EMQ » April–June 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 2
By Jim Harries
This article draws heavily on the insights of René Girard.[1] René Girard, was born in France in 1923, but spent most of his academic life in the United States, predominantly at Stanford University, where he retired in the 1990s. Girard went to glory in 2015. Originally a historian, some of Girard’s key foundational insights came to him as he studied literature.
Girard and Vulnerable Mission
Girard’s relevance to VM (vulnerable mission) arises from his articulation of the gospel.[2] The understanding of the gospel he gives us is profoundly influenced by the anthropology he developed in the course of his studies of ancient literature. Girard’s understanding, that makes enormous sense to me given my experience of Africa, demonstrates anthropologically how the gospel can revolutionize human communities. By thus providing a model for intervention into the majority world that does not have modernity, investment of capital, or even foreign languages as prerequisite, Girard’s work articulates how vulnerable mission may be highly effective in practice. That Girard’s work is profoundly anthropological rather than theological, is to say that he articulates a powerful expression of the gospel that is not dependent on supernaturalism.[3]
My observations and experience tell me that missionary work in Africa and other places is in these days facing a kind of crisis of identity. While many Western people continue to value the gospel of Christ, and the church remains highly active and visible (except when concealed by the media and other official channels) in relations with the majority world. Westerners have in recent decades concentrated more on aid, development, medical services, justice and other issues, sometimes at the cost of sharing the gospel. Some evidently struggle to see positive impact of the gospel itself on human communities. Increasingly in recent decades, mission has been about Western guided projects, re-distribution of resources, and advocating of Western education and technology. Girard’s insights give us a potential way out of this understanding – sackgasse.
Girard’s reading of classics in literature, including notably Shakespeare, had him observe a predominant role for human desire in community living. Human desire seemed to drive much of the intrigue in all the literature he studied. Such desire, Girard found, is not primarily for things, food, women or even money. Rather, human desire is fundamentally for what someone else has. This includes even a desire for the desire of the other. As a result, something or some person becomes desirable when someone else is perceived to be enjoying it or them. For example, boys might be wary of a girl, even if she appears attractive, if no one else wants her. A popular single girl will however easily attract the attention of a growing circle of boys. This is often seen very clearly amongst young children, when a child wants a toy that another child is playing with.
The above nature of desire, Girard noticed, results in rivalry. This rivalry for the goods (and ‘experiences’) of others drives today’s consumer culture. Today’s capitalism has in some ways taken the edge off rivalry. This is because goods can be mass produced. Some goods however, women being a classic case, remain in limited availability. Even when goods are available for purchase, money is still in limited supply. This results in much activity in pursuit of money. This is not to satisfy basic needs, Girard observes, unlike a lot of classic contemporary thinking. Following these observations by Girard, people are not free standing autonomous rational beings satisfying innate desires. People can be better understood as engaged in imitation. This kind of imitation of what others have and even of their desire, Girard calls mimetic desire. Mimetic desire, the desire for what others have, and even the desire to imitate the desire of others, drives human society.
Mimetic Desire, Rivalry and Satan
Mimetic desire, it could be noted, is close to envy; people who want what others have can quickly translate into their not wanting others to have what they themselves do not have. Girard notes ways in which rivalry for goods can quickly lead to conflict. Two men both desiring the same woman will inevitably, if one does not back down, lead to conflict. People desiring to outdo one another cannot all succeed. These kind of rivalries result in tensions and stresses building up in human communities. Rivalry for goods that are of limited availability becomes competition that results in losers as well as winners, but usually more losers than winners.
All this rivalry resulting in disappointments leads to another very human reaction. Disappointed people look to others to blame for their disappointments. They blame others for many things. They blame them: For interfering in their getting a job. For trying to steal a woman. For cheating in a competition. Or for promoting personal sales so that their own sales decline. Accusations, suspicion, gossip, slander, and backbiting can easily come to beset human communities.
Girard tells us that these kinds of suspicions and accusations end up facing in numerous directions. That is; a person in a community comes to consider a variety of people to be in different ways responsible for their misfortune. Different members of a community accuse a wide variety of others. This results in enmity and a general mistrust within a community that’s like a complex web. Then, however, something strange happens. It is possible, in such a community that is riven-through with mistrust, for people’s accusations to be focused and channeled more narrowly. They can be focused on what is in English discourse about Africa known as a witch.[4] Someone (or in some cases a group of people) can be identified as being responsible for the mishaps of the whole community. Such a person can be considered a scapegoat, as in Leviticus 16:21–22. Or as a witch. A kind of mass reaction follows, that leads to the person being considered responsible for all the ills in a community. Then the community, now as a mob, seeks for the death or at least removal of that person. Once that person has been killed, or has been chased away, because everyone rallied together against them, the whole community acquires a kind of peace. Following the extermination of the party considered guilty, previous ill fortune is considered to have been dealt with. People anticipate that things will be different. They consider themselves healed, or cleansed. Old feuds are ended and replaced with friendship, and so on. These things happening confirms to them that indeed the accused was guilty.
