It has been a while since I have said anything much about Girard, but this is not because I haven’t been thinking about it. Once you see the mechanism (of mimetic envy) that Girard outlines, it is difficult not to see it everywhere. Now there are some Girardian fan boys out there who do to this insight what hyperpreterism does to preterism. You find a shiney new hammer, and absolutely everything starts to look like a nail. So don’t do that.

At the same time, there are a lot of nails in the world, and once you see how a bunch of them have worked loose in the fence of ecclesiastical comity, so to speak, a pleasant and instructive afternoon can be spent pounding them back in. This mechanism doesn’t explain absolutely everything, but it does explain an awful lot that needs explaining. For those pastors who want a fast-track introduction, try this.

But here is the application I have been mulling over. I have seen this development in families I have counseled, as well as in churches, particularly in startup churches that are still in the “liftoff phase.” Here is the scenario. The presenting problem is that there is conflict for which there does not seem to be an adequate cause. And there are good people watching the troubles escalate, and these good people are soon scratching their heads. Everything is okay, and for some people that’s not okay.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of “troubles” in churches and families. The first is provoked by misbehavior or tyranny by the leadership, and at some point the discontent gets to a tipping point, and the controversy results. This kind of imbroglio is the historian’s friend — the antecedent causes are easy to see and there is ample documentation. Tetzel goes one step over the line, the last outrage in centuries of outrages, and Luther goes off like a bottle rocket. Causation here is about as hard to understand as the cue ball making the eight ball go into the corner pocket. So that’s one kind of trouble, and not really my topic here.

The second kind of trouble is caused because of weakness (or perceived weakness) on the part of the leadership. Challenges, objections, querulous inquiries, and accusations are all made, and they are made simply because those making them think they can get away with it. No other reason is necessary. Nature abhors a vacuum, and always seeks to fill it. Human nature abhors a leadership vacuum (or perceived leadership vacuum) and will seek to fill it. Let’s take a marriage example, and then a church example.

A husband and wife go to a family conference in which Husbandly Perfection is extolled and taught with a high-gloss finish put on it, and the husband in question is an ordinary schmoe with a job, three kids and very discontented wife, and so the drive home from this conference is a cold one, with her glaring at him most of the way. When the thing blows up later, it is not because he is a terrible husband. It is because she knows he will put up with it. She talks to him this way because she can. When this is happening, the particular result sought is not really the issue, but rather a demonstration of who really gets to set the agenda around here.

In a church, let us say that the complaints are about _________________(fill in the blank with “the liturgy,” “the music,” “the preaching,” or “other”). And remember that we are not in category one discussed earlier, where the liturgy is Godforsaken, the music an offense to the heavenly angels and the preaching the kind that could not find its way out of a paper bag. Suppose the liturgy is okay, the music okay, and the preaching okay. It turns out that the average church is not capable of being above average. But the average church is capable of being okay.

When the criticisms are leveled, the point is not whether there is room for an average church to grow, mature, and improve. Of course there is always room for that, and a good place to start is by not subsidizing criticisms that place the average church on an impossible treadmill. The pastor doesn’t preach like John Piper. So? The congregational singing does not sound like a bunch of Welshmen having a revival in a hall with fine acoustics. Not a problem. The average church can’t compete (and it is not a competition anyway). But the average church can learn to handle the average malcontent parishioner . . . but the elders have to see it for what it is first.

Back to a marriage illustration. If a husband criticizes his wife for her failure to look like “the women in the magazines I’ve been reading lately,” should she begin her discussion with him by apologizing? The widespread availability of media-savvy Christianity, conference Christianity, talent-cluster Christianity, and so on, is that it has precisely the same effect on the attendees that going to the Husbandly Perfection conference had on that poor, murmuring wife earlier. When people visit a place that is rich in resources, teaching talent, and so on, like your average mega-conference, there are two possible results. One is that it makes the attendee more equipped to be a loyal and faithful parishioner to a faithful but average pastor back home. If that is the case, then have at it. Go to the conferences. But if all it does is set up invidious comparisons, then that person needs to quit going to conferences.

So the real issue, in this setup, is that if you are perceived as vulnerable to criticism, all you have to do in order to provoke some form of it is wait for fifteen minutes. That is the kind of world we live in. Just ask Girard.

When we emphasize that Christ died as a propitiatory sacrifice, a blood sacrifice, we are emphasizing something right at the heart of the gospel. And shrewd evangelists have known for centuries that preaching the cross this way is essential to effective evangelism — a process quite distinct from what passes for evangelism these days, a process more akin to recruiting.

Now that means this kind of declaration of the cross gets souls saved, and the lives of these people are transformed accordingly. This is glorious, and may the process never end, but even those tenacious, conservative evangelicals who insist on a substitutionary atonement are tempted to stop here, which is stopping short of the glory that is involved. Preaching this way is an effective way to get folks headed for heaven, but there is another element of the death of Christ, one largely neglected today in our praying and preaching.

