Thread by @creabuntur

What is "mimetic fundamental ecclesiology"? @GrantAKaplan, who coined the phrase, explains in his book Rene Girard: Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology...
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"Just as the Eucharist--the source and summit of the Christian life ['totius vitae christianae fontem et culmen']--is the sacrifice that undoes sacrifice, so the the Church is the community that radically reorients community.
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"[The Church] provides a space and time in which to grow into this new being, to unlearn patterns of false being, and to settle into and to undo false ways of belonging."
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"[James] Alison intuits...a 'mimetic fundamental ecclesiology' by describing this new way to be and to belong, and how the Church facilitates this process..."
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"Alison's first book, Knowing Jesus, recounts how the crucified and risen Jesus appears to the disciples as gratuity. ... Only in the act of being forgiven for their participation in Christ's crucifixion to the disciples really come to know God.
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"Alison declares, 'The resurrection has turned our victim into our forgiveness.' ... Concerning the Resurrection's gratuitous interruption, Alison comments, 'And it happened as forgiveness. ...
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"'Part of the utterly gratuitous other is that it is entirely outside any system of retribution and desert, and is therefore experienced by us as loosing us from being tied in to the 'customary' other...
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"'It is both as forgiveness of our sins and complete restructuring of our virtues that the gratuitous other reaches us.' This kind of double act describes the process of reconciliation.
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"A normal person cannot untangle two different emotional actions in the case of sin: a sense of dislike for oneself and a sense of God-as-Judge disliking me. When reconciliation happens, one not only feels forgiven from that particular sin...
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"...but also feels that the God who only loves you when you are good slowly fades away as one comes to know a God who simply likes you. The act of reconciliation allows for a reimagination of a relationship not rooted in reciprocity.
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"There is an ecclesiological upside to this being-forgiven. Knowing Jesus stitches together how the gratuity of the Resurrection relates to the community called Church.
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"To *know* Jesus, for Alison, means to experience forgiveness from a sin of which one has not been fully conscious. Not just *a* sin, but a *sinfulness*, which entails unhealthy rivalry and a reciprocity that governs individual relationships.
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"On a social level, sinfulness manifests itself in a manner of belonging that requires exclusion or expulsion of some other person or group of people. One comes to understand the way one belongs, and this way of belonging is rooted in an anonymity.
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"Being known by Jesus means coming into an identity. The place this happens is the Church. Alison explains: ...
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"'The only unity to which he or she can escape belonging is the unity of humanity that the Holy Spirit creates out of the risen victim, the unity which subverts all other unities...
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The Church is the universal sacrament of that kingdom (of heaven). That is to say that it is the efficacious sign of a reality that has been realized only in embryo. As such, it is radically subversive of all other forms of belonging, all other ways of constructing unity.
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"'But it is so *as* a gift from God.' If one does not experience this new kind of unity as graced or gifted, then one does not experience it at all. Alison's description sheds light on what it means to call the Church a sacrament of salvation.
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"Being such a sign in embryo means that the Church does not equal the Kingdom. At best the Church points to the Kingdom of God, or heaven. Alison insists, however, that the Church cannot be just another group:
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"'It is particularly sad when Catholics turn belonging to the Church into a sectarian belonging, into a definable cultural group with a clearly marked inside and outside, and firm ideas as to who belongs outside ...
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"'By their very sectarian insistence on the unique truth of Catholicism, these people cut themselves off from access to the truth which they think is theirs, but which is only true when it is received as given.' *Received as given*: this phrase requires a bit of meditation.
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"By this phrase Alison means something that we cannot return or pay back, that was neither earned nor deserved. We cannot receive grace any other way. On this point so many stumble because they are more likely to think they can earn whatever good things come their way.
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"The citation at the beginning of this section from Knowing Jesus makes this point in its final sentence.[tweet 17] God reaches us in the forgiving of our sins. Being forgiven *as* sinner lets the believer experience this grace...
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"The experience of being forgiven (soteriology) and the discovery of a new way of belonging (ecclesiology) constitute two side of the same coin.
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"Alison makes this point most explicit in his short summa, Jesus the Forgiving Victim. The book's sixth and seventh essays link atonement with ecclesiology. Here Alison writes,
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"'Do you see how it is that the Atonement and the birth of a new people are different dimensions of the same thing?' One paragraph later he adds, 'Automatically the hearing of the voice of the Forgiving Victim is the inauguration of a new sort of relationship.'
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"'The coming into being of the Church is not an add-on, but what the whole project was about.' Thus a discussion of the Church becomes essential to any Christian theology or apologetic."
