Anarchy and Apocalypse. Ronald E. Osborn. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Ronald E. Osborn
Издательство: Ingram
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Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781621890751
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else could be done? If not retaliation in kind, what then? If not retributive justice, how peace? Before attempting to give a positive answer, we must return to the world of Iliad. We must see why the question suggests the same fatalism that permeated ancient Greek thought.

      Several centuries later, this idea of the simultaneous futility and inescapability of bloodshed would form the heart of Greek tragedy. Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy is archetypal: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia to propitiate the goddess Artemis. His wife Clytaemestra must then murder him to avenge the death of her daughter. But Orestes, prompted by Apollo, must now kill Clytaemestra to avenge Agamemnon. The cycle is only ended by the arbitrary intervention of the goddess Athene, who appeases the Furies by giving them a permanent home beneath the city of Athens.

      IV

      The Sermon on the Mount, from which these words are taken, is presented in Matthew’s Gospel in a programmatic fashion as the new Torah, a new charter for the community of believers. Just as Moses delivered the tablets of stone from Sinai, Jesus gathers his disciples on the mountain to disclose a new covenant with Israel. The new covenant begins with the Beatitudes, a counterintuitive and politically charged overturning of the world’s values and moral reasoning. God’s blessings, Jesus declares, are upon the downtrodden, the oppressed, the meek, the peacemakers. All of the accouterments of power and prestige on display in Greco-Roman society mean nothing. Education, wealth, and noble pedigree are illusory anchors. Lord Caesar and Lord Mammon are out. Reality, in God’s eyes, is ordered with a paradoxical premium upon weakness and undeserved suffering.

      To embody God’s truth in a blinded world, Jesus calls for the formation of a countercultural community, “a polis on a hill” (Matt 5:14). In the polis of Jesus, reconciliation will overcome hostility, marriage vows will be kept with lifelong fidelity, language will be honest and direct, all hatred and violence will be renounced. The emphasis throughout is not upon individual piety as a means to salvation, but upon personal and social ethics leading to restored community in the present reality. Jesus sees his teaching as the deepest fulfillment and revelation of the Law and the prophets. He does not seek to negate the Torah but actually intensifies the Torah’s demands. The Law prohibits murder; Jesus prohibits even anger. The law prohibits adultery; Jesus prohibits even lust. When it comes to the matter of violence, however, Jesus does not simply radicalize the Torah: he decisively alters and in fact overturns it.

      The lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—is spelled out in several passages in the Hebrew Bible, but particularly in Deut 19:15–21. If in a criminal trial a witness gives a false testimony, the Law declares, that person must be severely punished in order to preserve the social order. “Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (19:21). Political stability is the goal and fear is the mechanism by which it will be achieved. Jesus shatters this strict geometry with a simple injunction: “Do not resist an evil person.” This does not imply passive capitulation