Edgework

I recently discovered Marcus Peter Rempel’s new book, Life At the End of Us vs Them: Cross Cultural Stories. I agree with Brain McLaren who says in the foreword to the book that Rempel generously drops “gems of brilliance left and right” (xix). What I found of particular interest was that the entire book is really a dialogue with and a search for applications of ideas proposed by René Girarde and Ivan Illich, both of whom I have had an interest in for some time but certainly not mastered. Like all good writers who write for us commoners, Rempel distills the central ideas of Girarde and Illich and draws them into the orbit of our everyday lives.

My first exposure to René Girarde came through his book, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightening (1999). Basically, it starts with his understanding of “mimetic theory” which states that as humans we imitate one another and in the process tend to produce rivalry. As rivalry increases so does violence and a destabilization of the social fabric. Then, to solve this problem, someone stumbled upon the idea of a “scapegoat.” As scapegoats, individuals – who are genuinely believed to be at fault – are expelled or killed so that order and peace might return. In playing this powerful role, scapegoats became “sacred” in a sense, and therefore became hidden in the mechanisms within sacred rituals of sacrifice. In the Christian story, says Girarde, Jesus set this whole entrenched dynamic on edge. Because he was an innocent “scapegoat,” even forgiving those who killed him, he exposed the fact that culture is based on a murder and a lie and that all God asks is that we imitate Him, not as rivals but as members of a community of grace.

I first was exposed to Ivan Illich through a series of interviews David Cayly did with him on the CBC program, “Ideas” in 2000 entitled, “The Corruption of Christianity.” His central thesis is that Christian faith was at first seen to be most authentic when it was lived out in practical ways. For example, he notes that for the first three centuries, every Christian household was expected to host strangers because it was believed that any stranger might be the Christ. But, says Illich, when Christianity was co-opted by the state in the fourth century, Christian charity became institutionalized; strangers were now housed in homeless shelters set up by the church and paid for by the state. As institutions became increasingly impersonal, says Illich, Christianity became corrupted and actually regressed into scapegoating and fear-based violence – all now designed to keep social order and maintain social status for the church. The Inquisition and the Crusades illustrate this well. As Illich would say, “The corruption of the best, became the worst.”

Richard Rohr says that primitive religion was fear based and that the best way to alleviate fear was to control and manipulate the gods. Scapegoating was one of the buttons to push to keep the gods on your side and deliver predictability. Rempel states that a major development came within the Abrahamic tradition. “Abraham, the ‘father of faith,’ rejected human sacrifice, a move recorded in the story of his divinely inspired substitution of a ram for his son Isaac on the altar of Mount Moriah” (117). Rohr says, “In Abraham’s time and context, the sacrificial instinct was, sadly, transferred to goats, sheep, and bullocks when animals, rather than humans, were sacrificed to please this fearsome God.”

I can see red flags coming up here. Some would argue that God was directing this movement from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice while maintaining the notion that a scapegoat had to die to gain and maintain favor with God. That is why Jesus had to shed his blood to assuage an angry father God. Others would say that it was Abraham, divinely inspired, who moved the needle from human to animal sacrifices – that Judaism was evolving with God’s assistance – and would eventually arrive at the place where scapegoating was eliminated entirely in God’s economy.

Any way you look at it, it seems to me that we see these tensions throughout Scripture. If you read the biblical story from a fear based perspective, the narrative goes something like this: God moved his people from practicing human sacrifices to a combination of animal sacrifices and law-keeping in order to keep them together in the ways of God. When Jesus came he shed his blood to do away with animal sacrifices to save humanity and require of them to respond specifically to such love in order to be saved for eternity. There is enough material in the biblical text to make such a reading possible.

But what if one were to pick up on an alternate reading, for which there is also plenty of biblical material which starts on the premise that God is Love and that he doesn’t require any manipulation to release that love? God graciously, and patiently, is moving his people to accept this much grander vision: God creates humans with a spark of himself within, walks in the garden desiring fellowship, rescues his people from slavery, provides them with a blueprint for living that is rooted in covenant love, gets exasperated with those who use sacrifices as a cover for evil, sends Jesus to demonstrate his boundless love and simply calls us to love God and our neighbors as he loves us?

While the religious elite reached back into primitive religion to “scapegoat” Jesus, Jesus upended the whole system by suffering as an innocent victim, forgiving those who killed him, and rising from the dead to destroy scapegoating’s legitimacy forever. And to affirm once and for all that Exodus 34: 6-7 will stand forever: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.”

Girarde and Illich, via Rempel, have helped me to accept this latter reading with greater confidence.