The Drama of Violence-A Religious Studies and Theological Perspective

Abstract

Is religion the most important cause of violence? In a conscious departure from the ”enlightenment” approaches to the relationship between religion and violence I'd rather say, the ritualistic religious violence is mean of controlling diffuse human violence rather than as its source. The archaic images of God comprise sacralized violence in order to contain unclean and illegitimate violence; the legitimate violence regulated by rites and taboos is to be a bulwark against uncontrolled violence. The essence of archaic religiosity is the scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat is nothing but a surface for projecting all the diffuse violence and thus the essence of the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. But: why we can find such violent images of God in the Bible? For Rene Girard, the accumulation of the problem of violence in the Scriptures of the Hebrew bible (unparalleled in religious history) is neither coincidental nor is it a sign for the tendency of the religious to breed violence. He rather understands it as a painstaking process, marked by many backlashes, in the course of which a strategy to cope with diffuse violence that is based on deception is being unmasked. The falsification of the question of violence in the context of the concept of God, however, does by no means solve the question of violence. The fact that violence cannot be an attribute of God says nothing about human ability to behave non-violently. Thus the modern ”doing away with God” naturally does not solve the problem but rather shifts it even more to the human plane. That is exactly the place, where we can find the ”drama of Jesus”.