René Girard and Moral Influence: Part 4, The Coming Apocalypse

When René Girard's ideas were all the rage during the Golden Age of blogging, the tone was triumphalistic. Here was a way of reading the atonement that solved all of our problems! Here was a vision of salvation that would usher us into an age of peace! 

This triumphalism, though, was misplaced. Recall, most of the people touting Girard's ideas online were evangelicals deconstructing penal substitutionary atonement. Their excitement and enthusiasm was due to being saved from a bad theory of atonement. Stated plainly, René Girard didn't save us from violence but he did save us from penal substitutionary atonement. And given how penal substitutionary atonement was experienced as such an oppressive influence, stepping out of its dark shadow was exhilarating and liberating. We'd been set free! But being set free from bad theology is not the same as being set free from human sin and depravity. Good ideas alone cannot dispel the darkness within the human heart. Better theories of the atonement will not save us.

Plus, there was a nagging problem with Girard's ideas. Specifically, if the gospels unmasked the scapegoating mechanism, liberating us from the myth of sacred violence at the heart of civilization, then why has so little changed since then? Violence has continued. Scapegoating rolls on. 

Of course, this doesn't mean that Girard's reading of the gospels is wrong. Or that, if we were converted by the gospels, it wouldn't have consequential impacts upon the world. It's just that, as I've described in these posts, the scapegoating mechanism keeps getting masked. Again, the gospels stigmatized scapegoating as scapegoating. No society self-consciously scapegoats people they know to be innocent. Rather, we attack people we deem to be threats. Our violence is, in our eyes, a justified response to danger. So while the gospels might have unmasked the dynamics at work in all this--how the innocent scapegoat is viewed as guilty--there remains the issue of evangelism and conversion. At every time and in every place we must, here and now, unmask the satanic dynamic at work, how our present attributions of "danger" and "guilt" have become instruments of evil. But such a transvaluation of values is so huge, a complete flipping of good to evil and evil to good, that it is impossible to achieve on a widespread basis. In short, while Girard's is a truthful description of what's going on with us, it provides few tools to create a more peaceful world. Good diagnosis, but little by way of prescription. 

In fact, the gospels might have made the world worse. Girard himself admitted this. What the gospels unmasked was the sacred legitimacy of sacrifice in archaic religions. The gospels demythologized the practices of ancient sacrifice. And in doing so, the gospels robbed mimetic rivalry of its cathartic release valve going forward. And without that cathartic release, violence would escalate. As Girard has written, "Christ’s Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. And yet, the Passion freed violence at the same time that it freed holiness." Archaic violence had been bound in "fetters" due to the sacrificial systems, constrained and limited, but this violence was "unshackled by the Passion--with the result of liberating planet-wide violence." Girard unpacks this: 

By accepting to be crucified, Christ brought to light what had been “hidden since the foundation of the world”—the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the Cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.

Freed of sacrificial constraints, the human mind invented science, technology, and all the best and worst of culture. Our civilization is the most creative and powerful ever known, but also the most fragile and threatened because it no longer has the safety rails of archaic religion. Without sacrifice in the broad sense, it could destroy itself if it does not take care, which clearly it is not doing.

Girard goes further and makes the provocative claim that "Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure." This is the vision that unfolds in Revelation. The gospels do not save the world. The world is doomed. 

What the gospels do provide is apocalypse. Revelation. Unmaking. Exposure. History has been laid bare. And in this unveiling, a pathway toward salvation is opened. As Peter declared in the very first gospel message in Acts 2, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” And as Revelation pleads in regards to Babylon:

“‘Come out of her, my people,’
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her crimes."

And Babylon is then destroyed. John 3 puts it this way:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.

Or, as Jesus said: "For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

As Tolkien observed, history is a long defeat. As depicted in Revelation, we will not be saved from within history. Help must come from the outside. Salvation must be a eucatastrophe. 

As Girard admitted, the scapegoating mechanism might have been unmasked in Christ's Passion, the light coming into the world, but that exposure has not turned the tide of violence within history. People love the darkness. What the gospels have given us, however, is moral clarity. The cross has gifted us illumination. The light shines. But the path is narrow. And the time is short.