In his 2011 book, A Lever and a Place to Stand, Richard Rohr revisits many of his grand themes. Here are some notes from his short section  ¢â‚¬ËœThe Scapegoat Mechanism ¢â‚¬â„¢ (pp. 76 ff.).

Note: he has read Rene Girard on this broad issue, and quotes him elsewhere in the book, but not on these few pages…   Rowland Croucher, March 2012.

~~

[Beginning of quotes from Richard Rohr]:

 ¢â‚¬   (The process of both denying and projecting your fears and hates elsewhere is called  ¢â‚¬Ëœscapegoating ¢â‚¬â„¢. The strange word… comes from the King James Bible, where instead of speaking of the  ¢â‚¬Ëœescaping goat ¢â‚¬â„¢ they translated it as  ¢â‚¬Ëœscapegoat ¢â‚¬â„¢…)  

 ¢â‚¬   The scapegoat mechanism is almost entirely hidden in the unconscious; it proceeds from our denied but real need to project our anxiety elsewhere. Unfortunately there is no elsewhere in the spiritual world. Meditation is refusing to project our anxieties elsewhere, and learning to hold and face them within myself and within God.  

 ¢â‚¬   It must be hard to be married because there is a projection screen very close at hand. He or she is lying right next to you: a very easy target.  

 ¢â‚¬   My paraphrase of Romans 8:3  ¢â‚¬“  ¢â‚¬Ëœ[Christ] became the problem to overcome the problem ¢â‚¬â„¢… [His] wounds were not necessary to convince God that we were loveable; the wounds are to convince us of the path and the price of transformation… Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ wounded body is an icon for what we are all doing to one another and to the world. Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ resurrected body is an icon of God ¢â‚¬â„¢s response to our crucifixion. The two images contain the whole message of the Gospel.  

 ¢â‚¬   If any of you were going to create a religion, who would think of creating as your religious image a naked, bleeding, wounded man? It is the most likely image for God; the most illogical image for Omnipotence.  

 ¢â‚¬   [The main problem for modern humans is that] we still love to hate. Feminists can hate men, liberals can hate conservatives, activists can hate rich people, good family-values folk can hate homosexuals, and victims can hate perpetrators…  

 ¢â‚¬     [On the cross] God is not paying any price to God, as if God needed to be talked into loving God ¢â‚¬â„¢s creation. [1]    

 ¢â‚¬   A Bit of History:   In the 13^th century a big debate occurred around Anselm ¢â‚¬â„¢s famous question Cur Deus Homo? (Why did God become a human being?). St Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans: a ransom had to be paid to somebody. Versus Franciscan John Duns Scotus: Jesus wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t solving any problem with God. He wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t changing God ¢â‚¬â„¢s mind about us, but, rather, he was changing our   mind about God. Scotus concluded that Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ incarnation and death were not at all necessary: Jesus was a pure gift. We were not saved to pay any debt to the devil or to God… As usual the Franciscans were right, but unfortunately we lost the debate, and the mainline Dominican position has been held by most Catholics and Protestants to this day, with a lost of sad results. Someone has called it  ¢â‚¬Ëœthe most unfortunately successful piece of Christian theology ever written ¢â‚¬â„¢, because it implied that God was not naturally and unconditionally in love with what God created.  

[End of Richard Rohr quotes].

[1] Note from Rowland: this idea of a  ¢â‚¬Ëœprice to be paid ¢â‚¬â„¢  ¢â‚¬“ to God? To the devil?   – led Evangelical scholar John Stott away from those alternatives, to suggesting that the  ¢â‚¬Ëœransom ¢â‚¬â„¢ was a debt paid from the love of God to the justice of God.