Girard associates the above with the activity of Satan. Satan is the one who encourages people to think that happiness will arise from consumption, satisfying one’s desires, having things, and excelling over others. The very same Satan then convinces people that the tensions resulting when everyone tries to live this kind of lifestyle will be resolved if a person considered a witch is exterminated. This is the peace that the world gives (John 14:27). It resulted in rivalries between Herod and Pilate being replaced by friendship (Luke 23:12). This is Satan against Satan (Matthew 12:26). This deception, that peace and prosperity comes through the shedding of the blood of a witch is what, Girard tells us, has always (outside of the Bible) been the source of human peace and prosperity. For centuries, or millennia, or longer, it proved impossible to break out of a vicious circle: People were always convinced that killing the witch (scapegoat) really did resolve their problems, because doing so did indeed bring them a new unity and peace. Hence, they always concluded that they had been right to accuse and kill (or chase) the witch concerned. They always knew, that is, that the witch really was guilty.
Jesus – A Better Way
At this point in his thinking, Girard realized that he knew of a better way. Initially, he did not comprehend the source of it. Then he had to acknowledge that an alternative way of life to the above arose from the gospel of Jesus Christ. Girard then grasped how that happens and explained it. From this point in his life and on, having become a Catholic (a faith that he had rejected for a while in his younger years), Girard began also to work in reverse. That is, as well as studying the world so as to know more of the church, he also studied the Bible as a basis for helping him to know more of the world.
The key person in the New Testament to have been accused and then killed is Jesus Christ himself. We read in the Gospels, how opposition to him gradually built up. The Gospels build up to his crucifixion. Knowledge of Christ and his crucifixion is the hub of biblical revelation (1 Corinthians 2:2). By the time of his trial, and especially of his crucifixion, the crowd that accused him had achieved near unanimity in its assessment of his ‘guilt.’ This is noted particularly by the withdrawal of even his closest disciples from him, Peter being perhaps the most famous case in point (Matthew 26:75). When Jesus was crucified, none but a few women stood with him. Hence his was a classic case of being accused of being a witch, against whom all rallied. Once he had been crucified, the new friendship between Herod and Pilate illustrates the classic result of this way of dealing with victims.
The shock to this traditional system in which there was unanimity against a witch, arose three days after Jesus’ death on the cross, when he rose again. His rising, being the son of God, demonstrated by the power of the Holy Spirit to those who had been his disciples, made Jesus’ case unique. After he had been summarily executed, many of his followers denied that he was a witch. They considered him innocent. This was a first in the history of the world, especially as the same witnessing, denying of Jesus’ guilt and testifying to his resurrection, continues up to today. To those who believe in him, the resurrection of Jesus has blown the deception! To declare that Jesus was innocent, sinless, the son of God, who died for the sins of the world and rose again, is to undermine the foundation for all civilizations outside of Judeo-Christianity back to the beginning of the world: All those other civilizations believed that shedding the blood of witches is the means to peace and prosperity. The resurrection of Jesus showed that this was not the case.
The same pattern, fulfilled finally in the death and resurrection of Christ, can be found, uniquely, throughout the Old Testament. (No other tradition has done this.) That is: the Bible, uniquely, comes down in favor of the victim! This tendency can be found in many parts of the Old Testament: Abel, killed by Cain, is clearly considered not guilty. Joseph, whose brothers wanted to kill and who then expelled him, was innocent and his brothers were guilty. Joseph ends up ruling his brothers from a position as Prime Minister. Many of the Psalms depict the crying out of victims to God, and God hearing their pleas against those who have accused them (effectively, of being witches). Jesus’ death and resurrection is the ultimate fulfillment, completion and perfection of the depictions of God’s love and concern for the victim that had gone before.
Scripture’s Impact on Western Advance
The above articulation should help us to understand the basis of today’s prominence of the West in the world. Western Christianity, with its intense study of Scripture in the post-Reformation era, realized the above the most profoundly, and applied it to its understanding of the world. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are the great demystifyer. Following the European enlightenment, whereas the rest of the globe continued to damn victims (witches) and use their blood to search for the prosperity of the living, Europe had seen through this system as the farce that it is. Europe instead began to search for causation in origins other than the death of witches. Such demystification enabled the foundations of science and the flourishing of technology, as well as giving a kind of peace to European ways of life unmatched in the rest of the world. This is the gospel understanding through which in due course Europeans interpreted other people’s ways of life, thus creating world religions.[5] Overthrowing Satan’s deception, that true peace comes from the killing of witches (scapegoats), was the beginning of all that is enabling modern life to be what it is!
