Carlos Padilla Rediscovering the Forgotten Man: The Election Without Scapegoats

I’m starting to realize that God has been preparing me for an eventual encounter with the all-inclusive, indwelling theology that people like Mr. Padilla, Jason Clark, Max Kruger, & others are restoring. Twenty years ago, I came across a reference to Rene Girard and his theory of mimetic violence and the scapegoating system that human cultures have nearly always used to deal with mimetic conflict, the only exception to that being the early church. Girard’s interpretation as to what “the sin (singular) of the world” that Jesus came to take away is the unjust system of sacrificial scapegoating, and that Jesus accomplished this by living a perfect life and yet allowed this unjust system to flaunt Him as a victim. His resurrection was the final evidence that showed the bankruptcy and iniquity of the system. Girard also said it was inevitable that the church would eventually revert to a “sacrificial reading” of the gospel and the scriptures, but also pointed out that there are enough clues in the text to guarantee that this trend would again be seen for what it is.

Another author whose work may be of interest to people teaching from the “universal indwelling” point of view would be Iaian McGilchrist. He was the head of a literature department at Oxford and one day decided that he needed a challenge, so he went to medical school and eventually became a neuroscientist and psychiatrist. His work studying the asymetrical, bicameral nature of the brain led him to a much more detailed and nuanced picture of the difference in how each of our brain hemispheres perceives and processes reality. It is a vast picture that we will probably never be able to plumb the depths of until we are fully transformed, but one area that is now well documented and available for discussion is how the left hemisphere’s skill at separating things and breaking them down into parts for analysis and mastery of them might play a role in how “separation” theology got started. Mr. McGilchrist wrote a huge book titled “The Master And His Emissary – The Divided Brain And The Making Of The Western World” in which he claims that “left-brain” thinking got a foothold in western civilization with the introduction of ideas from Socrates and those who followed, and this way of thinking and seeing the world has waxed and waned over the centuries since. Left-brain, analytical thinking has a lot of advantages as long as the results are turned back over to the “right-brain”, which has the ability to see “the big picture”, something the left brain is not designed to do, yet it is notorious for deceiving itself and overestimating its abilities in this area. McGilchrist notes that animals need two types of attention in order to survive, a wide scope of attention so that predators can’t make them their next meal, but at the same time the animal itself needs a narrow scope of attention in order to pick out which items around it are suitable for food. In his book, the “master” is the right hemisphere and the emissary is the left. The left hemisphere’s advantages can provide a lot in the way of “progress” in material ways through science and technology, but it cannot integrate those things into a living system. When a lot of things that are part of human culture are analyzed or made explicit, they die or lose their appeal (like when a joke has to be explained, or when an attempt is made to quantify something like love). A danger that Mr. McGilchrist has talked a lot about is the fact that throughout history, “eastern civilizations” that were more traditional and conservative have always been around as a stabilizing force when the western world got drunk on its left-brain driven, material “success” and went off-kilter, but today, a large portion of these eastern cultures want the material advantages of the west and are changing their ways. Maybe websites like this one and across all worlds, etc. will be used to form a counterbalance here in the “west”?