Virtually Christian Quotes

“There was a natural resource in the affective devotion to the saints and to Jesus, and a similar intensity of devotion inevitably became directed to the ordinary human.7 Eleanor of Aquitaine, the paragon of courtly love at the courts of Angers and Poitiers, was a grandchild of Guillaume, duke of Aquitaine, the first known troubadour. In many of Guillaume’s love songs ‘the vocabulary and emotional fervor hitherto ordinarily used to express man’s love for God are transferred to the liturgical worship of woman, and vice versa.’8 The layering of Christian feeling and the new romantic spirit is also witnessed in the roman courtois, the epic stories filled with legendary material and hinged on figures of woman, mystery and quest.”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“I refer to the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a uniquely fruitful moment in the production and meaning of desire. These centuries saw the first development of romantic feeling.”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“You could say then that desire creates a ‘lining’ around the surface, or just under the surface, of an object so that it works dynamically as a sign. The lining is put there by people and says in effect, ‘Here is the object to possess and the fact that both you and I desire it makes it powerfully significant.’ We are very close here of course to Girard’s mimetic desire; the only difference is that it is played out in a systemic collective form, in the world of economics, the marketplace of buying and selling. Here is another aspect then of our world of signs. They are not just about information. Many of them—perhaps today almost all of them—enlist our mimetic and possessive desire to achieve and communicate their meaning. However, the moment I say this a reaction surely sets in. People have a sense that the contemporary phenomenon covered by the word ‘desire’ is richer and more many-sided than sheer possessiveness, and immediately I will also agree. I said ‘almost all’ signs, not all. I believe in fact that before the motif of possessive desire at work in Western society there is an earlier, underlying and more wonderful level which it presupposes. In this case Girardian desire, although enormously cogent, is only a partial description of the historical and anthropological facts. Before people in the West learned to desire things as consumers they learned to do so as contemplatives! I”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“How did the West produce the intense world of visual signs? What were the underlying forces that favored the multiplication of signs? It is generally understood that there is close relationship between capitalism and Christianity. Especially through the Protestant Reformation the Christian faith produced a huge shift to the individual, a man or woman separated out before God. Sociologists and historians recognize that by means of this ideological transition the individual no longer existed within a containing order of duties and rights controlling the distribution of wealth. Wealth instead became a marker of individual divine blessing. Thus the Reformation led to the typical figure of the righteous business man, the mill-owner who made big profits during the week and with them endowed a church for giving thanks on Sunday. More recently we have the emergence of the ‘prosperity gospel’ which applies the same basic formula to everyone. As they say in these churches, ‘prayed for and paid for’, neatly chiming relationship to God and personal financial success. Thus Christianity has underpinned the multiplication of material wealth for individuals. But a consequence of this is the thickening of the world of signs. Prosperity is a sign of God’s favor, and this is shown, signified, by the actual goods, the houses, clothes, cars, etc. Against this metaphysical background, however, the goods very quickly attain their own social value and produce the well-known contours of the consumer world. Once they were declared divinely willed and good they could act as self-referential signs in and for themselves. People don’t have to give any thought to theological justification to derive meaning from the latest car model, from the good-life associations of household items, refrigerators, fitted kitchens, plasma T.V.s, and now from the plugged-in cool of the digital world, computers, cell phones, iPods, G.P.S. and so on. So it is that our Western culture has developed a class of signs with a powerful inner content of validated desire. You”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“In contrast I have already pointed toward a positive implication of the revelation of Christ in the world that counters that of violence. The desire for the object demonstrated in Christian culture is not simply possessive; it is also contemplative and self-dispossessing, and this contemplative desire may well accompany and parallel the spreading virus of mimetic desire. My argument then is both more radical and more hopeful than Girard’s. I believe, in agreement with Girard, that in the world of signs under the pressure of the gospel the inherent violence of human culture is more and more exposed to view. But alongside this there is the cultural ‘other’ of the revelation of violence which is the possibility of compassion and giving arising in and from the very same chaos of signs. We are assisting at the most profound semiotic revolution worked by the Christian message, more profound than the use of the printing press, more profound even than the revelation of violence. Why? Because Christ is changing the nature of the sign itself. Christ is working at the level of the virtual to bring about his kingdom of love. I want now to demonstrate this, to show within the chaotic world of signs the process of an amazing change. The”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“They are the subversive force progressively breaking down traditional mechanisms based on sacrificial repetitions of the founding murder and the cover-up that goes with them. Girard is very clear that the bible has had this unique effect which thoroughly pervades our contemporary world. But in these conditions there emerges a stark choice. After the Christian revelation there are no longer truly effective scapegoats and so, in Girard’s own words, ‘the virus of mimetic violence can spread freely’. Thus, ‘Either we choose Christ or we run the risk of self-destruction.’5 I do not disagree, but the way his analysis narrows simply to this statement cuts out a great deal of the field of contemporary reality. It becomes a kind of negative scholastic or churchy judgment on the world. All the deep genealogy he has labored over at this point becomes two dimensional and misses the profound transformative changes Christianity has brought about. In short Girard has produced a structural genealogy of violence; he lacks an equivalent genealogy of compassion. In”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“However, in these circumstances of prevailing cultural mist there