Discussion Questions
What part has violence played in your life, both personally and culturally?
If you are or were raised Christian, what do you make of Wink’s dismantling of the scapegoat and atonement systems? How have those played shaped your response to the Christian path? What might it mean to let go of them?
The matter of dying to self – Girard’s and Jung’s thought make it central. How does one die to self without using the ego to do so?
Summary
Chapter 4 – Breaking the Spiral of Violence
Merely winning does not satisfy the Powers; they must win big, in order to demoralize oppositions before it can gain momentum. (84)
What killed Jesus was not irreligion, but religion itself; not lawlessness, but precisely the Law; not anarchy, but the upholders of order…According to the French philosopher Rene Girard, Jesus’ death revealed the sacrificial system as a form of organized violence in the service of social tranquility. The sacrificial system is like a vaccination, in which a smaller amount of violence is perpetrated against a single victims in order to prevent a greater amount of evil from engulfing a society. (85-6)
In the Hebrew Bible…the actual initiative for killing does not originate with God, but is projected onto God by those who desire revenger. Yahweh’s followers projected their own jealousy on God and made God as jealous as they. (85)
It is in the New Testament that the scapegoat mechanism is fully exposed and revoked…God is revealed, not as demanding sacrifice, but as taking the part of the sacrificed…The earl church…confused God’s intention to reveal the scapegoating mechanism for what it was with the notion that God intended Jesus’ death…Jesus was sent by God to be the last scapegoat and to reconcile us, once and for all, to God…This took the Powers off the hook, however…(they) disappear from discussion, and God is involved in a transaction wholly within God’s own self. But what is wrong with this God, whose legal ledgers can be balanced only by means of the death of an innocent victim?…
The God whom Jesus revealed as no longer vengeful, but unconditionally loving, who needed no satisfaction by blood – the God of mercy was changed by the church into a wrathful God whose demand for blood atonement leads to God’s requiring his own Son’s death on behalf of us all. The nonviolent God of Jesus becomes a God of unequaled violence, since God not only allegedly demands the blood of the victim who is most precious to him, but hold humanity accountable for a death that God both anticipates and requires. (87-9)
As 20th-century mystic Simone Weil put it, the false God changes suffering into violence, the true God changes violence into suffering. To be the true God’s offspring requires the unconditional renunciation of violence… The present cultural order cannot survive the demise of the scapegoating mechanism, says Girard. The Domination System grows out of the fundamental belief that violence must be used to overcome violence. (91)
…we are liberated, not by striking back at what enslaves us – for even striking back reveals that we are still controlled by violence – but by a willingness to die rather than submit to its command. (93)
…rebirth is not a private, inward event only. For it also includes the necessity of dying to whatever in our social surroundings has shaped us inauthentically…such things as racism, false patriotism, greed, and homophobia. We must, in short, die to the Domination System in order to live authentically. (95)
The task is not ego conquest by means of the ego (a persistent pitfall in all forms of spiritual aspiration), but ego surrender to the redemptive initiatives of God in God’s struggle against the Powers of the world. This means our abandoning egocentrism not only as individuals, but as cultures, as nations, even as a species, and voluntarily subordinating our desires to the needs of the total life system….of making ourselves expendable in the divine effort to rein in the recalcitrant Powers. (97)