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"According to mimetic fundamental ecclesiology, the Church is a sacrament for a particular kind of being and belonging. [But Alison (and others) note] the Church's failure to articulate a compelling fundamental ecclesiology [due, in part, to historical context:]
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"'It is worth noting that...ecclesiology, ..the discourse about the Church, is a fairly modern discourse, invented in the wake of the Reformation... It was born in the midst of a controversy, and on account of this still bears the scars of its defensive and apologetic birth.
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"'That is to say it was born to defend the truth of the Church against the devastating critique of the Reformation and for that reason had to have recourse to a series of proofs about Jesus founding the Church in its institutional form...
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"'In order to be maintained [these truths] were decked out in a whole way of conceiving of the Church which we're only now learning to get beyond.' ...
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"To unpack Alison's nondefensive ecclesial apologetic, it will be helpful to review what Alison says about being and belonging. The revelation of Jesus permitted a transmission of knowledge from Jesus to the disciples. Alison explains:
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"'The revelation that brings about the intelligence of the victim is creative of and constitutive of a new historical, linguistic, representational community, which is simultaneously seen to have been originary: what humans were always meant to be.'
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"The Church allows one to belong in a way that throws into question earlier ways of belonging. Hence the Church's insistence that if one is to profess belief in it, one must profess belief in its catholicity, or universality. ...
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"To be a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals *is* to detest the Cubs. For Alison, the Resurrection overturns such presuppositions of belonging:
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"''What is given in Christ's victim death is a subversion of the old human way of belonging, and the possibility of our induction into a new human way of belonging, of being-with, without any over-against.'
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"Of course, numerous people experience the Catholic faith as anything but universal. For many, being Catholic has meant *not* being something else. Such an attitude, according to Alison, exhibits a failure to undergo the Church's catholicity:
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"'The unity that is created in this way--even the laughing emotional bonding that seems to have no practical consequences--is created at the expense of a victim or victims, at the expense of an exclusion...
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"'[Such a unity] betrays the very deepest truth of the Catholic faith, the universal faith, which by its very nature, has no over-against.' ...
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"Most people have been at a party and wondered: 'How did *that* person receive an invitation?' Too often Catholics have been able to attend a self-segregating weekly party: ...older ethnic parishes but also parishes that become bastions for progressives or traditionalists.
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"For Alison, the universality of the Church 'means that I am always going to have to be in communion with fundamentalists as a condition for staying at the party.
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"'Any tendencies I might have to belong to a group of people like me, who think like me, agree with me, and with whom I could form a nice friendly like-minded clique, are constantly being smashed.' ...
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"The Church impels one to practice a new way of belonging to, not over against, the other."
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"Alison bases much of his ecclesiology on his exegesis of key New Testament passages. ... Mimetic theory suggests reading scripture as self-corrective and highlighting particular passages to demonstrate how God reveals through scripture.
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"Alison unpacks the importance of the baptism of Cornelius in Acts 10. This chapter tells how Peter received a vision to eat nonkosher animals (Acts 10:15), which compelled Peter to extend this vision to Gentiles.
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"In the same chapter, Peter declares, upon sitting down to eat with Cornelius, 'God has shown me not to call any person profane or impure' (Acts 10:28). Gentiles can enter the communion of Israel now called the Church."
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"For Alison the passage implies much more than a permission, following a very strange vision, to allow the baptism of a non-Jewish man. He calls Acts 10:28 'one of the most important lines in our history' and 'an extraordinary anthropological earthquake.'
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"The connection to the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism is direct: once one realizes the innocence of the victim, then the need for excluding individuals or whole groups of people dissolves.
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"Rather than switching sides, like a liberal who becomes a conservative, now even more convinced that the entire fault lies with the other...This transformation means the creation of a universality hitherto unimagined. Acts 10 reveals...'the great secret of catholicity:
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"'while every local culture [builds] its frontiers by means of victims, ..if we begin from the forgiving victim, [we] can build a culture which has no frontiers because we no longer have to build any order, security or identity *over against some excluded person*.'"
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"...Ephesians 2:11-21...perfectly summarizes the effect of the Christ event on the community Paul addresses: the Gentiles. The letter sets out to explain how the Christ event changes everything for non-Jewish believers.
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biblegateway.com/passage/?searc…

