Rene Girard's Work

In the Christology section of my seminary class on theology there is a brief review of Rene Girard's work. It does not nearly do the man justice. It does touch on the scapegoating themes and the issues of pacifism and violence that are at the heart of Girard's work, but it messes up the central Christological message. It says at one point that Girard never claimed to give an accurate alternative understanding of the atonement. That may be true, but it is atonement that is at the heart of what Girard is talking about. Whether Girard's intention or not, it is what he wound up doing.

The book talks about mimesis briefly, the copying of the behavior and more importantly the desires of others by mimickry. It talks about scapegoating violence as the community's way of solving this problem. But it fails to point out the contagion aspect of the process. Girard's mimesis has some affinity with Richard Dawkins'... mimetic behavior takes on a life of its own, and acts very much like a virus. This virus causes people not only to turn on one another, and then ultimately on a scapegoat, but also moves people to deify the scapegoating victim. The victim is blamed for some existing problem, which itself hides deeper mimetic patterns of envy and covetousness, and then the community kills the victim to relieve the pressures caused by the problem and the mimesis. This process is then hid, because the killing of the scapegoating victim actually relieves the pressure and solves social problems. Scapegoating works...this is the power of the disease which is the devil. The process of scapegoating is covered up by deifying the victims. This is why Girard thinks that personalizing the devil makes sense, since the devil is incarnated in various figures who are elevated to divine status because violence against them has the power to heal.

The Gospels attack this system by exposing it. They make the scapegoating pattern the center of the story, something other 'myths' never do (and cannot do, without robbing scapegoating of its power). Jesus' death reveals the devil for what he is, and thereby robs him of his power. This puts us in right relationship with the True God, who is revealed in the only scapegoating victim that shows us the truth. Jesus' sinless nature reveals the evils of scapegoating, as does His death as a scapegoating victim. Believing in Jesus' divinity, to believe that the scapegoated being is God and the violence done to him is the devil, is the only way to actually rob the devil of his power. Thus faith in Jesus is Girard's final end. Girard doesn't seek to prove Jesus is God, but to prove that faith in Jesus is necessary to destroy this pattern of violence that dominates the world. Thus the atonement is everywhere in Girard's writings, whether he explicitly claims to be producing an alternative theory of atonement or not.