“Mythology is the very best school in the training of silence. We never hesitate between the Bible and mythology. We are classicists first, romantics second, and primitives when necessary, modernists with a fury, neoprimitives when we are disgusted with modernism, gnostics always, but biblical never” (Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, pp. 104-105).
Girard’s book is a fantastic treatment of the decline and fall of the persecutorial vision. He shows how fundamental this vision is to the unbelieving mind, and how the passion of the Christ has brought an end (in principle) to that way of running the world. In the account of the death of Jesus found in the New Testament, we find that the vision of the persecutors is “abrogated, broken, and revoked” (p. 103).
We have prophetic intimations of this throughout the Old Testament (particularly in Job and in the Psalms), and of course the fulfillment of all these promises in the life, death, and life again of Jesus.
Part of the pattern that persecutors insist upon is the demand that the designated victim “confess his crimes.” The cooperating victim is part of the display. From Oedipus to the self-accusers at Stalin’s show trials, the choreographed program requires that the victim be cooperative. The virgin must fling herself into the volcano. And this is one of the central “offenses” that persecutors find in the Psalms, and they are not shy about finding fault with the psalmist’s imprecations. The psalmist does not cooperate with the staged lie. He insists on his innocence. He says that his former friends have double-crossed him. He points out that his words are being twisted every day by malicious witnesses. He appeals to God for vindication. This is intolerable insolence, and the persecutors gnash their teeth at him. They circle him like wolves.
The persecutorial mind does not just want to kill the designated victim. He wants to be righteous in having done so, and getting the victim to cooperate is an important part of this process. The persecutor does what he does because he himself feels threatened; he feels like a victim who has narrowly averted disaster . . . by getting rid of the real trouble-maker. A victim at the stake who remains defiant is guilty of outrage — he is continuing to “persecute” the man in purple robes who ordered him burnt. This kind of orchestrated frenzy has occurred many times in the history of the world. And they, the powers of old, were intent on doing it to Jesus. Clearly, manifestly, they were going to do what had been done countless times before. It was the ancient way. It is fitting that one man die instead of the nation, as the high priest put it, speaking far more accurately than he knew.
And yet, something was still off. Jesus did not accuse himself. He did not accept their assessment of Him. He didn’t call down legions of angels to resist them, but He did not acquiesce either. No matter, they must have thought. “We can clean up the account of it later.” And this is precisely what they would have done, but Jesus messed it all up by coming back from the dead. God really did vindicate him, declaring Him with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:4).
After the resurrection, men with fevered brains have periodically tried to rebuild the same kind of pagan empires that used to exist before the Incarnation. But it cannot happen anymore. And in the same way, they have also tried (from time to time) to resusitate the old mob-demos approach to scapegoating. But that doesn’t work either. The believing world is saved by the gospel, and the unbelieving world is haunted by it. The story that hovers over everyone and everything now is the story of the Victim-King. Christ and Him crucified. This means that the old trick of lying to the crowds, whipping them into a self-righteous froth, cannot work with the same authority anymore. One man with an upen Bible can now stand before all tyrants on lawless thrones. One man with an open Bible and free gospel can now stand in front of a lynch mob, and face them all down. The death of Jesus has not removed sin and injustice from the world. The tyrants and mobs can and do take lives, and in the century just past, they have taken millions of them. But what the victory of Jesus has done is make it impossible for that injustice to successfully pretend to be something else. The old confidence that the persecutors had is gone, and is gone forever. Christ is Lord, and He is on the throne. And the King of the universe has scars in His hands, feet, and side that He received from the old judicial system.
They can still say and do what they want, but no longer can the persecutors have the same serene confidence that they are doing the will of the divine. “Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation” (1 Pet. 2:12). They can say all manner of outrageous things against us, but when God intervenes to vindicate His people (as He did vindicate His Son and their Lord), they will have to acknowledge that those they attacked were not evildoers at all, but rather righteous. Christians need to learn how to worship, believe, sing, eat, breath, and live in this confidence and faith, because it is the only appropriate way to entice the persecutors out of their narrow prison.
“Persecutors always believe in the excellence of their cause, but in reality they hate without a cause. The absence of cause in the accusation (ad causam) is never seen by the persecutors. It is this illusion that must first be addressed if we are to release all the unfortunate from their invisible prison, from the dark underground in which they are stagnating but which they regard as the most magnificent of palaces” (p. 103).
One last comment on this, and I’m done. Conservative Christians, Bible-believing Christians, are frequently tempted to walk away from this glorious aspect of the gospel by woodenly applying some aspect or another of biblical law. In the name of theonomy, or traditional values, or decency, they frequently have fallen into the trap of doing the “right thing” in the wrong way. That wrong way has frequently included the temptation to fall into the persecutorial mindset that Jesus did away with in His death.
This is particularly the case with churches that practice church discipline (as the New Testament requires of us). But church discipline is one thing, and persecution is quite another. Church discipline honors and protects the name of Christ. Persecution, or zealously hounding dissenters, disgraces the name of Christ, and in effect denies the gospel. That this is a perennial temptation for Christians who take the Scriptures seriously can be seen in all the attempts that we have seen to get us to take this particular bait. But wise church discipline is not just protecting the church from the sins in question, it should also be handled in such a way as to protect the church from the excesses that historically been connected to the practice of church discipline. The church must not only discipline its members, it must also discipline itself.
From the outside of our church, we have heard many confident (and slanderous) pronouncements that church discipline awaits any poor kirker-sap who dares “disagree with Doug Wilson.” But if someone really wants to be disciplined by our church, what they really need to do is abandon their wife and kids, or knock over a few banks. As far as expressing a poor opinion of me goes, not only will the kingdom survive if some folks don’t think I walk on water, it will also survive if some are of the decided opinion that I should sink straight to the bottom, the sooner the better, and good riddance. Those good folks can call me anything they want, just so long as they don’t call me late for dinner.