Christian Practice, A Potentially Controversial Epilogue: The Final Practice?

After I finished my last post on Christian practice something I've been wrestling with surged back into my awareness.

This blog post is going to be controversial to orthodox Christian believers. I myself go back and forth on this topic. But rather than add a big preamble with disclaimers, I'm just going to discuss this particular viewpoint as a provocative theological perspective for you to consider, ponder, debate, or reject. The post is to let you experience one of my current theological struggles.

In the spring, I read a lot of the work of Rene Girard. I'm particularly draw to Girard's theory of the scapegoat and his non-sacrificial reading of the Bible. In the future, I plan to devote some longer posts to Girard. If you are interested in Girard, I'd start with The Girard Reader as it's a good compilation of his work.

In Girard's book, Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World, he discusses how scapegoating is a human impulse and how ancient religions ritualized human aggression and the scapegoating mechanism by inventing the rite of sacrifice. However, in Jesus Girard contends that the mechanism behind the religious sacrifice was exposed: Human violence. That is, two things are observed with Jesus. First, he was scapegoated and sacrificed. Second, the Bible continually witnesses that Jesus was innocent. Thus, in Jesus the scapegoating ritual of sacrifice is exposed for what it is: Ritualized human aggression. Religions ritualize aggression to allow the group to survive. Otherwise, violence spreads through the community. The religious rite of sacrifice allows the group to blame the scapegoat and, thus, focuses the violence upon a target. Without the scapegoat the blame is diffuse and violence spreads from neighbor to neighbor. Eventually, the community disintegrates into warring sub-groups. In short, Girard contends that sacrificial religions up to the time of Jesus were built atop murder and human violence. Religion simply channeled that violence to benefit the group. Stated crudely, religion was violence.

But Girard contends that the witness of Christianity, in the death of Jesus, is the end of sacrifice, the end of scapegoating, and the exposure of human violence. That is, Jesus’ death exposed us for what we are. It exposed religion for what is was (and still is). If we killed God Himself, how can we ever do violence to anyone ever again? How could we possibly trust ourselves? We can’t. If religion killed God, how could be ever trust religion again? Again, we can't. So the violence has to stop. As Girard says, he set out to "scapegoat scapegoating."

But here is the even trickier part. Girard goes on to suggest that most Christians miss this point. They misread the whole thrust of Scripture. They claim that via Jesus' sacrifice they are saved while others are Lost. Thus, two groups are defined, the Saved and the Lost. And the Saved group begins to scapegoat the Lost group. Not all Christians do this, but the history of Christianity generally supports Girard: "Christians" have shed a lot of blood since the time of Jesus. And they have felt justified in this. And that’s the irony Girard points us to: A book that exposes religious scapegoating (to put an end to it) is used to create further rounds of religious scapegoating. Mel Gibson blames the Jews. Other Christians blame homosexuals, humanists, evolutionists, or Muslims.

And so, because of this persistent misreading of Scripture, Girard suggests that there is one final practice of becoming a Christian: The rejection of the Bible, of Christianity. To quote Girard:

"Once again, the truth and universality of the [scapegoating] process revealed by the [Bible] is demonstrated as the [Bible] is displaced toward the latest available victims. Now it is the Christians who say: 'If we had lived in the days of our Jewish fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of Jesus.' If the people whom Jesus addresses and who do not listen to him fulfill the measure of their fathers, then the Christians who believe themselves justified in devouring these same people in order to exculpate themselves are fulfilling a measure that is already full to overflowing. They claim to be governed by the text that reveals the process of misreading, and yet they repeat that misreading. With their eyes on the text, they do once again what the text condemns. The only way of transcending this blindness consists in repudiating-as is done today-not the process that is revealed in the text and can maintain itself, paradoxically, in the shade, but the text itself; the text is declared to be responsible for the acts of violence committed in its name and actually blamed for not, up to now, mastering the old violence except by diverting it to new victims...There is one last trick, one last victim, and this is the text itself...It is the ultimate irony that the gospel text should be condemned by public opinion in the name of charity." (from Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World)

I am both drawn to and repelled by this position. Maybe you are as well. On the one hand, I see Girard's point: The Bible has been and remains a source of violence. Getting rid of it, once we fully get Jesus' message, seems like a good idea. But on the other hand, as a Christian, I'm very apprehensive about "condemning" the Bible "in the name of charity."

The thing that haunts me about this passage in Girard is a different passage in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It is Wittgenstein's ladder metaphor of meaning. His notion that you use his words as a ladder up to a certain point. And then, to understand correctly, you must discard the ladder. You cannot cling to the ladder. Quoting from the Tractatus:

Tractatus 6.54:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

This passage in Wittgenstein haunts me because I wonder if something like this must be done, as Girard suggests, with the Bible and Christianity.

In order to fully love the world, to give up violence, to give up scapegoating, and to demonstrate that you understand the Bible correctly, must the final act of the Christian be the rejection of Christianity?

This is what Girard claims.

And sometimes I wonder…