Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence by Hector Avalos

Author:Hector Avalos [Avalos, Hector]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-10-11T18:47:00+00:00

Yoder's violence to the plain meaning of the text is as arbitrary as any encountered from fundamentalists. Indeed, how does one come to understand "the point" of a passage except by understanding the meaning of the words in a passage? If "hate" is the opposite of "love," as we have amply demonstrated, then why can't the point of the passage be that you must hate your family to follow Jesus? Instead, Yoder invents his own point, which has nothing to do with anything mentioned in the text or context. This also leads to another question: If Jesus wanted to make the point that you should actually hate your family, what other, stronger word would lie have used?

And why does Yoder invert the object of hate so that the passage becomes centered on a "community" taking upon itself "the hostility of a given society"? The grammatical objects of "hate" are "parents" and "family," and so why does Yoder not see parents and family as the community which becomes the object of Jesus' hostility? This indeed, is to deny the victinihood of the family, and to condone the clearly hateful words of Jesus.

Likewise, why does Yoder suppose that Jesus cannot be doing both, creating a so-called voluntary organization and asking joiners to hate their families? As in the case of other pacifistic readings, Yoder's claim ends up as nothing less than an effort to maintain the value of violent texts and hate speech by pretending or claiming that Jesus did not mean what lie said. Such arguments are no less arbitrary than those used by fundamentalists, and they expose the fact that Yoder's pacifism is based on privileging violent texts by pretending they are not.

But a hopeful sign is that recent critical scholarship has focused on the antifamilial nature of some of Jesus' injunctions." Often these are assigned to the early strata of Gospel materials. However, the problem remains that any interpretation that sees Jesus as essentially loving and peaceful will center on choosing one text, whether early or late, as representative of the preaching of Jesus. But if one assumes that the antifamilial passages are indeed closer to the historical Jesus, then it is the advocates of a more violent portrayal ofJesus who may have a greater claim to approximating any "essential" message of Jesus.

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