Preaching a propitiatory sacrifice is something that disrupts the way of the world. It unhinges how the world works. It gets in the way; it jams the signal. It cuts off the power that makes all the machinery in Satan’s factories hum so nicely. It does this inside the covenant, and it does this outside the covenant.

The world runs on envy, it runs on striving. The world aches with desire, and this desire is the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine that mankind has ever come up with. Imagine coming across a pyramid of ants in a field, each one constantly striving and clambering for the top. And when an ant gets there, he has his three seconds of antfame as predicted by their warhol, before being tipped abdomen over elbows by his replacement. Think of it — movie stars, idol contestants, champion swimmers, cute starlets, congressmen, lords of Wall Street, authors, poets, leading botanists, and authors of seven volumes of letters in the back corner of a great library, last checked out two and a half centuries ago — all of them, three seconds at the top.

Whenever those who are entrusted with the gospel begin to detect that this worldly ache is settling into their churches, when they see striving and discontent start to look around for something to complain about, what to do? The world is setting up shop in the middle of the church, and how is a faithful pastor to respond? First, he is to mortify that ache in his own heart. And then he is to preach the message of the archtypical death of the ultimate man, the death that overthrew all of this empty hungering forever. He is to preach Jesus Christ, Lord of men, flayed by sinners. He is to preach Jesus stripped naked, and then nailed to a gibbet. He is to portray Jesus before his congregation as crucified, high and lifted up, the way Paul did with the Galatians, and he is to preach an old-time come to Jesus message.

He is to lift Jesus up in his sermon, the way God lifted Him up from the earth, so that the nations of men might turn from their striving and come to rest.

When a relationship goes south on you, and the whole thing seems inexplicable, the place to turn for wisdom is James 4. Where do these out-of-the-blue conflicts come from, for pity’s sake? And of course, all the initial trouble-shooting diagnostics you run ought not to be trying to figure out what went wrong with the other guy. Ambrose Bierce once defined a Christian as one who believes the New Testament is a divinely inspired book, admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

I was reminded of all these things yet again because of some recent foolishness on the Internet — I don’t need to mention where, right? There is only one foolish site out there, right?

When someone gets a skewed view of you, and nothing seems to be able to fix it, the temptation is to try to . . . fix it, just one last time — another explanation, another conversation, another appeal, we are all of us adults with drivers’ licences here. This shouldn’t be so hard. And yet, there you are at the end of your appeals, gray hair and all, feeling like you just came out of a hard relationship day back in junior high school.

Once someone sees you from this tangled perspective, reason won’t fix it. Neither will appeals to the facts or to the need for maturity. Trying to fix things that way is the ultimate exercise in futility. This person’s perspective of you is similar to the perspective the family cat has of the laundry room after inadvisedly getting into the dryer to cozy up in the warm towels. He did not think that somebody was going to think another five minutes for the towels was going to be necessary. Trying to fix this kind of thing with a rational appeal is like throwing a couple sheets of Downy fabric softener in there as aid and support for the cat.

So how can this kind of thing be fixed? Can it be? Of course, this is a fallen world, and there is not a nice little automatic solution to every relationship problem. But the Holy Spirit is in the world, and one of the things He is doing is the vast and glorious work of reconciliation. But this reconciliation is always based on the bold proclamation of the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on a bloody cross. The engine that is driving all the screwiness is envy, competition, hunger, lust, mimetic desire (see James 4 yet again). Where do these conflicts come from? Scripture tells us. And true reconciliation always has blood all over it. Nothing “rational” about it at all.

Let me take, as a fixed point of evangelical orthodoxy, the penal, substitutionary atonement of Christ. Let me also take, as a point of personal privilege, the knowledge that Rene Girard has offered some stunning and cogent observations about human nature, the process of scapegoating, triangular desire, and all the rest of it. How are these to be reconciled?

Well, as parts of a single system they cannot be. One has to give way to the other at the central point, which is the central point of evangelical orthodoxy. Christ bore the wrath of the Father on our behalf, and there’s the gospel.

But here is the catch. Conservative evangelicals who hold to the penal substitution of Christ, who do not see how “substituting” works everywhere else in human society, are thus in danger of negating the potency of the cross. They hold to it dcctrinally, but they do not apply it in such a way as to exclude all other forms of scapegoating. But that is what the substitutionary atonement of Christ did in history — it made all other sacrifices impotent, precisely to the extent that it was a real sacrifice. So why is it that conservative churches are filled with conflicts, competing desires, acts of exile, splits, running off the pastor, and so on? To the extent that they “continue the sacrifices,” they are testifying that they do not hold to the one true sacrifice.

Liberals, on the other hand, who are likely to be attracted to the writings of Girard because it provides them with an opportunity to hold to a “non-violent atonement” present a different case, and the results of their error will present a different set of pathologies entirely.

