Girard\u2019s analysis is\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>skandalon<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span>. It means the taking of offence, seeing something as shocking or blasphemous. As part of his anthropology, Girard argues that scandal is contagious and reproduces itself across a society, forming a major way in which a society polices its own customs. The practices of societies are founded in sacred violence and scapegoating \u2013 in other words, societies reinforce their identity by choosing a person or group as the \u2018cause\u2019 of all their problems (think Jews in 1930\u2019s Germany) and the society achieves a sense of unity by combining against that person or group, expelling them violently from their midst, and then telling a religious mythology justifying their actions. This practice persists over time, for the society is never able to completely eradicate tensions within itself, due to the maintenance of rivalrous desire, when one person wants what another person has.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Girard describes this contagion of scandal as the way of the world, and sees the Satan, the \u2018lord of this world\u2019 as that force which seeks to reproduce scandal, the taking of offence \u2013 for it is in the shared nature of the offence taking that the social solidarity is affirmed and reinforced. A society has a vested interest in ensuring the maintenance of scandal, for that is how the society itself is maintained. What such a society cannot accept is the continued existence of the source of scandal.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I believe this can be seen rather clearly in the case of the video posted to YouTube. When it was first uploaded, nobody took offence \u2013 hardly anyone even noticed! Yet certain authorities have a vested interest in shoring up the unity of Islamic societies over against the West, and so the West is then scapegoated as the source of the problems (internal tensions) experienced in Muslim countries. Thus it is Islamic sources which seek to generate a sense of scandal about the film \u2013 to great success \u2013 and at the cost of, amongst others, the life of the American Ambassador.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Christianity, however, begins with the scandal of the cross. That is, in the story of Jesus we have the unmasking of this process \u2013 a scapegoat who isn\u2019t simply a victim, but one who is understands what is happening and who forgives those who take part in it. In other words, a victim who does not take offence. This \u201cnon-taking of offence\u201d is central to Jesus\u2019 entire ministry \u2013 indeed, he is regularly criticised for eating with sinners and tax collectors, and memorably criticises the religious authorities saying that the prostitutes will get to heaven before them! Through not taking offence, through not seeing religious pieties as things to be defended, Jesus changes the social dynamics and enables a non-violent reconciliation with the excluded to take place. That is the essence of the Kingdom \u2013 an unmasking of this process of scandal, scapegoating and violence, in order that a new common life, not built upon these elements, can come into being.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, for a Christian, it is wrong to take offence, it is a sin. To take offence is to play the devil\u2019s games, to enter into antagonism between the \u2018righteous\u2019 and the \u2018unrighteous\u2019, the \u2018sinner\u2019 and the \u2018saved\u2019. In letting go of any sense of offence, one is released from the mythological pressures embedded in all stories of \u2018them and us\u2019, and is set free to become the sort of person that God originally intended \u2013 living in peace and loving the neighbour. This is what lies behind the striking language in Matthew\u2019s gospel (5:29), where Jesus commands us to pluck out our eyes if it \u201ccauses us to sin\u201d \u2013 language taken up by a great many moralists seeking violent self-harm, as it is, of course, to scapegoat a part of oneself. The original language used in Greek, however, is related to this word <\/span><\/span><\/span>skandalon<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span> and the passage means \u2018if your eye is scandalized, pluck it out\u2019 \u2013 in other words,<\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0if you are offended by something that you see you should blind yourself, for the fault lies in you, not in what is outside you.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This I find profoundly helpful, in terms of guiding my engagement and interest in the world. We are not to seek to preserve some sort of moral purity \u2013 that runs counter to Jesus\u2019 own well documented practice. Nor are we to protest at being offended. If God does not take offence at the murder of his Son, how can we take offence at anything milder? <\/span><\/span><\/span>It is precisely because of this bias against \u2018offence\u2019 embedded in Christianity from the beginning that Western society has grown up with this remarkable notion of free speech and free enquiry, which is what is now at stake in the confrontation with the Islamists. It is the unmasking of the sociological processes of scapegoating and sacred violence by Jesus on the cross that fundamentally enables the fruits of Western society that we presently enjoy \u2013 including, most especially, modern science. Girard puts it well: \u201cThe invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit \u2026 is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Western civilisation is under threat and it is worth defending, but not by being offended by those who hate it, whether the Islamists, or even artists like Andres Serrano<\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Slightly revised version of blogpost written in 2006, after the Muhammad cartoons) Should a Christian be offended by blasphemy, in the way that various Islamic groups have \u2013 according to the official story – been offended by an obscure film … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,36,30,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courier","category-islam","category-spirituality","category-violence"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-4K","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6233,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/6233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}