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 doctrinally, 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.