From Stumbling Block to Cornerstone

Reflection by Gil Bailie 

When I look back over the more than 30 years during which I have explored, and encouraged others to explore, René Girard’s legacy, I have to acknowledge that something of a gap has widened between my work and that of many of those committed to harvesting the fruits of that legacy.  

Like René himself, I have insisted that the Girardian corpus is best appreciated when it is situated within the Judeo-Christian inheritance as preserved and explicated by the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition.  

With each of my books I have moved further away from a merely moral or social science account of Girard’s work in order to explore its religious roots and implications. The wisdom of this context for appreciating Girard has many times been brought home to me, as it was most recently when I received a journal containing a masterful article by the Australian theologian Tracey Rowland. Dr. Rowland is a friend who graciously wrote a dust-jacket blurb for God’s Gamble and a trusted source of wisdom and insight. She writes: 

The need for a Christocentric approach to moral theology leads directly to the issue of how we know Christ. This question, in turn, takes us into the field of fundamental theology. Arguably, it is precisely in this territory that we find the greatest divisions between theologians. The issues take two interrelated forms. The first concerns the principles that ought to govern scriptural exegesis; the second asks which philosophies and social theories make legitimate partners for theology. Or, to put the second question in other words: How do we know that a particular philosophy or social theory is a legitimate partner for theology. (my italic emphasis) 

Since the publication of my first book in 1996, I have been arguing that René Girard’s lifework represents, not only a legitimate partner for theology, but one that marshals new resources for contesting the prevailing cultural antipathy for the moral and theological patrimony of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  

It is a fact that Girard’s work, thus understood, has led to no small number of Christian conversions and to a deepening of faith on the part of many once nominal Christians. What Dr. Rowland says of theologians applies in many ways to other disciplines touching on the Judeo-Christian cultural heritage. In quoting the German scholar Gottlieb Söhngen, she gave expression to what I learned from René himself, but which he necessarily left less explicit in his published work due to the literary, historical, and anthropological character of his own mission, a reticence that some have misinterpreted. Gottlieb Söhngen wrote: 

The theologian should add science to faith; but he must not place faith in a natural knowledge or belief that takes the place of the revealed and proclaimed belief. 

 For Rowland, conversion is a matter of coming to know Christ, not just in knowing about Christ. Though he did not wear his religion on his sleeve, René Girard would have agreed.