Conservatives don’t take the real sacrifice of Christ as the end of sacrificing. Liberals, because of their sentimentalism, think that sacrificing was always unnecessary, and ultimately unnecessary in the cross. Thus they, in their own way, still seek to make room for us to bite and devour one another.

If we have learned one thing from Girard, it should have been how the human race is capable of hiding things from ourselves, and we do it like Poe’s purloined letter—we hide things in plain sight, and then obstinately refuse to look at it, not matter what.

When we are occasionally given a seer who does what his title implies—that is, he sees—we honor and praise him into the middle of next week, but we stare stupidly at what he is trying to articulate. According to Girard, one of the great seers of the last several centuries was Nietzsche. This does not make him a good man—he was quite the opposite, but he saw what he was doing. This does not make him a great man across the board either—he was something of a pencil neck. But he was a mousy little man who saw, and who tried to embrace the ramifications of what he saw. The end result wasn’t pretty. As Girard put it, “Genius and insanity lend each other a hand until the last instant, giving the lie to the orthodox thesis that disconnects the two” (Reader, p. 246).

What did Nietzsche see? He saw the uniqueness of the Christian faith, and he saw all forms of paganism arrayed against that Christian faith. In Nietzsche’s words, “Dionysius versus the ‘Crucified’: there you have the antithesis” (Reader, p. 247). That is right; there is the antithesis. Nietzsche saw the two teams, and picked the wrong one, but he correctly identified the color of the uniforms, and (for the most part) the nature of the two teams. This is absolutely correct—and once you have antithesis, you choose up sides. Ya pays your money, and ya takes yer choice.

A number of times we have pointed to the tendency of mythologizers to draw a veil over what they have done, and to pretend, quite primly, that they haven’t done it. Nietzsche doesn’t do this at all.

In short, the biblical faith consistently takes the side of victim, and Nietzsche knew that paganism required victims. It was a requirement he embraced. In doing this, he was rejected the urbane and oh so educated approach which lumped the Christian faith in with all other forms of religion and myth.

In his great work Orthodoxy, Chesterton identifies this same error and has a great deal of fun with it. The thing that makes the Christian faith distinct is that which makes all the difference.

Nietzsche rejected the “for public consumption” forms of paganism. He was not a PR guy for violence (like Heidegger). Heidegger gave us a kinder, gentler Nietzsche (Reader, p. 255), but Nietzsche did not sugar coat it. He knew what he was embracing.

And so Nietzsche has no use for the lying dismissals of modernity.

Now there is one place where Nietzsche (necessarily) misses it. Like Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters he cannot get his mind around the Christian sympathy for the victim. He sees (as few others do) the stark and undeniable fact of it, but he then tries to reduce it to a craven and servile thing. This is the meaning of ressentiment, the “interiorization of weakened vengeance” (Reader, p. 252). Nietzsche assumes that the only way to take the side of the victim is to adopt a slave mentality, one that strikes back but only when it is safe to do so, which it rarely is. In short, Nietzsche knows nothing of the grace of God; he does not know the meaning of faith, hope, and love. But he does know that they are unalterably opposed to everything that he desires.

Nietzsche is no halfway atheist. He does not come around with any patronizing nonsense about the human race “out-growing” a need for religion. Nietzsche wrote, not of the passive death of God, but of the murder of God (Reader, p. 255). Girard makes much of this, rightly. Many, with pretended detachment, speak of the “death of God.”

Like a group of detestable relatives gathering for the reading of a despised but wealthy aunt, they are cheering inwardly, but have solemn and grave faces in order to keep up appearances. This is where Nietzsche is so bracing. His contempt is open.

Nietzsche again:

Girard points out the unmistakable reference here to the founding murder, the need for atonement, followed by the immediate need to pretend that atonement was unnecessary.

Nietzsche is aware of the murder that mythological minds insist on hiding from themselves. “This deed is still more distant from them that the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves” (Reader, p. 258).

It is undeniably there. Nietzsche, unlike many philosophers, reads like a prophet. He is a crazed prophet, as many prophets have been, and he was an awful man. We as Christians can benefit from reading from him, but only in the sense that Wellington benefited from studying Napoleon.

One last comment—Nietzsche is rightly credited as the father of the postmodern turn, but the postmodernists don’t understand him any more than the early modernists did. Allow me to reapply an observation of Girard’s.

Those who appeal to Nietzsche, whether they know it or not (and they almost never do), are appealing to the gods of blood. It is Dionysus or the Crucified. And Dionysus is not just the god of the endless party—sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He is also the god of random dismemberment. In the sixties, we were urged many times (in a Dionysian vein) to “make love, not war.” It turns out that the slogan actually means “make love and war.” The most notable example of this unholy marriage is the carnage of abortion, a carnage that is peculiarly Dionysian. Lust and blood lust are not separable. But what can be separated is the venting of the blood lust and the willingness of the spattered participants to see what they have done, and are doing. But Nietzsche saw, and Nietzsche approved of what he saw.

