Love Helping Me Find Some Cracks in Rene Girard’s Ideas?

Mar 7

Open and relational thinking has the imagination to superimpose the fluctuating amorality of tohu wa bohu (the void and potential of Genesis 1:2) with the science of chaos and dissipative structures (term from Prigogen/Stengers) which leads one to say that there are always options. These options might be limited, as we’ve identified—a quantum field of nothingness—but even so, the Spirit lives within possibilities. And possibilities within Spirit.

We may not have free will carte blanche, but our wills might be freed to the point where we can act in some capacity (a genuine but limited freedom). What happens when one minuscule choice of limited freedom is activated in the middle of shifting sands, in the middle of criticality? It gives the prophet (I mean physicist), the confidence to boldly say “entropy itself becomes the progenitor of order.” (Toffler) Might this be the scientist describing strength in weakness? Power in consent? Might love itself be large enough to contain entropy?

Not that love itself is entropic, so let me try that again. Might love be the space where all things are held, including the possibility of entropy, but within that possibility also contain the possibility of something new? Might love break open the possibilities of life inside the possibilities of death? Again? And again? Ad infinitum? Might love be “as strong as death, its passion as enduring as the grave”? Might it “flash like fire, the brightest kind of flame”? (Song of Songs 8:6) And might all this be named hope?

I dare to hope so. By faith I say hope is found in love. And love is revealing a God uninterested in redemption through violence, much in the same way Genesis might be showing a God uninterested in creating the world through violence, much in the same way Revelation might be showing a God uninterested in ending the world through violence. The one who looks like a lion is, upon closer inspection, a lamb, “slain before the foundations of the world.”(Rev 13:8) It is the revelation. “History is open not only on this end, as we head into the future,” according to Andre Neiher, “but on the other end as well, in the beginning, stretching back to time immemorial.”

Furthermore, given the way “apocalyptic end times” language has been abused in Omnipotent-religious settings, when we reference such things, we might choose to overcommunicate that we are not just now arriving at the “end times.” The ascension of Christ some two thousand years ago initiated these end times. We have been in the end-times epoch for two millennia. This is simply the endest we have ever been.

What’s true now has always been true: reality is relational. Therefore, there is a multiplicity of factors that determine any given result. These factors have to do with love’s invitation through ideals, values, possibility, and our response. As we actualize the invitation, real life might be instantiated through acts of honor, kenosis, empowering, consent, non-violent resistance, patience, and countless other expressions of love.

If we could draw lines between these instantiations, like connecting stars in the night sky, certain constellations of truth and beauty might emerge. But there is no one concretized result, time-stamped as it were, for all eternity. No one idea “wins the day.” Life is (simply) too complicated. Girard seems to eschew this kind of thinking when he says, “Christ will have tried to bring humanity into adulthood, but humanity will have refused.”(Battling to the End)

My response to his pronouncement? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a risk, but what else is there? We could be the people who risk in the face of apocalypse rather than people who give in to the force of apocalypse.

-Excerpt from Theology of Consent: Mimetic Theory in an Open and Relational Universe (pp. 206-208)
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