For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth

On Paper and in Person

174 Robert Hamerton-Kelly and fanaticism. The “Left Behind” series of over twenty biblically based novels has reached its climax in the publication of Glorious Appearing, in my opinion the work of clinically certifiable sadists. However, these novels, now selling in excess of fifty million copies, are not only the products of mental illness; they are also a fairly direct extension of images and actions present in the Bible, especially in the Revelation of John the Divine. Therefore, they represent the sentiments and desires of many people who have lovingly engraved upon the most ardent facets of their minds biblical images of violence and horror. These are the “KKKristian Taliban,” who like the high priestly enforcer Saul of Tarsus are made violent by their conceptions of their religions precisely in proportion to the seriousness of their religious practice. Another dark force emanating from the current collapse of our biblical hermeneutics into puerility on the one hand and pusillanimity on the other is so-called Christian Zionism. The late Jerry Falwell assured some Israeli organizations that “the American Bible belt is Israel’s safety belt” and flew around the world in a private jet provided by these groups; and some members of these groups are just cynical enough to exploit this “idiocy of the goyim,” knowing how disingenuous it is vis-à-vis their own long-term interests, aiming as these Christian millenarians do to facilitate the final solution for all the enemies of God and the final conversion of all Jews at the glorious appearing of Jesus. One assumes that these Israeli groups are confident that they can control the fundamentalists when the time comes. Against this dangerous, “prophetic” interpretation of the Bible, the “historical ” interpretation stands powerless and aghast. Against the red meat of flailing dragons, falling stars, surging battles, and oily Antichrists, it pits ludicrously irrelevant arguments, for example, questioning whether the Fourth Gospel could have been written by the Beloved Disciple. While the Left Behind series sells scores of millions of copies, “historical” interpretations sink like stones in a sea of bad prose, in learned journals and books with miniscule print orders, which fewer and fewer people read in any case. Onto this hopeless hermeneutical scene, where “prophetic” lunacy is trouncing “historical” timidity, comes mimetic realism. I propose that we start using this term, mimetic realism, to describe a ray of new hope in the interpretative darkness of fanaticism on the one hand and pusillanimity on the other: the empirical, scientific hermeneutic of the Cross. “Of the Cross” here is both an objective and a subjective genitive, describing interpretation of the Cross and interpretation by the Cross. Here, “of the Cross” (objective genitive) means the disclosure of the victim in the generative matrix of culture, the revelation of who we humans are Breakout from the Belly of the Beast 175 (murderers from the beginning of our postlapsarian culture) and who God is (our lover, who absorbs our murderous violence and does not retaliate, who substitutes Himself for our human victims). Given that our mimetic nature plunges us perpetually (but not originally) into violence against each other, and that human sacrifice is the tested way to conduct violence out of the system , God offers Himself, as the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, to conduct violence away from the human earth into the ocean of divine love. The conduit out is the Cross of Christ. So mimetic theory reverses the order of penal substitution: the anger to be appeased is not God’s but ours. This small modification saves and sharpens the substitutionary theory of atonement. Similarly, with the phrase “by the Cross” (subjective genitive), we interpret the Bible and human life, allowing the Cross to disclose the violence in the texts and the violence done by the text. Read by this hermeneutic, the Bible begins with the death of the Son of Man who gives access to the one true God to all, by virtue not of our ethnicity but of our humanity. This is the pivot on which Paul the Apostle saw civilization turn from exclusion to inclusion and the age of the fathers turn into the age of the brothers and sisters. Thus, the hermeneutical function of the Cross is to highlight the historical line of salvation and distinguish it from its violent opposite, with which it is entangled dialectically. This very conflict of forces is part of the Bible’s disclosure , of the fact that in this...