Readers Respond

A Note on Letters to the Editor

We welcome your responses to our articles. Send letters to the editor to letters@tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fit available space in the magazine.

Stop-And-Frisk

James Vrettos’s November 2012 article on tikkun.org, “Stop-and-Frisk in New York and the Politics of Crime in America,” ably spotlights the fundamentally political nature of discriminatory policing practices such as stop-and-frisk, and keenly advises that, if we seek to end practices that are fundamentally political, our strategies must be so as well. As Vrettos notes, this begins with changing the narrative. As long as those defending stop-and-frisk insist that they are simply fighting violent crime, we must establish that this claim is demonstrably false and at the same time show that it only survives within a worldview that actively criminalizes youth, poverty, and people of color. In addition to publishing the damning statistics on the policy, one way to start this shift is to engage the stories of people who have been stopped — because they are young, because they live in low-income neighborhoods, because they are Black or Latino.

A recent report by the Center for Constitutional Rights, “Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact,” tells many of these stories. The center issued the report in an effort to share the personal experiences of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers represented in Floyd v. City of New York, a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD for its unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices. When a young woman recalls being stopped and searched with her cousins, ages eight through sixteen, as they walked up the stairs in their public housing unit, it is hard to believe that this is the kind of policing that will keep our city safe. When someone tells how, after being stopped and frisked, “my jeans were ripped. I had bruises on my face. My whole face was swollen,” the fiction that stop-and-frisk is protecting New Yorkers from violent crime becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. When the growing “surveillance-directed policing system” that Vrettos describes overwhelmingly targets Muslim New Yorkers, denying the political nature of discriminatory policing becomes downright impossible.

— Vince Warren, New York, NY

Christianity Without the Cross?

It seems that what is objectionable in the discussion of “Christianity Without the Cross?” in Tikkun’s Fall 2012 print edition is a particular theory of the significance of the cross: the late Western, Latin, and Protestant “satisfaction theory” of St. Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century and its even later corollary, Calvinist “penal” theory, according to which God required a sacrifice for human sin. Many contemporary Christian theologians reject this line of thinking. This rejection of satisfaction theory began perhaps in the 1930s with Gustav Aulen, who argued that Luther rejected it, too.

Aulen argued that the classic, ancient Christian view was that, in His Son, God absorbed all the forces of violence into Himself. This notion depends on the Doctrine of the Incarnation, in which Jesus is not only a Prophet or a Sage, but also God Himself. The ancients saw this as the “defeat of the devil” by subterfuge — death swallowed up a man, but was poisoned by devouring God. It has nothing to do with sacrifice to God, but sacrifice — and victory — by God. Many prefer not even to use the word atonement (a medieval English coinage), but rather, redemption. A current variation of this view is found in the “narrative Christus Victor” thinking of Mennonite Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement. (If you google the latter, you will find all kinds of articles about this matter.) Weaver is a fine scholar who shows that language about “sacrifice for sin” means something different from Anselm’s interpretation. For one thing, the Paschal sacrifice was not a sin...