Salvation Story: A Biblical Commentary on Human Violence and Godly Peace

Salvation Story responds to Douglas John Hall's claim that the world is "waiting for gospel." Humanity needs a clearer understanding that the gospel has come to redeem. The work of Rene Girard, an anthropologist, demonstrates that our human culture is founded on the concealing of its own violence in religious myths and symbols. Girard had hoped to enter into dialogue with Richard Dawkins, whose expertise is evolution, but this encounter never happened. Dawkins observed how evolution is blind, not unlike the blindness created by human myth and religion. Bringing together the work of Girard and Dawkins provides a lens for reading scripture. Salvation Story is written to challenge religious fundamentalists and atheists alike, as well as the rest of us--all those who realize that our current approaches to the Bible are woefully inadequate. This book digs into these ancient texts to discover what we have been hiding from regarding our own evolutionary inheritance, in order to discover the God who comes to save us from our own self-destruction.