It should be noted that as well as opportunity, this new way of life (sometimes known as religion) also brings responsibility. The peace that can be found through faith in Christ is powerful. It can enable an overcoming of prior barriers to human flourishing. When many people flourish, their flourishing creates challenges of its own that were not there in the days of the rule of barbarous kings and emperors. It is the working out of this responsibility that occupies the globe today, led by the West who discovered the demystification that arises from faith in Christ. In the past, cruel hiccups in this system such as wars perpetrated by Christian nations, have brought bad-repute to the gospel. That errors have been made shouldn’t be taken as discrediting the power of the gospel. Prior errors should become the basis for future learning. Ongoing adherence to and credit to the gospel needs to form the basis for ongoing global prosperity.
Impact on Africa
Sub-Saharan African peoples can be considered amongst the last to be brought under the influence of Christ’s revelation of peace from God the Father. Prior to Christianity and ‘civilization’ being taken to them, African people were beset by constant attention to the annihilation of witches and fear of the envy (mimetic desire) of others.[6] In the twenty-first century, African countries continue to battle to come under the lordship of Christ: fear of witches continues in many parts of the African continent. Killing is still widely seen as being foundational to human prosperity. Many are unaware of ways in which following human desire leads to tensions and conflict. Before coming to a knowledge of Christ, they seek healing in the shedding of the blood of people and of animals (i.e., sacrifice).[7] The lives of those who have come to faith in Christ are transformed as they discover that Jesus’ blood is sufficient, so that they begin to seek for causation in other than blaming others, accusation, and the killing of witches. This demystification is starting to bring development to Africa.
The missionary’s task is to facilitate the latter. I believe that, in our era, this task has run up against a number of troublesome barriers:
- The tendency for Europeans, who as a result of the above demystification have developed their economies, of swamping people with goods created by capitalism, to postpone the crises that arise from constant unabated mimetic desire in human community. In Africa, this has resulted in people who prefer ‘greed’ to Christ, and even to Christians who prefer to combine desire for worldly prosperity with the gospel rather than seeing the tension between the two (this results in the prosperity gospel).
- Europe’s own crisis of faith, resulting from its failure to perceive the gospel as the source of demystification. Some European (in which category I include American) people consider science itself to be the demystifyer, thus omitting the vital prerequisite of faith in Christ for science to be discovered and to be effective. This results in confusing messages being sent to Africa.
- Very much related to the above, has been the wide spread of European languages and education in Africa. These have been secular languages and systems of education. That is to say, instead of providing the means for African people to sidestep their aboriginal faith in the killing of witches as the basis for prosperity, they wrongly suppose that the latter sidestepping has already been achieved. Thus, they preclude demystification in Africa.
Conclusion
I conclude from the above, that what Africa needs is not heavier doses of Western language, funding, and education. Of more fundamental importance, is its need for the gospel. The gospel is not one of saving people through money and technology. The latter may be outcomes of but are not necessary-precursors to faith in Christ. The gospel is effective when profoundly and deeply believed. Such belief arises from side-stepping of the mimetic desire that otherwise leads to inter-human conflict. People do not become profoundly Christian by imitating the West, that is currently besotted by a deception that tells its citizens that consumption of the ever-increasing availability of goods under capitalism is today’s worthy salvation. For Western missionaries to disassociate from the above, requires the practice of vulnerable mission.
Some Western missionaries in Africa, through use of indigenous languages, can address people’s need for the gospel in the light of their contemporary ways of life. (Use of Western languages inevitably leads to the assumption that African people have already overcome their belief that witches stand between them and human-flourishing.) Because foreign money glitters brightly, it is by leaving it aside that a Western missionary can begin to advocate the gospel in an understanding biblical way – good news to the poor, to the effect that prosperity is not to be achieved by considering witches worthy of death, because Jesus has already died for all.
Jim Harries (b. 1964), PhD (University of Birmingham, UK), while born and raised in UK, has made East Africa his home since 1988, while engaging in missionary work. His primary ministry is reaching indigenous churches especially in Siaya, Kenya, using the Luo and Swahili languages.
NOTES
[1] Especially this book: René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Translated by James G. Williams) (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001).
[2] Vulnerable mission is that practiced by Westerners in the majority world using indigenous languages and on a foundation of indigenous, and not outside, resources. See https://vulnerablemission.org/.
[3] For more on God as supernatural see http://www.academia.edu/attachments/47346297/download_file.
[4] I emphasise that this is English discourse about Africa because use of the term witch is not always accurate, and often results in some transfer of meaning that is inaccurate, in describing Africa.
[5] Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[6] F. H. Melland, In Witch Bound Africa: An Account of the Primitive Kaonde Tribe and Their Beliefs (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1923). Jim Harries, “Witchcraft, Envy, Development, and Christian Mission in Africa,” Missiology: An International Review 40, no. 2 (2012): 129–139.
[7] Where healing is understood as being a cooling of the kinds of interpersonal tensions that uncontrolled mimetic desire brings.
EMQ, Volume 57, Issue 2. Copyright © 2021 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