One of Girard’s conversation partners (Jean-Michel Oughourlian) says that it “is obvious that bringing to light the founding murder completely rules out any compromise with the principle of sacrifice” (Reader, p. 179). Well, no. Our task here is to point to some of the reasons why Girard falls into this either/or trap.

Girard sees a great deal in the text, and, if it is in the text, we have a responsibility to see it also. But in places like this, Girard over-reaches. He stumbles when he contrasts the misunderstanding of most Christians over against what Jesus “explicitly says.” On the contrary, evangelical Christians believe in penal substitution because of what Scriptures explicitly say. Elsewhere Girard dismisses this kind of thing as remnant of the old sacrificial order—even the writers of Scripture have to scrape mud off their boots. But this won’t do either; we have no authority to pick and choose. God tells us what He wants us to know. It is our responsibility to accept it all, harmonizing it as we can, and accepting all of it whether or not we can.

From Genesis to Revelation, it is plain that God demands and receives true sacrifice. The Israelites put blood on the lintels of their doorways in the first Passover in order to protect themselves from the angel of the Lord—not from the Egyptians. The Passover lamb was a substitute for each first born son in the nation of Israel. And Christ is our Passover lamb.

But clearly, Girard is no dope. How does he come to make this mistake? Why does he contrast the way of sacrifice with the way of non-sacrifice? Why does he make it the most basic of all choices? There are two reasons. The first is that he accepts the doctrine of evolution. The second is that he does not understand how Calvinism explains the world, and in particular how it explains the relationship of God to the world.

He wants to say that the revelation of the sacrificial mechanism puts an end to all sacrifice. We want to say that the ultimate and final sacrifice reveals all unbelieving forms of the sacrificial mechanism for what they are, and puts an end to all need for sacrifice, both in form and substance. This is because Christ is the propitiation for our sins (1 John 2:1-2).

First, as a theistic evolutionist, Girard sees the human race struggling up out of a bestial past, trying desperately to get a handle on the violence that tore our communities apart. In this light, he sees the sacrificial mechanism as a great advance—a hard deal with our bloodthirsty nature that greatly mitigates the problem. But this doesn’t work at all if God created us male and female, and we rebelled against Him in the Garden, and we expelled. The first bloodshed was not Cain killing Abel; it was God killing the animals to make clothes for Adam and Eve.

His evolutionism is related to the second problem. If the world is just sort of evolving, God is off to the side, laboring and working with it, trying to whip it into shape. But if God simply spoke, creatio ex nihilo, and blam, there it was, the picture changes. It means that a Creator God cannot absolve Himself of any responsibility for the violence in the world. At the end of the equation this is nicknamed Calvinism, but really it is simply the doctrine of creation and providence.

Notice how Girard sees it though.

The only response I can really come up with here is “poor baby.” How did such a non-violent god every get saddled with such a violent world? The only possible biblical answer is that this violent world is here because God made it. It continues on its violent way because God lets it. But God cannot play the part of Pontius Pilate, and wash His hands of it.

If God is seen as being part of “all that is,” then He and we are all swimming around in the great ocean of being—He as a whale and us as minnows. This means that for the whale to act on the minnows necessitates violence. But if God is the Creator God, and there is a Creator/creature divide, then this means that authoritative action across the divide is no more violent than it was violence on the part of Shakespeare to write Macbeth. We are not being evasive if we decline to do the math on this—we cannot. I can illustrate the Creator/creature divide on the blackboard, but I cannot do the physics involved and show my work. If I could do that, I wouldn’t be on this side of that divide.

As creationists, and as Calvinists, we can appropriate Girard’s central insights. The pagan mechanism of sacrifice is exactly what Girard says it is. Mimetic envy makes the world go round. The scapegoat mechanism is undeniable. But the God of the Bible says that “vengeance is mine,” not that “vengeance is bad.”

Just a few comments on Satan. Girard is right to identify Satan with scandal and accusation. He is also right to affirm that Satan is a reality. He goes astray when he denies that Satan is a personal being. Again, it is not a matter of either/or. The spirit of accusation and slander that arises from the human race, like fog off the river, does not create a “spiritual force” called the devil or Satan. Satan, a fallen angel, is driven by all the same forces that we fallen humans are, and he is the master of manipulating them. The relationship between devils and men is therefore symbiotic. We need each other, and have both been adept in managing this marriage of convenience. All the insight that Girard offers about this does not require that Satan be thought of as nothing more than a potent personification.