"Prior to Christ's resurrection, the Jewish community had understood Gentiles only in a negative capacity ('uncircumcision,' 2:11). Christ, who 'is our peace,' proceeded to 'break down the dividing wall of enmity' (v. 14).
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"The metaphors that Paul uses to describe this reconciliation--'brought near by the blood of Christ' (v. 13), 'reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross' (v. 16)--interweave the soteriological with the ecclesiological.
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"As a sacrament of salvation, the Church's catholicity, which fulfills the Christ's intention to 'create in himself one humanity in place of the two, thus making peace' (v. 15), points to the new belonging liberated from a process of exclusion.
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"The Church, paradoxically, is a community that undermines the logic of community as commonly practiced, much as the Eucharist is a sacrifice that undermines the logic of sacrifice. The Cross, according to Ephesians 2, makes this community possible."
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"In ch. 8 of On Being Liked, Alison [recalls] Jesus's indifference to the temple; a hatred of the temple would give it more meaning than Jesus thinks it should have. This indifference, says Alison, 'is of vital importance for fundamental ecclesiology.' ...
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"Understanding Jesus' attitude toward the temple as one of indifference lets us relate indifferently to supposedly sacred structures. [The 'New Temple' Jesus established] 'is the constant undoing of the human tendency to get sucked in to centres of mimetic fascination...
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"'...and the constant opening up of our intellects and imaginations toward the engaging in a new form of shepherding, leading people away from being trapped in sacred structures and forms of behavior run by stumbling blocks. *And this is what the Church is.*'
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"...Alison here writes for those ministering to gays and lesbians. In other words, for people who might be more justified in identifying the Church with violent sacred order. But...such an act would be a failure to regard 'The Temple' indifferently:
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"'In fact we will not have left the Temple at all...but will still be utterly locked in to the centre of mimetic fascination, with its draw and its repulsion, and our sense of being good and bad will be utterly dependent on it.'
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"...There's a way in which, despite talk of 'undergoing' (a conversion to the gospel), one can 'receive' the point here as something to be grasped. ... But Alison himself hints at a different process, because in the autobiographical section of his chapter, ...
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"...key insights happen on an Ignatian retreat, and in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Alison credits his capacity [for the virtue of indifference]--he would surely call it a grace--to this retreat, which liberated him from a prior reactive relationship with the Church."
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"As sinful humans, we regularly fail to see ourselves as victimizers because we would rather see ourselves as victimized, and thus let off the hook. Of this point, Alison writes, 'Constantly to be brought up face to face with the forgiving victim is...
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"'...constantly to be encouraged into no being frightened of telling the truth, of having the myths stripped away. Because it is a reminder of how we are victimisers, when we thought we were being good and holy and just...
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"'There is no true worship except in the presence of the true victim, because it is only from the victim that the voice which can undo the lies will come.' *Constantly.*
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"This means understanding the celebration of the Eucharist not so much as something to entertain us or to excite us, but to pull us out of a force field of romantic self-regard and into a remembering of our being forgiven by the innocent victim.
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"It is only by *abiding* that we can experience the slow process of coming to understand how we are caught up in unhealthy being and belonging.
Sometimes this reckoning entails coming to see our original impulse toward the Church as wrongheaded.
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"There's no better community to join for the wrong reasons than the Church. The liturgy of Word and of the Eucharist permit the grace that transforms the way we read the biblical stories, whose 'whole purpose,' writes Alison, 'is to enable us to inhabit a `we.`...
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"'...This we do not by detecting others' errors and hypocrisy, but by becoming aware of...a mechanism of bad religion in which we all tend to be involved.' Abiding in the Church permits us to come to see how we have been mixed up in 'bad' religion *as* Christians.
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"We are the Pharisees. Texts that had formerly convinced us of the Other's evil now 'become a gift which both shows us what an idolatrous building of our home looks like, and how to move beyond it in charity.'
...When this [abiding in the liturgical space] happens,
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'The Eucharist gets detached from...group belonging, and we begin to discover...the real presence of the re-creating heart of love which makes available to us a dynamic of detecting and moving beyond the mechanisms of violence that we set up for ourselves and inhabit so doggedly.

