Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, Biblical Studies, and Peacemaking

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Dawn, Marva J

Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, Biblical Studies, and Peacemaking

Telford, PA, Pandora Press U.S., 2000. 343 pp. $23.95.

At stake in this book is not only how we understand God and God's word, but also how we work for justice and peace in the world. Too easily, religious believers blind to their own Scriptures' true message generate a religion that betrays God.

The Institute of Mennonite Studies gathered Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist scholars to discuss Rene Guard's theory about "mimetic rivalry and the surrogate victim mechanism-sacrificial violence." While their essays interact with Guard's theory so particularly that they are accessible to readers not totally familiar with his work, they grapple with the apparent contradictions between the violence God seems to advocate in the Old Testament and the peacemaking commanded by Jesus in the New. For example, Charles Mabee shows how Deuteronomy functions catechetically to shape Israel's decision to choose YHWH, rather than to mimic other nations by adopting false prophets' use of the covenant tradition to postulate divine approval for state-sponsored violence.

The essayists disagree widely about the benefits of Guard's work. Gordon Matties criticizes the insufficient attention that Guard's theory pays to details in the book of Joshua and to its reception by later readers. Others embrace Guard's views too readily, thereby slighting difficult biblical passages or doctrines.

Michael Hardin contradicts Guard's thesis that the Epistle to the Hebrews did not escape the "sacrificial hermeneutic." Hardin's key insight-- that Jesus is compared therein not to the lamb but to the High Priest-- leads to momentous results for Christians' paradigm of self-giving. Loren Johns observes potential problems with Hardin's thesis but praises its gifts.

Paul Keim criticizes the reductive nature of Guard's theory, its weakness in being virtually untestable, its susceptibility to rejection as merely an apologetic for western culture and religion, and its tendency to distort Old Testament texts. Especially valuable is his section on Guard's significance for contemporary peacemaking issues, such as the cathartic sacrifice recognizable in many church communities' pastoral shake-ups.

As in all collections, some essays lack the lucidity and thoroughness exhibited by others. Robin Collins articulates critical defects in Guard's work, but grows vague when setting out his own "incarnational theory" and inconsistent in fulfilling his own requirement that an atonement theory must deal adequately with human sin. Collins also seems overconfident of human ability to "put on Christ." How can human beings overcome the effects of sin and corruption if Christ's defeat of evil forces consists only in "providing a new subjectivity that deconstructs this system"? Did Christ not actually, objectively, defeat the principalities? What do the church and the Scriptures mean when they claim that the resurrection overcame the power of death?

A few essays eliminate entirely any notion of God's wrath against injustice, while others disregard the plethora of biblical images for atonement and limit its meaning to sacrifice alone. Willard Swartley's chapter on the Suffering Servant superbly examines and balances the plurality of biblical concepts for atonement.

Building on Swartley's essay, Jim Fodor is the most critical of Girard and of those who too easily assume that his theory solves all our problems regarding violence in biblical narratives. Fodor's incisive analysis of discipleship as participatory mimesis is alone worth the price of the book; his trinitarian framework values a distinctly Christian employment of Girard yet "circumscribes, limits, and interrogates" such a reading. Fodor's extensive footnotes and painstaking assessment of such matters as Jesus' way in Mark's Gospel, kenosis rather than mimesis as the first stage in discipleship, friendship, the dialectical interplay of mimesis with participation in God's own perichoretic life, and the importance of a thorough recognition of sin's power give us the nuances we need to let Guard's theory guide, without delimiting, our understanding of atonement and suffering.

Much more biblical, theological work is needed for the sake of nonviolent discipleship, and our world's dearth of genuine peacemaking highlights the urgency of this task. We need to appropriate Guard's theory competently, rethinking the violence depicted in biblical narratives while avoiding facile assumptions about human mythical projections in these narratives. We need a better understanding of biblical words of judgment and wrath, retaining Scripture's multivalent view of sacrifice while rejecting Guard's earlier tendency to scapegoat sacrifice itself. We need to engage the practical power of Guard's theory to expose our own culture's "myth of redemptive violence." We must recover a trinitarian view of the Son's atoning sacrifice: "Not a human sacrifice to God, but God's sacrifice to humans," as James Alison's Raising Abel (1996) proposes. Violence Renounced provides excellent starting points for our careful study of, reliance on, and faithful imitation of Jesus.