A few final comments on how scandal works. One of the things that has been baffling (at first glance) in the controversies swirling around Moscow over the last few years has been the fact that adversaries and enemies can become friends as the result of scandal. We have seen this play out over and over again. Murphy leaves the church because he is unhappy with Smith. A little while later, Smith leaves because he is unhappy with Jones, whereupon Murphy and Smith become fast friends. A few years ago I nicknamed this the “fellowship of the grievance.” It was quite striking. Recently (as in, just this last week), we have seen conservative Presbyterians (FV critics) teaming up with our local Intoleristas. Let Girard explain it.

Scandals are interchangeable. There you have it.

Those with a conservative background who start reading Girard are struck by how much he “gives away” with regard to the integrity of the scriptural text. That is fine—we ought to notice it. At the same time, it would be a very great mistake to identify him as some kind of liberal. Once you get used to him, it is very striking how triumphalistic he can be when it comes to a comparison of the Christian faith with all other comers. This is not said by way of agreement, but rather in the interests of accurate disagreement. Girard should be read, not as a systematic theologian, but rather as a remarkable exegete—pointing to places in our text that say some quite obvious things that we conservatives have never seen there before.

For Girard, the distinctiveness of the Christian faith does not arrive (fully formed) in Scripture from day one, although Girard claims it is distinctively visible in the scriptural text from Cain and Abel on. “The founding character of the murder is signaled just as clearly, and perhaps even more clearly than in the nonbiblical myths. But there is something else, and that is moral judgment” (Reader, p. 149). In the pagan rituals, there is nothing to sit in judgment on the sacrificial rites—the sacrificial rites are the ultimate judgment available to them. But in the biblical text, the possibility of a gross miscarriage of justice is always before us, because God sits in judgment on the sacrifices—and the Bible consistently takes up the cause of the victim. This means that if paganism is civilization, based on the founding murder, then the biblical faith is the un-civilization, the alter-civilization.

First, let’s consider some places where Girard misses some things. Girard does take liberties with the text. “The authors of Genesis have recast a preexistent mythology” (Reader, p. 151). And astonishingly, on the page after he has quoted Isaiah 53:6 (“the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”, Girard takes verse 4 (“we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted”) as meaning, “It was not God who smote him; God’s responsibility is implicitly denied” (Reader, p. 157). But then he turns around and points to another example of the same thing. But note how he puts it:

We have no problem with this because we affirm the doctrine of propitiation—meaning that it was the will of the Lord to bruise him. The wrath of God was poured out on Christ on the cross. But for the present purpose, these are distractions. As we shall see, Girard believes the Bible straight up the middle at some other places where virtually no one else appears to see what it is actually saying. Those parts can be harmonized with the portions that Girard cannot get to harmonize, but let’s just allow him what he does get.

“Suppose that, far from being a gratuitous invention, myth is a text that has been falsified by the belief of the executioners in the guiltiness of their victim; suppose, in other words, that myths incorporate the point of view of the community that has been reconciled to itself” (Reader, p. 150). And contrast this with what the Bible does: “Abel is only the first in a long line of victims whom the Bible exhumes and exonerates” (Reader, p. 151).

Let’s set this up in an interesting way. There is a sense in which Girard offers a very healthy corrective to some of what is being circulated under the banner of the New Perspective on Paul, particularly in N.T. Wright’s resistance to the propriety of applying the charge of Pharisaism in any kind of universal way (to medieval monks, say). There is a sense in which we must insist on “timeless truths” if we are to understand what happened with the Pharisees at all. But so we don’t get distracted by notions of atemporality, let’s just talk about universal truths. When Jesus is attacking the scribes and Pharisees, is He doing something that can be safely locked up in a “Second Temple Judaism” box? Not a bit of it.

In these rebukes of the scribes and Pharisees, what does Jesus invoke? He tells the Pharisees that on them will come all the righteous blood shed on earth (Matt. 23:34-36). Starting with Cain and Abel, all murders are cumulative. And all of it will come on that generation. But although Abel was righteous, he was not a Jew—he lived thousands of years before the first Jew, and an additional couple thousand years before Herod’s Temple was started.

Luke makes things even stronger. “It identifies ‘the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world’ from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah’ (Luke 11:50-51). Shed from the foundation of the world. In Matthew 13:35, Jesus came in order to speak in dark parables, in order to utter out loud what had been hidden from the foundation of the world (same phrase). “Jesus is pointing not only at the Pharisees, but at the whole of humanity” (Reader, p. 159).

The issue is covenantal solidarity. When Jesus rebukes them for building the tombs of the prophets, and keeping them shiny, He is showing that something deeper than simple cognitive agreement is going on. “The sons are therefore still governed by the mental structure engendered by the founding murder” (Reader, p. 160).

Girard shows the essential agreement between John’s gospel and the three synoptics on this. How is it that in John 8:43-44 the devil is called “a murderer from the beginning”?

