The God of Wrath, or the God of Love?

 

Rene Girard, in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, writes, “…the whole of human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man's violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals. Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder. The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming invisible of the foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.

Woe to you! for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and consent to the deeds of your fathers; for they killed them, and you build their tombs (Luke 11, 47-48).”

In much of Christian theology there has been a misrecognition concerning the nature of the divine. This has resulted in a projection on to the divine an all to human construct. In Girardian analysis of the origins of human culture, there is the hypothesis that the hominization of homo sapiens resulted from an increase in the level of mimesis in archaic human social relations. This in turn led to an increase in violent reactions against members within the same social group, a change from typical non-lethal violence against those within the group, as observed in other primate societies. Over millennia of experiences of victimage against an ingroup member, due to heightened mimesis, there occurred an increased conscious attention to the body of the victim. This in turn led to a development of an increase in conscious symbolization. Humans began to develop a consciousness of meaning. The carcass of the victim thus took on semiotic import, as recognition that death was something to fear, in turn increasing levels of anxiety over the possible destruction of both the individual and the group from which the individual found security. At this point, Girard notices three things regarding ingroup victimization. First, as the mimetic crisis reached levels of possible communal extinction, an all-against-all, the group turns its attention towards one of its members who is believed to be the source of social conflict. This individual may display some form of physical dissimilarity from the others. (It is important to note that the victim is innocent, in that the violence arose from heightened mimesis. Thus, the whole of the community is culpable). In a state of mimetic rage, the group violently, wrathfully, attacks the ‘demon’, killing him/her. Second, in the immediate aftermath of this communal murder, peace and catharsis descends upon the group, as though some numinous divine power had descended and restored the community back to order and harmony. Third, there is now a transfiguration. The ‘demon’ has been transformed into a ‘divine being’, whose numinosity transforms the mimetic contagion of violent chaos into peaceful order.

Inevitably social conflict, the result of the increase in conflictual mimesis, will again bring about a mimetic crisis. Over time, as conscious symbolization increases, human communities will have reflected on the power of sacrifice, that is, the ameliorating effects of the immolation of a surrogate victim. While this whole process is the foundation of culture and religion, it is also the foundation of a hermeneutic that sees the divine in need of sacrifice to bring about social order and harmony. As ancient religions began to develop rituals of sacrifice, reflections on the nature of the divine also grew. When one investigates ancient pagan views on the nature of their gods, there is a ubiquitous acceptance that these gods can be both beneficent and capricious.  Numerous myths show us how easily a jilted deity can turn on its devotees. Thus, the need for military endeavors to begin with sacrifices and rituals that attempt to discern the mood of the gods before going into battle. Disregard for the proper propitiations could be devastating. Persecutions against Christians, exampled by edicts propagated by Decius and Diocletian/Gelarius in the 3rd and 4th century, are grounded in this religious imagination.

It doesn’t take too much research to see that this religious construct was incorporated into Christian visions of God, despite Christ’s incessant revelations to the contrary. Built into this misrecognition of the violent sacred, sprung from human mimetic violence, with its attendant social and cultural structures, is the persistent vision of divine wrath. Christ came to expose this illusion. He came to reveal a God whose nature has no track with violence, vengeance, or retribution. These are the gods of human construction. And unfortunately, this misrecognition informs the violent hermeneutics of many Christians and Christian theologians. It is no wonder, in my opinion, why those ecclesial communions who persist in their commitment to this hermeneutic are no longer finding persons, who having become suspicious of any form of sacred violence, interested in their religious structures.