rises to view one cultural tradition which does consistently and radically unearth violent human foundations. It is only because of that tradition—as Girard asserts—that we have a progressive awareness of these foundations today. The Jewish and Christian biblical traditions are unique in speaking for the victim; and above all the figure of Jesus the Crucified has served to disclose and vindicate the multiple victims of history, those at its foundation and those throughout its course. Because of the spread of these traditions throughout the world it is now impossible to ignore the victims we make, from the victims of genocide, through those massacred in war, to those subjected to discrimination, to individual abused children. This is a massive shift in human consciousness and it has only one reasonable historical source, the Jewish and Christian scriptures and their de facto dispersion through global culture. They”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“Now if we turn to the Book of Revelation—which we saw as a cause of offense in its apparent celebration of a God of violence—we have to say in all honesty that it is in fact a nonviolent New Testament writing, and profoundly so. ‘The Lamb’ is the general symbolic name given to Jesus in the book, mentioned 29 times, an image of nonviolence and the book’s undisputed hero. The essence of the Lamb is not to use violence. When we first hear of it is ‘standing as if it had been slaughtered’ (5:6): it does not fight, it is slaughtered, and it continues exactly ‘as if it were something slaughtered (i.e. it does not lose this identity). Furthermore its followers do not fight, they also are killed. We learn that the Lamb holds the key to human history, opening its seals to reveal its purpose and meaning, including its intense inner violence. The Lamb is able to do this because it represents a completely different human / divine way of responding, other than that of violence. At the same time, precisely because of this revelation, all hell (literally) breaks out around the Lamb. The old world system—the Beast—does not remain indifferent to the introduction of a new way and the absolute challenge it makes, but reacts with continually redoubled violence. At the end of the book there is a final battle when the Beast and the kings of the earth with their armies are all slain by a figure called the Word of God, by the sword which comes from his mouth. But directly afterwards the new earth and the city of the Lamb welcome and heal these very kings and nations which have just been slain! The only figures not to be restored are the Beast and its prophet which represent the system of violence, the imperial order with its ideological apparatus of cult and worship. No doubt there is a powerful tonality of anger running through the book, against the oppression and murder that the Christian communities were then experiencing at the hands of the Roman Empire. And there is pretty clearly a sense of emotional release offered by the images of destruction and vengeance unleashed against the forces of oppression. But the final structure of the book is redemptive and life-giving, and that has to be admitted in any honest assessment. The duality then is not between a vengeful God and a gentle Jesus, or an initially gentle Jesus and then a violent one, but between an actual world and culture of violence and a core message of forgiveness and nonviolence. The early Christians were sorely oppressed by the former and seeking desperately to hang on to the latter. If they use language and symbolism derived from the former to restore hope in the substance of the latter then the tension is literary and poetic, rather than two moods or identities of God. The book of Revelation was intended to have a cathartic effect on emotion, in order that the Christians who read or heard it could arrive, in their minds and hearts, at the transformed perspective where they welcomed and blessed their enemies. In other words it was and is intended to be therapeutic.3 In contrast the split between Jesus and a God of punishment—which came to full growth in the Middle Ages—is ontological, and can only lead to a fundamental division in the Christian soul, with eternal love on the one hand, and eternal violence on the other. In other words, a spiritual schizophrenia. This”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“At the same time as suggesting the language game we clearly do not have a change in the name of God as our only way to think in New Testament terms of an earth at peace. There is Jesus! It is very hard to attribute violence to the originator of the gospel, of the good news of God’s forgiveness and love, of divine healing and welcome. Despite the fact that people refer to his action in the temple in the last days of his life as an exceptional yet conclusive ‘proof’ of Jesus’ use of violence no serious bible scholar would look on these actions divorced from his whole ministry. And because of that we have to see them as a conscious and deliberate prophetic sign-action, taking control of the temple for a brief period to show how it stood in contrast to the direct relationship with God which he proclaimed, and to make the point with a definitive emphasis. The whip he plaits in John is used to drive the animals, probably with the sound of the crack alone. No one is attacked. No one gets hurt. And very soon the situation reverts to the status quo: the authorities take back control of the temple and decide on Jesus’ suffering and death in order to control him. Overall the event is to be seen as Jesus placing himself purposely and calculatedly in the cross-hairs for the sake of the truth, much rather than doing harm to anyone else. The consequences of his actions were indeed ‘the cross’, and supremely in the situation of crucifixion Jesus does not invoke retaliation on his enemies, or threaten those who reject redemption; rather he prays for their forgiveness. No, Jesus’ whole life-story makes him unmistakably a figure of transcendent nonviolence. The problem lies elsewhere, with the way the cross is interpreted within the framework of a violent God. It is unfathomably ironic that the icon of human non-retaliation, Jesus’ cross, gets turned in the tradition into a supreme piece of vengeance—God’s ‘just’ punishment of Jesus in our place. My book, Cross Purposes, is about the way this tradition got formed and it represents just one of a constant stream of writing, gathering force at the end of the last century and continuing into this, questioning how this could be the meaning of the central symbol of Christianity.2 I think the vigor of that question can only continue to grow, while the nonviolence of Jesus’ response must at the same time stand out in greater and greater relief, in its own right and for its own sake. And for that same reason the argument at hand, of ‘No-name’ for a nonviolent God, can only be strengthened when we highlight the nonviolence of Jesus against the traditional violent concept of ‘God’. Now”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New