“Here the essential point is that a triple correspondence is set up between Satan, the original homicide, and the lie. To be a son of Satan is to inherit the lie. What lie? The lie that covers the homicide . . . To be a son of Satan is the same thing as being the son of those who have killed the prophets since the foundation of the world” (Reader, p. 160).

“Human beings are sons of Satan because they are sons of this murder. Murder is therefore not an act whose consequences could be eliminated without being brought to light and genuinely rejected by men. It is an inexhaustible fund, a transcendent source of falsehood . . .” (Reader, p. 162).

“They must kill and continue to kill, strange as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing” (Reader, p. 162).

“Human culture is organized around a more or less violent disavowal of human violence” (Reader, p. 165).

Now Girard wants to push this into all the corners, which is fine, so long as it is the corners of our own little evasive hearts. But we have to draw the line when he has to do violence to certain texts. We saw this with Isaiah earlier, but let’s take the example of John. The same apostle who saw the things revealed that had been hidden from the foundation of the world also said things like this. “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).

The first thing we must do is distinguish the scapegoat of Leviticus, and a coinage of William Tyndale, from the scapegoat of popular usage. Girard has something to say of the former, of course, but his focus is on the latter. He spends a good bit of time defending his approach against those academic skeptics who are not willing to see the mechanism of persecution in mythology texts in the same way they do see it in historical persecution texts. I take Girard’s defense at this point as unanswerable, and, since it is not at the center of our concern, we don’t need to spend any time on it.

So, what is the scapegoat? As Girard sees it, the scapegoat is someone who, at the climax of a great societal crisis, is blamed for the crisis, and “in archaic societies, credited with the peace and harmony that are restored once the lynching has taken place” (Reader, p. 97). He, by his great sin, threw the whole society into turmoil, and, when he is sacrificed or exiled, he is the one who restores the harmony. He gets both the blame and the credit, although one or the other must obviously be (for the sake of avoiding flagrant contradiction) minimized. In mythology texts, the blame is minimized, and the deification of the hero emphasizes the deliverance he accomplished (from the crisis he himself caused, but we don’t talk about that much anymore).

With regard to historical persecution texts (medieval accusations against the Jews for causing the plague, for example), Girard points out that “naïve persecutors are unaware of what they are doing. Their conscience is too good to deceive their readers systematically, and they present things as they see them” (Reader, p. 104). There is therefore a great deal of free information in those accounts for the scholar who will simply look for it. “Just apply this to the mythology texts,” Girard urges.

So then, what is the “grammar” of persecution? How does it work?

First is the crisis, which may have an external cause (military disaster, plague, floods) or an internal cause (political uproar, religious conflict). But it is important to note that the crisis proper is a loss of that differentiation which is essential to social order. The causes of the various crises may and do vary (the trauma which strikes the blow) as opposed to the crisis itself (the shock the body politic experiences afterwards, which is this loss of differentiation).

In this setting, where loss of differentiation is everything, the victims must be easily identifiable. They are not seen as the sole surviving difference, but rather as the disruptive alien difference.

The second stage is that accusations are made against a victim or victims who are alleged to be the cause of “all this.” The accusations usually fall into three categories: the first is that the victims unforgivably violated or attacked those whom it is most criminal to attack. In ancient societies, this would be figures of authority. In societies affected by the gospel, the accusations are more likely to be of child abuse. Ask yourself: what accusations are most likely to make everyone absolutely forget the rules of evidence? Every society has such categories: ours would be child or spousal abuse.

The second would be sexual crimes, of violations against taboos concerning incest, rape or bestiality, and the grosser the violation, the better the accusation.

The third kind of accusation would be religious crimes—profanation of the host in conservative Catholic countries, desecration of the Bible in Protestant ones, and mockery of egalitarianism in ours.

And last, the victims are “marked” or identified by something easy to see, and which sets them out as differing from everyone else in a disruptive way. The problem is not the difference itself (remember, the society is trying to recover from the traumatic loss of difference). The society needed difference, and, according to the accusations, the victims abused this vulnerability.

All this said, what are some observations or cautions? The first is one that Girard himself notes, and it is important for us to emphasize. Suppose a white mob lynches a black man who was actually guilty of the crime he was accused of? (Reader, p. 115). For Girard, this makes no sociological difference. “The responsibility of the victims suffers the same fantastic exaggeration whether it is real or not” (Reader, p. 115).

C.S. Lewis notes somewhere that we pride ourselves on our great moral superiority because we no longer burn witches. But, he notes, this is not a moral advance because we decline to do so because we no longer believe in witches. We do execute spies, traitors, and serial murderers. If we believed that there were certain members of the community who had the malevolent power to harm and kill their neighbors by supernatural means, what would we do about it? And the chances are good that we would admit “spectral evidence” also—because we admit other forms of spectral evidence today.