"'...I'm not talking about anything magic here. Just the slow drip, drip, drip of regular participation at Sunday Mass mysteriously yielding the real, non-resentful presence of the risen Lord who...keeps alive the dynamic of enabling us to find ourselves within a catholic story.'

"...In [this] abiding, individuals not only grow in holiness but also come to understand the Church as the paradoxical sign discussed [above]. As a 'somewhat conservative Catholic,' and also a gay man, Alison has outlined his own way of navigating the painful experience of..
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"..a 'field of mendacity' [the Church has inherited] concerning its understanding of homosexuality akin to fields of mendacity in race and or gender. ...the Church itself has been part...of the cultural...machinery describing gay and lesbian people as defectively heterosexual.
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"The Church, says Alison, has been a witness to this machinery, but it also 'has an evangelizing role to play,' which is as a 'witness to a part of its overcoming.' Implied here is that Catholics should not equate the Church with the magisterium...
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"Alison suggests imagining the Church as the group of people--however haltingly or invisibly--not totally opposed to receiving the graces needed to abide peacefully with one another. One sign of this peaceful abiding is the capacity to react nonviolently to the magisterium..
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"..when not in immediate agreement. Alison advocates [avoiding both] 'pathological loyalty' and 'pathological rejection.' The former cannot disentangle belonging to the Church from 'an act of sacrifice of the `other.`' But the latter position...has its own pathology.
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"It must not remain stuck in this reaction...lest it stop at 'a symmetry of enemy twins.' [For instance,] it would be a great failure if one's deepest joy in [Pope Francis's] papacy consisted in wondering how miserable he is making certain *bad* Catholics..."
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"Alison imagines a 'victimless sacred' space, in which one learns to receive an identity 'without resentment,' by reading the gospel 'eucharistically.' The kind of ecclesial belonging that brings about this new space understand the Church fraternally instead of paternally.
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"[Human] approval can never mediate the graced sense of approval that can come only from God. Being wrapped in the dialectic of approval/disapproval indicates 'a failure to accept the fullness of responsible involvement for bringing into being the project.'
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"The project takes time. The apostolicity of the Church gives witness to the Holy Spirit's creative work in history. In many and diverse ways, the Church has paradoxically signified the overcoming of an inherited mendacity. Worship and prayer, for instance, help participants..
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"..experience time in a new way: 'The True Worship of the True God is in the first instance the pattern of lives lived over time, lives which are inhabited stories of leaving the world of principalities and powers, and gradually, over time, giving witness to the True God.'
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"The 2010 French film Of Gods and Men depicts how a group of Algerian monks pray communally and, as a result of their life together in quietude and prayer, learn how not to be wrapped up in the violent sacred. The film itself...can be viewed as a sacrament of true worship...
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"...on account of its sluggish pace... By drawing the audience into the deliberate rhythm of Trappist liturgical life, the film permits the viewer to experience, perhaps only dimly, how the monks learn not to be caught up in the violent tug of things.
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"In one poignant scene, a younger monk blurts an obscenity at an older monk, whose nonresponse suggests how the angry reactive mode of relating can be overcome by prayer and asceticism. The portrayal overlaps with Alison's comments about worship.
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"True worship..'enables us to dwell more freely and creatively within [the world of principalities & powers], a lifelong therapy for distorted desire.' Perhaps Catholics should consider religious life as an acute form of the 'lifelong therapy' required for all of fallen humanity.

"...Alison's application of mimetic theory to fundamental ecclesiology...substitutes the perfunctory categories used to steer this topic. Judging which church or group most embodies the *four marks*...
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"...means that one has not yet undergone the kind of transformation of desire that the Church teaches. To judge a community as beneath one's own is already to abandon the kind of belonging into which the risen Lord invites us.
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"The Catholic Church requires that one confess one's sins in order to be a *good* Catholic. This in itself is a paradox that Alison helps make sense of.
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"Rather than leading to an overwrought scrupulosity, a sustained attention to sinful habits can lead the believer into a space where she is less easily dominated by them.
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See biblegateway.com/passage/?searc…

"...Although Alison's discussion of the sacramental life generally focuses on baptism and the Eucharist, I would suggest that penance might be a place where one could slowly 'cook' in therapy, and in this way exchange sincerity for honesty.
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"In his discourse on honesty, Alison argues that the main quality of honesty is that one is possessed by it. Real reconciliation means being loved into a more relaxed way of being and belonging.
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jamesalison.com/honesty-as-cha…

"I might also suggest the sacrament of marriage...for this living out of ecclesial reality. Nothing quite embodies the gradual undergoing as does marriage, & the Church's theology of marriage especially underscores how God's grace unites the freely assenting couple in their bond.

"At a point when we are most likely to believe in the Romantic notion of our autonomous choosing, the Church suggests that, even here, the love really felt and expressed is subsequent to the God who loved us first and made us loveable to the other.
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"Further, the ability to be faithful to this promise depends, primarily, not on the strength of our wills but on the auxiliary grace that overcomes rivalry and reciprocity to make possible a life together.
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"Moreover, the command to be open to the fecundity of the sexual act, can, at its best, help couples see that God mediates his life-giving goodness through a couple's love.
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"...Mimetic theory [explains] the inner dynamics of what the Church is and how it comes to be..."
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For further reading, some of the James Alison texts excerpted here are readily available online:
- tweets 6, 19-20, 35, and 37-38 are included in the excerpt of Knowing Jesus hosted at
girardianlectionary.net/res/kj_80-84.8…

- tweets 40-41 are from a 2004 presentation at an ecumenical Christian conference:
jamesalison.com/humansexuality…

- tweets 56-59 are from a 2002 talk given for the Center of Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Pacific School of Religion, part of the Graduate Theological Union, at Berkeley, California.
jamesalison.com/ecclesiology-a…

- tweets 63-64, 81, and 85 are from a 2003/2004 talk also published in Studia Liturgica 34:2 (2004), pp. 133-46:
jamesalison.com/worship-in-a-v…