The brilliance of Rene Girard

Evolutionary Biology has a lot (a lot) to say to Christians. Asa Gray, Ronald Fisher (whom Dawkins has called the greatest biologist since Darwin),  David Lack, Theo Dobzhansky, undoubtedly four of the greatest evolutionary biologists to live, as Christian believers had their faith informed by how God brought life to human form. But so does Evolutionary Religion.

Enter Rene Girard, the French Anthropologist and long-time Stanford Professor whose thought development is as impressive as it is important for Christians to understand how religion has evolved. In his seminal "The Scapegoat", Girard presents his hypothesis in stunning, dramatic and convincing manner. (I use hypothesis because, unlike Psychology and string theory, Girard's work should be considered science simply because it is falsifiable, albeit perhaps not in the traditional experimental sense).

Girard's thought developed over years of studying different cultures over different time periods, and the myths that come from these cultures. Through these experiences, Girard forms his "mimetic" theory, the essence which surrounds the idea of mimetic desire, that humans not only phenocopy but photocopy each other's desires, and, to avoid conflict, have entered into an ancient, and since recently, repeating circle of scapegoat violence. Back to that in a moment, and the Girard Hypothesis is indeed significantly more complicated than this. But there is something else though that is equally important, and I admit, maybe more so for me.

There are two things that intellectually bother me about Christianity. The first is, if God is whom we think God is, it is very difficult to reconcile the violence and genocide described in the OT. It is equally difficult to reconcile the violence and the shear amount of death and suffering (though I'm not sure how much the quantity matters) in nature. In short, the problem of evil is alive and kicking in Christian circles, and, if anybody tells you differently, they are either not being truthful with you, themselves, or they know something that I don't about it.

Equally challenging a problem for me, as a Christian, is what I would call the literal-myth-Kenosis problem. Essentially, Jesus believed certainly in the validity of what I am personally convinced we can see as myth. From the Creation to the Flood to Jonah, my feelings are it is reasonably unlikely that one can reconcile these stories with a purely literal interpretation. To complicate things, Jesus, if we are to believe was Divine, would be expected to carry those traits of Divinity which Orthodox Christians ascribe to God -- omniscience, among those. Yet, Jesus clearly believed that the Flood, for example, was in some ways a real event. So what is the solution? (I hardly, from the mounds of evidence saying otherwise, have to even eliminate Jesus was not God as one possibility).

One thing Girard does, convincingly, is bring myths outside of our limited post-modern Western cultural viewpoints, and illuminate them in the cultures that they were originally intended for. This significantly changes their meaning, and should change our understanding of them. Myths, thus, are mixtures of truth and untruth: one part truth, another part moral lesson, and another part embellishment, ignorance and untruth. Just because a culture wasn't familiar with Germ-Theory does not mean that their viliage did not suffer a  catastrophically fatal event. They just did not die as a result, let's say, of the sun god not being happy. And as such, the correct understanding of myths serve as an important signpost to how to understand, for example, how God could be truth yet allow His Son to teach the Flood as, what Hebrews of the time would understand it, a literal event.

Back to the Girard Hypothesis. It is brilliant, but I cannot begin to say enough about it to give it justice. I would say, if you enter Girard's thoughts with an open-mind, it can be revolutionary. I implore anybody to find out themselves. "The Scapegoat" is a great place to start.

I will divulge one piece of the puzzle that should be startling. The Gospel Myths, as written in the NT, have all the elements of every myth written across every culture throughout human history (so every myth ever told/recorded has the same main elements -- yeah, that is wild, but appears rather true). The difference, of course, is that "the Scapegoat" hitting the reset button, in this case, was truly fully innocent. And so, there is stands. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the at the same time written in the same fold of every myth, yet stands as the culmination, the fulfillment, and the destruction of every myth. And, since myth is a tapestry of truth and untruth, it is the destruction of the human need of scapegoating. In a human history filled with human sacrifice, the evolving human deals with its problems and rivalries in the same manner. Yet, in a space-time point, Jesus enters the Cosmic fray, and, fully human and Divine, acts as the final sacrifice. The final myth. The final Scapegoat.

This reminds me of work done by the eminent contemporary (and as of a few years ago, newly-converted Christian) sociologist of Religion, Rodney Stark, in his seminal, "The Rise Of Christianity." Here, Stark makes the point that one of the reasons Christianity was so successful in its earliest stages -- it's treatment of women was far superior to what anybody else was doing. Much like Judaism did before, with God demanding Jews to treat slaves with dignity, a totally unheard of notion in the Ancient Hebrew times, Jesus' relationship with women caused a total reversal of how women were to be treated in the future. In a more global way, Calvary is a reversal of how humans should treat humans, in total abandonment of and treachery to, our Darwinian drumbeat, to our violent desires, to our Scapegoating impulses.

I suspect, though I do not know, Dobzhansky, and Fisher and Lack and Gray saw this. Humanity turning itself on its head to feed the poor, clothe the sick? What was that? What is that?

In the same vein that God's commands started to break the chains of slavery and Jesus' acts broke the chains of male chauvinism, Girard's Hypothesis blows the cover off, precisely by revealing, mimetic desire, as it explodes in the fabric of myths sweeping across every culture in every time, and, exposing the Gospel myths for what they also are -- the termination of myths as we know it, God's revelation to humanity of the Divine Scapegoat, and the insertion of the exclamation point after St. John's words: God is Love!

Pick up Girard's work. Keep an open-mind. I predict, as we already see happening now, Girard's Hypothesis will bleed into many fields, not just Ethnology. There is just too much revelation here that is critical to help us understand how we should understand the world. And, for the Theist, particularly the Christian, what God has told us in Scripture, how Evolutionary Religion, like Evolutionary Biology, can illuminate our understanding of precisely who we are and what we are swimming up-tide against. And, more neatly, give us more insight into how God prepared this Universe and our minds to either reject Him or accept Him, to choose eternal life, or eternal sadness.