Girard and the Apocalypse

              In this article, I want to look into an interpretation of the violence in Revelation that is simply food for thought. This is not exegesis of Revelation, but simply looking at the book of Revelation through the lens of philosopher Rene Girard. S. Mark Heim, in his book Saved From Sacrifice explores this Girardian interpretation of Revelation.

In the perspective of Girard, one of the primary ways Christ’s death has effected this world is to make victims of violence and scapegoats more visible in society. From Girard’s perspective this is exactly how Satan has been “chained” or limited by the actions of Christ. By becoming the sacrifice that ends all scapegoating sacrifice, and brings attention to other victims of injustice, the cross has revolutionized human society.

Now, one might say this is untrue as Christianity itself has produced countless victims of oppression and scapegoats. This is true. Christianity has held the cross high as a sign of oppression rather than a sign of judgment on oppressors. However, where the cross has been rightly understood as God becoming the human victim of violence and thus reflecting God’s solidarity with victims  of injustice, the cross has been revolutionary on human societies.

And where the cross has had this effect it has produced the effects that the book of Revelation describes. When victims all of a sudden become visible in a human society there are a few ways we can react, and it often produces the kind of apocalypce described in the book of Revelation: “In apocalyptic texts an old world is disintegrating and dying. A new world is being born in fire.” (Heim, pg. 263) While this recognition of victims is obviously a good thing, it is also destabilizing to a society that has found peace through oppressing victims or scapegoats: “Apocalypse happens, we may say, when the old reconciling power of sacred violence withers and the new way to peace fails.” (Heim, pg. 264) When there is not an effective substitute on which a society can place the blame for problems, there is no way for the society to achieve stability.

In Revelation, one reaction we see to the cross is the reign of God. Within this option, people have chosen to submit themselves to a society where victims are recognized and where we confess the ways we have victimized and scapegoated specific people or groups. God is seen as in solidarity with the oppressed.

On the other hand, we see in Revelation a mockery of such a vision. We see powers coming forward who pretend to be Christ. They are antichrists. They “appear to be” fatally wounded (Rev 13:3). They have “two horns like a lamb” but speak “like a dragon” (13:11). They also “do not confess the coming of Christ in the flesh.” (2 John 1:7) And they do not confess the “Son” (1 John 2:23). John also states that it is because it is the “last hour” and because the world and its “lusts” are passing away that the Antichrist comes (1 John 2:17-18). We also see in Revelation 6:2, a figure who looks like Christ later in the book of Revelation, but is in fact a man of violence, who could also be seen as an antichrist figure.

The antichrist uses the image of the cross in a mockery of the cross to do the exact opposite of what the cross is meant to do in the world. They deny the flesh (the vulnerability) of Christ, and want to reclaim a God that is not willing to be vulnerable before humanity. In Gnosticism Jesus is invulnerable and unable to die because he only appears to have human flesh. Later in history, Nazi-sympathizing Christians removed the humanity from Christ and made Jesus a warrior in ways reminiscent of Gnosticism and Marcionism. They removed the essential aspect of the cross where God has solidarity with victims, and re-make the cross so that God is on the side of the victors, not victims.

From this perspective, the extreme outbreak of violence in the book of Revelation is a natural reaction of a world to the cross that does not want to live the way of Christ in the world. Matthew 24:7-12, for example, depicts a world self-destructing. It will be “just as it was in the days of Noah.” Perhaps in the days of Noah also there was not a way humanity had found to stabilize under widespread conflict. In the same way, the world will be destabilized by the cross.

Girard’s interpretation of Revelation has plenty of explanatory power. For example, in Revelation 5, no one can open the scroll but the Lamb. So while this moment is one of praise and adoration of the Lamb it immediately leads to an implosion of the world into chaos. The Satanic ways of humanity achieving stability are no longer viable because these mechanisms have been exposed for what they are.

One way the world reacts is by trying to stamp out this new way in the world. We see this in Revelation 6:9, where there is a systematic effort to stamp out God’s people and prophets. But the world knows the wrath of the lamb is coming because the lamb is not in solidarity with the oppressors.

But if the Lamb were to fully execute all his wrath, if all victims were exposed, it would lead to apocalypse (Rev 12:10-11). Revelation depicts God as exercising an all-out war on the oppressors of his people and the results are terrifying. In the same line of thought, when the reaction to the exposure of victims is to seek vengeance and justice, it often leads to all-out war. This is exactly the nature of Marxism/Communism, which aims to expose victims and bring all oppressors to justice. Marxism effectively tries to take the role of God and the lamb in Revelation in bringing every oppressor to justice. However, Marxism/communism, unlike God, fails to do this without hypocrisy. In the end, through human efforts at justice, the oppressor still ends up on the top, and there is an unending search for the privileged oppressor.  

Marxism/communism often ended up mirroring the right-wing extreme of fascism, who sought to bury victims and recreate whole new scapegoating systems. The endless pursuit of oppressors and endless pursuit of victims ended up being mirror images of one another in history. Both are antichrists, pretending in one way or another to be Christ, but failing to actually submit to Christ’s Lordship. Both reactions are imitations of Christ, antichrists, but achieve the exact opposite of what God intended the cross to achieve in the world. Both seek to avoid the confession that they have sinned and so give glory to God, as we are all caught up in the violence of this world in one way or another: “The only faithful religion of identification with scapegoats would be one able to acknowledge its own guilt for scapegoating.” (Heim, pg. 287)

Enlightenment values also can parade as an antichrist with the myth of progress, our hyper-individualism allowing us to avoid communal complicity, and the same inability to confess sin and retain a myth of innocence.

Within this Girardian framework, we might see the thousand years that Satan is chained and limited in his scope on the earth as a period when the sacrifice of martyrs bears fruit in a society that has tried the antichrist ways of reacting to the cross, but the true Christian message of the cross has eventually transformed society. The end of this, and Satan being let loose on society again can mark a cycle of a return of the Beast.

This is one way to read Revelation from a social Girardian perspective. I’m not expecting readers of this article to agree with every facet of this reading, but it does give some explanatory power for much of Revelation.