A meme quoting René Girard is circulating on social media. The quotation—“The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence”—is from Girard’s book Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture.
The person who created the meme added: “ . . . until Jesus’ followers ditched him for the cult of Christian nationalism. René of Mimesis, pray for us!”
Well, that takes the bull by the horns, doesn’t it?
But I endorse this message.
Here’s the thing: the Bible is a large library of books that are diverse in genre, method, and message. The Christian faith treats the whole as canonical scripture—as divine revelation that is meant to regulate what we believe and how we live. But the diverse, wild jungle of stories, law codes, prayers, laments, prophetic oracles, letters of instruction, etc., can only function as canonical Christian scripture if one central, nonnnegotiable rule governs every reading of every text: it all must be read, always and only, in light of the life, teaching, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ. Christian teaching has been clear in this point from the beginning. And by “the beginning” I mean the teaching of Jesus himself, as represented, for example, in Luke 24, where Jesus opens the scriptures to two disciples in the road to Emmaus; and the teachings of the early, scripture-writing apostles, as represented, for example, in Romans 15:4, 1 Corinthians 10:11, Galatians 4:24.
Too many contemporary Christians, not having been adequately trained by their pastors, or failing to heed the instruction of their pastors, commit one—or ironically but very frequently, both—of two errors: (1) not reading the whole of scripture attentively and repeatedly, so as to be intimately acquainted with all of the content of the books contained therein; (2) failing to read every line of scripture in the light of the central, final, absolutely governing revelation, namely, the incarnation of God in the birth, life, work, teaching, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ as expounded, through the gift of the Spirit who guides into all truth, by the apostles who wrote the books of the New Testament.
People have said, and can say, all kinds of things on the basis of the books of the Bible. Some of what some of them say even without reading through the lens of Jesus Christ can be powerfully instructive for Christians—I am thinking here especially of Jewish interpreters like Abraham Heschel or Jon Levenson, but also of Christian interpreters who sometimes in expounding Old Testament and even New Testament passages deliberately bracket (temporarily ignore) the central revelation that is Jesus Christ in order to trace the contours of a given text in light of its own original setting as available through the methods of modern scientific historiography alone. But ultimately no reading of scripture can be regulative for Christian life and thought without being grounded and centered in Jesus Christ.
So—to take an example suggested by the René Girard quotation in the meme—the scapegoat text in Leviticus 16 could be read as recommending that Americans today should expiate their own guilt by identifying some component of the population, blaming that segment for all our ills, and driving them away. Or it could be read in light of Christ as pointing to the sacrifice of Jesus as the act of God that expiates our guilt and abolishes all scapegoating. The former way of reading would be a possible reading, but from a Christian point of view it would be an error and a blasphemy.
Or to take another example, the commands in the Hexateuch that Israelites should take over the land of Palestine by violence and slaughter any people dwelling there who are unwilling to be assimilated into Israel’s own faith and culture could be read as warranting Christian support for the subjugation, expulsion, or elimination of Arab inhabitants of the land in our own day by surviving Eastern European Jews, and Jews from around the world, in the aftermath of the slaughter of six million Jews by Christian or apostate Christian Europeans. Or it could be read as a record of the inchoate and error-ridden struggles of early Hebrews to understand and appropriate the call and the promises of God. The former reading, which is emphatically not a reading in the light of Jesus Christ, is, from an authentically Christian point of view, erroneous and blasphemous. The latter way of reading is not only permitted but required by the central Christian imperative to interpret all of Scripture in the light of Christ.
American white Christian nationalism and American Christian Zionism are twins, or two sides of the same coin. They both result from failure to read the Bible as Christian scripture, in the light of Christ, and the consequent failure to construct a Christian political theology. Neither American Christian nationalism nor American Christian Zionism is authentically Christian. No Christianized nationalism is authentically Christian. The Christian gospel does have things to say to every nation! And Christians within every nation should drive so far as possible to influence their nations to behave Christianly. But the Christian gospel does not say to any nation on earth: You are God’s chosen nation and are therefore licensed to dominate, subjugate, oppress, or eliminate other nations.
In every attempt to merge Christianity and nationalism, the nationalism dominates and distorts the Christianity, because nationalism is about domination, while the way of Jesus Christ is self-sacrificial servanthood.
Verba Sparsa 