A second concern is this: If we extend this principal too far, reading it into absolutely everything, what happens? We have simply come up with a new and unique way to hammer the victim. If all are victims, we are all persecutors. And if in the name of Girard, we get to the point where we refuse to take sides (as God does not refuse to take sides), then we have simply come up with a new way of annihilating differences (in this case moral). But right and wrong have to have some kind of objective meaning.

A few test cases: take the story of Esther. Is this a classic persecution text, in which the Jews are rationalizing and justifying themselves for slaughtering their enemies? Or is it an honorable story of legitimate self-defense? When Jonah was thrown overboard by the sailors, were they scapegoating him, or did God actually require them to do this? When Achan was blamed for the loss at the first battle of Ai, was this an instance of ungodly scapegoating?

Put another way, we have to refuse to allow questions of guilt and innocence to be swallowed up by this sociological theory of the scapegoat. At the same time, we have to anchor our understanding of guilt and innocence in what the Scriptures give us concerning the rules of evidence. What are we allowed to look at, and what must we refuse to consider? One of the central things we must refuse to consider the stampede of the turba, the incipient lynch mob.

Introduction to Sacrifice

We now come the area where we are going to have the most difficulty with Girard’s approach—but not so much in what he sees throughout the ancient world, but in how far he extends it, and what as a result he excludes from the atonement of Christ. He has a great deal of insight into the nature of sacrificial cultures, but we want to be careful here.

An underlying reason for this difference may be seen on p. 69 of the Reader, where the editor refers to the “hominids in the process of becoming human.” If religion is a reasonable device that men came up with in their evolutionary ascent out of bestial violence, then let’s give credit where credit is due, and continue our growth past that. But if all violence began after an expulsion of fully created human beings from an idyllic Garden, then that is a completely different story. The issues of creation and evolution are basic in this discussion.

This whole process is in the very nature of things. “When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim” (Reader, p. 72). But is not just a matter of “this guy for that guy.” Ultimately, the entire society is involved. “Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves” (Reader, p. 77).

The quarrel may have started out with just two men, but ancient societies knew that two men fighting with one another, with one of them killed, was no more innocent (as far as they were concerned) than to find two members of their community with a bad case of the plague. “This common denominator is internal violence—all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that” (Reader, p. 78, emphasis mine).

“In a universe where the slightest dispute can lead to disaster—just as a slight cut can prove fatal to a hemophiliac—the rites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community’s aggressive impulses and redirect them toward victims that may be actual or figurative, animate or inanimate, but that are always incapable of propagating further vengeance . . . The sacrificial process prevents the spread of violence by keeping vengeance in check” (Reader, p. 87)

Girard holds that in order for a sacrificial system to “work,” everybody has to squint at what they are doing. They have to see just enough of it so that the exercise is plausible, but not enough of it to see that the whole thing is crazy. This victim is like the entity he is being substituted for—so let’s call it good. The victim is unlike the entity he is being substituted for, and so we stop the spread of violent contagion. “Sacrificial substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based” (Reader, p. 75).

According to Girard, this misunderstanding furthered by the theologians and priests, but he does not say this in an attack on them. He sees, quite clearly, the essential role that fostering this misunderstanding plays. “The theological basis of the sacrifice has a crucial role in fostering this misunderstanding. It is the god who supposedly demands the victims; he alone, in principle, who savors the smoke from the altars and requisitions the slaughtered flesh. It is to appease his anger that the killing goes on, that the victims multiply” (Reader, p. 77).

Men do not think that they have the authority in themselves to simply assign a victim. The voice of God must be sought. “Men can dispose of their violence more efficiently if they regard the process not as something emanating from within themselves, but as a necessity imposed from without, a divine decree whose least infraction calls down terrible punishment” (Reader, p. 83)

The sacrificial rites are born in the founding of a city—usually a founding murder of some sort. But periodically, an established system starts to break down. “If, as is often the case, we encounter the institution of sacrifice either in an advanced state of decay or reduced to a relative insignificance, it is because it has already undergone a good deal of wear and tear” (Reader, p. 88).

Under certain circumstances, the “victim will not longer be capable of attracting the violent impulses to itself; the sacrifice will cease to serve as a ‘good conductor,’ in the sense that metal is a good conductor of electricity” (Reader, p. 88).

In his great book, Til We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis has the priest of Ungit compare the “thickness” of his religion, with its need for blood, with the “thinness” and aridity of the Fox’s philosophical urbanity. Blood is necessary, and at the foundational level. And although it has pragmatic benefits—peace to the community—the reason it brings peace is that the community knows that something fundamentally necessary has been done. This is true even if that community is mistaken about whether the fundamental necessity has been accomplished. It is close enough to be able to make the mistake. Girard is indispensable for showing how the mistake is made via “substitution”—animals for men, this man for that, this man for all of us, and so on. But why does substitution work at all? Is this a design feature of the world, of which all pagan religions are sinful and twisted distortions.

