Silliman's Papers

Jesus Christ and Josey Wales
Reimagining the Christic “Sacrifice” through the American Western

Preliminary comments:
1. All Christians, by definition, agree that the crucifixion of Jesus, incarnate God, was an act in time with redemptive consequences. However, among Christians there are two theoretical debates – who and how.
2. These debates are, literally, besides the point. The question adressed here of how redemption happened or happens is important only inasmuch as it moves one towards a better understanding of Christ and that that understanding moves one to respond to redemption worshipfully.

Introduction:
1. There are various debated explanations as to how Jesus’ death is redemptive.
A) The Romans responded to the early Christian’s claim of crucified messiah was “so what?” (Justin Martyr quotation.)
B) My father, who did not grow up in a religious home, was baffled when he first heard of “Good Friday,” asking “If Jesus was a good guy, why do you call the day he was executed good?”

2. All of the explanations of the how of redemption are metaphors.
A) Legal justification metaphor. (C.S. Lewis/Chronicles of Narnia quotation).
B) Ransom metaphor. (St. Anselm quotation).
C) Bride metaphor (Quotation? God/man, dieing/undieing inversions).
a) These metaphors are not mutually exclusive.
b) Each specific metaphor has specific problems
i. A) seems to over-credit or normalize the system we need redemption from.
ii. B) seems to be a Manichean sort of dualism between God and Satan.
iii. C) doesn’t necessitate death or go beyond Christ-as-example.

In being metaphorical, the explanations for the how of redemption are not primarily or necessarily theoretical or theological.
1) Consequently, we are free to mine any field which might give us profitable metaphors.
2) Therefor let us here turn to literature, looking for a profitable metaphor to explain how redemption happens.
A) Literature is full of “Christ Figures,” that is, a character who parallels Jesus Christ in that he or she is messianic, of a higher or divine order, preforms miracles, imparts grace or forgiveness, brings about a new age, or is killed in a way that redeems others.
1) E.T. is a Christ figure in that E.T. is more evolved and therefore of a higher order, imparts wisdom, and marks the advent of a new age of peace and understanding.
2) William Wallace in Brave Heart is a Christ figure in that Wallace is of a “heroic” and thus higher order, preforms miracles (of a sort), brings about a new age, and is killed in a way that redeems others.
(Note: Science Fiction films are filled with redemptive themes and Christ figures and, in the opinions of some scholars, took in the 70s and 80s the socio-cultural place of the 40s and 50s Biblical epics of DeMille and others. Mel Gibson’s films are filled with Christ figures and almost every character he plays is tortured in a pivotal scene (What Women Want may be the only exception).

3) We are going to look at the American Western for a Christ figure and a Christic “sacrifice” metaphor.
A) Because I like Westerns.
B) Because it gives me an excuse to watch Westerns.
C) Seriously, because the Western is definitive for America’s understanding of itself and everything else. If one wants to understand America one only needs to understand this genre, from “Buffalo” Bill Cody’s Wild West Show to the first Western film Cripple Creek Barroom to High Noon to Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns to Star Wars to Kevin Costner’s Open Range a few years ago. Or, to put it another way, the Western is ever-changing genre illustrating the American psyche as it changes from the Indian Wars and Westward expansion to “Roaring 20s” to the Cold War to the late Cold War to the present War on Terror.

4) The hero-gunslinger of the Western at first appears to be an objectionable Christ figure.
A) The hero-gunslinger is violent.
B) The hero-gunslinger is a fallen human, esp. in the more recent “revisionist” or anti-hero Westerns, e.g. The Wild Bunch and The Unforgiven.

There are three ways in which the hero-gunslinger exeplifies the Christic action that results in redemption, which might be helpful in reimagining the how of redemption.

1) The hero-gunslinger protects and defends weak strangers without personal benefit or without or beyond reason.
A) Josey Wales gathers a motley and rag-tag caravan, which slows him done and leads to his death.
a) A hostile and biggoted old women
b) A retarded girl.
c) A distrusting Cherokee.
B) Shane protects farmers that disgust him. (Quotation.)
C) John Wayne in The Searchers protects those he considers to be the enemy, who are tainted by the very evil he's fighting.
a) A half-Anglo, half-Comanche boy.
b) A culturally Comanche girl.
c) An estranged family and their stupid neighbors.

Imaginations: The hero-gunslinger-Christ gathers to himself the weak , the dispossessed, and the unlikable, becoming one of them.

2) The hero-gunslinger engages in the system of violence in order to overthrow that system, taking all of the violence upon or into himself.
A) John Wayne’s Searcher takes scalps, and is equal to the brutality of the Comanches. He is a man who, in hating the Comanche's brutality and ugly life, hates his own violence.
B) Josey Wales is a “bush whacker” who guns down a score of men and who is falsely said to have killed between 50 and 100. He is portrayed as a man, to quote another Eastwood film, who knows that "it's what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid."
C) Shane learns the peaceful life of the hard-working farmer, but restraps on his gun in order to meet as an equal the mercenary killer hired by the rancher to drive out the farmers.

Imaginations: By partaking in violence, the hero-gunslinger-Christ ends violence. He, quoting the New Testament, “brings the kingdom of God by violence, takes it by force.” The most violent part of the Western is always the final showdown, which brings about the self-desdruction of the violent system and results in a new age of peace, a new Eden or Kingdom of God. The hero-gunslinger-Christ uses violence in an inverted way, to protect the peaceful, end the reign of brutal force, and move the violence to consume itself.

3) Despite pleas to stay, the hero-gunslinger always dies or leaves, lest he recreate the system of violence and bloodshed.
A) Shane doesn’t come back but rides over the hill. (“Shane! Come back! Shane!”)
B) The last shot of The Searchers shows John Wayne outside the cabin from inside the cabin, framing him in the cabin door and showing him almost ritually removed from the home to which and for which he’s brought peace.
C) Joesy Wales eventually stays in what one character actually describes as “New Eden,” but only undergoing a ritual death and resurrecting as a new man, the non-heroic John Williams.

Imaginations: The hero-gunslinger-Christ takes all of the violence into himself, and then rather than becoming a new king which would necessarily be of the same likeness as the old king (The King is dead! Long live the King!) takes all of that away into the outer darkness or grave. By this inversion, from power for the sake of power to power that undermines and ends the power structure, he leaves behind him a space for a new sort of epoch, a kingdom of peace. With the hero’s literal or figurative death the age of death ends.

Summary: Using the American Western’s metaphor to explain how the Christic act brings redemption, we say that Christ gathers and defends the weak and worthless, engages and subverts the structure of power, and dies to create a space for an epoch of peace or the Kingdom of God.

Conclusion: This metaphor has the advantage of not over-crediting the rules of the system which Christ will overthrow, of avoiding a Manichean dualism, and of explication why Christ had to die.

This metaphor has the disadvantage of being about cowboys, who no one takes seriously.

Qualification: The claim here is very limited, claiming only that this might be a useful way to reimagine how Christ’s crucifixion was redemptive and that even if it isn’t, it may spur us to evaluate and consider what metaphors we do accept and use.