Girard has a Quarter Pounder with Cheese

A recent series that Doug Wilson has begun on his blog site has got me thinking. Sometimes I think about commenting on his site, but especially under this topic, the writing has gotten a bit fierce and keeps me at bay, doing my own thing. This would be his new "Creation and Food" theme, which so far I've really enjoyed. This most recent post, "Making the Spoon Taste Good" reminded me of something else I've noticed in modern (and postmodern) culture.

It's amazing to see the reaction among Christians when someone insists that all food is to be received with thanksgiving. This would seem to be an obvious statement, and one clearly supported by Scripture, but the argument has instantly gone to the question of "What is food?" Doug quotes I Timothy 4:1-3 and equates a refusal to be thankful for sex (and the resulting promiscuity) to a refusal to be thankful for food. Our culture is extremely schizophrenic when it comes to God's good gifts, and food is no exception.

Our culture is either emaciated or obese. It is temperance or drunkard. It is promiscuous or a prude. We worship our children or murder them. We have lost all sense of steering in the waters of discernment. Why does our culture look like this?

Rene Girard does a great job in his book, The Scapegoat showing how pagan cultures deified those that they persecuted. Some horrible plague would strike the city and the first to be blamed would be the outcast, the minority, the deformed, or the poor. That person's blood would be required to rid the city of the plague; transforming the outcast into the hero. One such example of this would be Romulus who founded the city of Rome. He was murdered by his own people, and then honored as a god for his unwilling sacrifice. "Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them" Luke 11:47.

This was paganism and this is what our culture embraces now. We don't thank God for His gifts, and therefore we don't know what to do with them. God gives us food and we shun it in our aestheticism. We then feel guilty, and in our sentimentalism we overindulge. This can be seen in each and every gift that we refuse to be thankful for. We hate the fruit of the womb and so we kill our babies, but then our guilt leads us to a sentimental attachment to everyone else's children. Conservative Christians shun most of these obvious sins, but we still see the need to capitulate to our culture, and so we do it with the less obvious--like food. God's gift becomes the Scapegoat and we become the persecutor.

This was the foundation for all pagan societies and our Lord came to overturn them. He came as the willing sacrifice who really had done no wrong. He was the archtypical Scapegoat, taking on the sins of many, but overturning the desires of His persecutors by triumphing over them.

Repentence and gratitude for all God's gifts--without exception--is the only rudder to steer us through discernment and away from destruction.