Substitution is the way God made the world, and so men in rebellion counterfeit it in many ingenious and complicated ways, or substitution is something we came up with as a temporary makeshift, and, when we were mature enough to see it, God revealed the true nature of the makeshift to us.

But for those who believe in the plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture, the question is settled. Just a couple examples should suffice:

Propitiation is similar to the idea of expiation, although propitiation has the additional element of dealing with the concept of wrath. We know what the word propitiation means in just the same way that we know what the words synagogue, boat, or temple mean. Propitiation contains two halves. The first is the element of appeasing the wrath of an offended party (in this case, God), and second is the element of being reconciled to Him as a result. That said:

Note that, according to John, God sent His Son to be a propitiation, which is quite a different thing than revealing to us that the whole concept of propitiation was actually bogus.

Metaphysical Desire

We come now to a fascinating engine of conflict, both in real life and in great fiction. As you will see, Girard argues that poor fiction sidesteps this reality, while great fiction confronts and exposes it wonderfully. We are beginning a genuine study of ourselves and, while we’re at it, a rewarding study of the kind of literature that enables us to really see ourselves.

It is important to emphasize at the beginning here, that although this desire is profoundly destructive, Girard believes it to be a creational good, twisted by pride and sin. As Christians we are to imitate others ahead of us as they in turn imitate Christ. Mimesis is not to be understood as inherently sinful (Reader, p. 63)

Except in a basic, trivial sense, desire is not a two-part operation (thirsty person > water). Rather, desire is triangular—a three way thing. According to Girard, there is 1. the self, 2. the mediator (or model), and 3. the object desired because the self believes or suspects (rightly or wrongly) that the model desires it. This is triangular desire.

The mediator may be distant or close. If distant, this results in what Girard identifies as external mediation. If the model or mediator is the Virgin Mary, or the family legends of one’s great, great grandfather, or the example of Martin Luther, this would be called external mediation. The person can be driven, but is not going to find himself in endless conflicts with the mediator. In external mediation, the subject knows what is happening. “He worships his model openly and declares himself his disciple” (Reader, p. 39).

It is not that no problems can arise with external mediation, but the real possibilities for confusion and violence arise with internal mediation. “We shall speak of internal mediation when this same distance is sufficiently refused to allow these two spheres to penetrate each other more or less profoundly” (Reader, p. 39). This is the kind of thing you have when you have two men, the best of friends, falling in love with the same girl. It happens when you have twin brothers wanting the favor or blessing of their father, or the rule of the city. It happens when one church is enormously blessed when the other church across town “should have been.” In other words, the subject and the model are constantly underfoot. And it is not always clear who is the subject and who is the model.

This is because there are many things going on.

According to Girard, great writers are hyper-mimetic (p. 64), and consequently they (in their personal lives) were all caught up in the tangles that this causes. They write from personal experience. And the climax of the novel is when the protagonist becomes capable of writing the novel himself. He comes to the point where he sees what has been driving him the entire time, and renounces it. He might renounce it and die, with the resurrection in the next life implied, or he might be transformed in this life. The issue is not the fact of the transformation, but rather the nature of it.

Now this means that Girard is maintaining that great novels are death and resurrection stories, conversion stories, just like all those Billy Graham movies, or cheesy Christian romances at the Christian gift shop. But the thing that makes great novels great is the nature of the repudiation, the great renunciation. What is dying? What rises?

Ham-handedness is writing is consistently recognized in creative writing workshops, and then the poultice is applied to the wrong wound. “Show, don’t tell,” actually means don’t tell me that way, tell me another way. A novel in which there is a marked conversion in the next to last chapter gets an “oh, puh leeze” response—unless it turns out we are talking about Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, Don Quixote, and carry on with this list on your own time. The problem is not “conversion” stories. The problem lies in the nature of what we think we need converting from, and what we believe we are being converted to.

Pedestrian fiction by-passes the possibilities and complications of triangular desire. “In most works of fiction, the characters have desires which are simpler than Don Quixote’s. There is no mediator; there is only the subject and object” (p. 34). But of course, ultimately, this results in someone trying to write a novel about a dog finding a piece of meat.

Of course, there are the mechanics of writing a good sentence and all that, but a work of fiction suspended on the dilemmas caused by triangular desire will be a lot easier to make interesting than a subject > object story. And don’t think that this problem can be fixed by having a two subjects > one object story. That is just two dogs racing for the piece of meat.

The greatest originality is shown by those writers who know what affects and drives all men, and yet which is invisible to almost all men. We are so accustomed to blinding ourselves to the machinery of triangular desire that it can be quite obvious in a text—those of you reading Theater of Envy will see this—and yet be missed by virtually everyone.

What Girard calls the writing of romances is that which departs from the patterns followed by just about everybody—originality. And those who return to the “banal” conclusion (his word), time after time, will find themselves haled as strikingly original writers. “That which is common to man” is an important phrase to remember.