The Bible can then be seen as the record of a conversation between God and a human race which has, as a whole, rejected this conversation but which, in a remnant (mainly Israel and the Church), continues to oscillate between dialogue and independent rejection. This is, finally, why the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is so decisive. As we have seen, Jesus lives fully in the counter-testimony, the conversation with God which embraces pain and imagines possibility, and he enables humanity to enter that conversation too.
Girard describes this radical reversal in terms of God first taking the side of the victim and then, in Christ, becoming the victim:
“The desire that lives through imitation almost always leads to conflict, and this conflict frequently leads to violence. The Bible unveils this process of imitative desire leading to conflict, and its distinctive narratives reveal at the same time that God takes the part of victims. In the Gospels the process of unveiling or revelation is radicalized: God himself, the Word become flesh in Jesus, becomes the victim … The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.”[1]
Gerd Theissen sets a similar understanding of Christ’s revelation in the language of science by writing of Jesus as an ‘evolution against evolution’:
“In an evolutionary perspective religion has often been simply one of the social mechanisms by which control, and hence the continued survival of the strong, is established; but in these two cases [the increasingly monotheistic faith of ancient Israel and in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth] religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the downtrodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutation which spell death for the weak and powerless.”[2]
Rowan Williams completes this initial survey of the Christian life and scriptures as conversation by linking conversation with God to Girard and Theissen’s emphasis on God as victim so that entering into conversation with God means entering in to the counter-testimony:
“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim”[3]
[1] J. G. Williams, ‘Foreword’ in Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Gracewing, 2001, pp. x & xix.
[2] J. Barton, People of the Book? (London: SPCK, 1993), pp. 50 & 51 summarising G. Theissen, Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach (London: SCM, 1984).
[3] R. Williams, Christ On Trial: How The Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement (London: Fount, 2000), p. 138.
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