A Girardian Look at the Old Testament

In my meanderings and web journeys and here and there and everywhere surfing, I came across an article written by John Hemer called Violence and the Bible. It is from a series of post Easter talks and it takes a look at the violence we see in the Bible from a Girardian perspective...especially the violence in the Old Testament.

He starts by pointing out:

There are in the OT roughly three hundred passages which talk of people doing violence to each other, either a report or a threat or a command, or a lament. There are roughly a thousand passages which talk of God’s violence or wrath; either a report of his slaying someone, or his threatening people with violence or descriptions of him as a man of war.

Violence is a huge part of the Old Testament. We cannot ignore it. We can not chose to focus on the "good" passages in the OT. Neither can we justify the violence by acknowledging that it was acceptable because so much of it was God ordained/ordered. The violence that was not God ordained/ordered was dealt with by violently punishing the perpetrator at "God's command"

He goes on to say that:

Violence is not peripheral to the Bible it is central, in many ways it is the issue, because of course it is the human problem. The central icon of our faith depicts an act of mob violence against an innocent victim. The Bible is in fact the story of the slow, painstaking and sometimes faltering escape from the idea of a God who is violent to a God who is love and has absolutely nothing to do with violence.

And so Girardians believe that one of the main reasons for the Bible is to hold the mirror up to our dirty little faces and make us look our dirty little secret right in the eye. We are mimetic creatures...who form our desires based on the desires of others. When obtaining these desires is thwarted (by others who are trying to obtain the same things we are) we become frustrated and bitter and our anger burns within us. It leads to violence, both private and collective....and takes many shapes and forms from relatively benign to apocalyptic. I often wonder if mimes is the "vanity" creation was subjected to not willingly? (interesting choice of wording) Is it what is meant by original sin? If the dawning of acquisitive mimesis was the fall?

Mr. Hemer explains it this way:

Almost all human conflict is the result of people modeling themselves, (albeit unconsciously) on others and then entering into rivalry with others. All human conflict is about wanting what someone else has and desires – money, land, prestige, a spouse, a friend, power etc. every human society is threatened by this desire which becomes rivalry which leads to conflict.

Girard thinks it was quite by accident that societies (and individuals) stumbled upon a way to ease the tension and avert the displaced anger that is the result of mimetic rivalry. We scapegoat. We find a victim to either oust or sacrifice. And it eases the frustration and releases the pressure as people who were formerly rivals and enemies join together against a common enemy. Peace reigns...but it is a temporary peace because mimesis is part of who we are...and the cycle begins again.

So, the point of this article that I mentioned many paragraphs ago is to look at some of the events in the OT from this Girardian perspective....to see the violence there, not as God ordained but rather for what it is. Man's dirty little secret. Violence, blood lust, sacrifice, the me, me it's all about me attitude we have, looking out for number one....the antithesis of what Jesus meant when he said, "Follow me." And the antithesis of what his Father desires for us.

I think we make a huge mistake when we try to make God the instigator of all the OT violence and try to somehow justify it with types and shadows and his ways are higher than our ways kind of thinking.

More on this to follow....