Several times while reading Hart’s book on Christian history I found myself saying, “He should totally cite Rene Girard here! That would totally beef up his argument”. Alas, the Frenchman is nowhere to be found. Hart has come to some of the same conclusions though.
“Christendom” was only the outward, sometimes majestic, but always defective form of the iteration between the gospel and the intractable stuff of human habit.
The more vital and essential victory of Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences.
If we find ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women destroyed or ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect that theirs was – in purely pragmatic terms – a more “natural” disposition toward reality.
-David Bently Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, p.213
The unworldly tenderness sowed in human consciences. The heart of Girard’s theory is explaining the mechanism for exactly how this happened. After Jesus, there is just no going back to the way things were. Ever. The deep lie that allowed us to ignore innocent victims has been permanently unmasked.