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Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred

true meaning by arguing that they originate from the same time as the prophetic texts that preachers use all the time. He claims that the texts of violence are urging the same thing: total dedication and social justice. Those religious communities with ‘scriptures’ relate to them in special ways. When a community decides to raise a text to the level of scripture (for example, the Bible rather than just a holy book like The Imitation of Christ or Pilgrim’s Progress), it decides to make that work authoritative in the sense that thereafter the community will relate its ongoing self-understanding, morals, structure, behaviour, beliefs, and ideals to that text. It will do this even if the relation is rather forced or even non-existent or (as in this case) the text is quite contrary to requirements. For this the community is prepared to reduce the text to almost a blank page on which it can write what it needs to. Thus statements about the meaning of scripture are often more statements of present requirements than of any strict meaning of words on a page. In fact, this has been relatively easy in the past; for most of the history of Christianity, Christians resorted to allegory which could almost be defined as a method for finding in a text what one needed. Christians had theories of multiple senses, where the literal or historical was only one and often the least important (Pardes in Judaism and Ta’wil in Islam served similar purposes). In many ways, what the text ‘means’ in a sense commonly understood today is a problem of the last few hundred years, when the other senses simply fell away and all attention was focused on the literal or historical. Thus the way religious communities have used their scriptures has often been inconsistent and contrived and does not preclude repudiating the natural import of a text—as texts of violence illustrate.