We need Anthony Bartlett’s delineation between the clear, apocalyptic, anti-sacrificial, early Girard, and the compromised, muddled, and somewhat defeated later Girard, now more than ever.[1] Tony gently calls us to return to the true vision of Girard, in the midst of this cultural and political moment in which flaky Girardians, such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance rule. It is nearly impossible to initially distinguish between two groups: those Girardians who, like Thiel, would “turn to a new kind of Constantinian order where Christianity accepts the expedient role of force” and those who like the Girard of Things Hidden, who writes, “(The) sacrificial concept of divinity must ‘die’ and with it the whole apparatus of historical Christianity, for the Gospels to be able to rise again in our midst, not looking like a corpse that we have exhumed, but revealed as the newest, finest, liveliest and truest thing that we have set our eyes on.”[2] Girard initially saw no possibility of accommodating his theory to the institutional Church or the “apparatus of historical Christianity,” but then he compromised. Bartlett compares him to Galileo, making his initial discovery, and then under pressure from the Church, or friends such as Raymund Schwager, he backs down. Maybe the earth and its history of violence are true center (he seems to be saying in Battling to the End). Maybe his discovery in the Bible and Christ of a primary “transcendental relation of nonviolence” is inadequate in the face of “reality.”
Girard backs down in his opposition to the term “sacrifice” in conjunction with the death of Jesus. Schwager referred to Jesus’s death as “scapegoat” and “sacrifice” which had aroused his “unease” but he decides Schwager must be right, and he wants to be accepted by the Church.[3] He had wanted to “draw a definitive line between the death of Jesus and the deaths of the gods, since the former was viewed by ethnologists and cultural commentators as the ‘same-old’ mythical story.”[4] Schwager convinced him to drop his opposition to the language of sacrifice, and with this he compromised his original notion of a “symbolically manifest difference, something as visible and tangible as possible.”[5] Bartlett explains that accompanying this shift then was a compromise to what was key in his theory: “This is important as it seems to manifest the intention in Girard of expressing a critical semiotic shift from sacralized Christianity to the new meaning of the Gospels: he talks of a symbolically manifest difference.”[6] His theory had focused on the manifest difference of revelation breaking into human violence in Jesus Christ and making a clear distinction between a violent God and a nonviolent God. There was an absolute and apocalyptic difference, and no notion of some neutral ground with an admixture of violence and nonviolence. “Surely the deep tilt of Girard’s argument was a revelation coming from outside of humanity, and this does have a manifest difference for which it is correct to seek a proper symbolic or semiotic status. Girard’s instincts were by no means wrong.”[7]
“The gospel has its authentic character as a message, an angelion, which stands urgently for itself with its own highly distinctive semiotic status. Early Christianity expressed this dramatic difference by the calling the crucified-and-risen Jesus ‘Lord and God.’”[8] Bartlett dubs this unique relation to God revealed in Christ “the transcendental relation of nonviolence.” This is the absolutely unique transformation, which cannot be laid out on some sort of historical or philosophical continuum. Bartlett recognizes that theology has continually compromised philosophically and historically, by imagining the divine revelation on a continuum with natural revelation, but this is always a compromise with violence. The semiotic shift of Christ is a different order of meaning. It “should be announced as an absolute difference reconstituting human meaning. Anything less is to forfeit the remarkable evangelical breakthrough Girard has himself brought about.”[9]
Girard abandons his clear understanding of Christianity’s uniqueness; there is “archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However it is all sacrifice.”[10] Mimetic desire and rivalry, he concludes are the case for all humans and there is no escape. “I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we be able to elude them? I doubt it.”[11] He had once understood “it is Christ who finalizes . . . the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god.”[12] Yet, in conversation Bartlett asked Girard if God is nonviolent, he answered, “I don’t know.” In his early work Girard sets forth the priority of Christ over subsequent violence. “’Christ was the last messenger who came first.’ “It is a remarkable announcement of his full biblical thesis, presented with unquenchable brio and clarity, with the theme of revelation running like white-hot lava through its lines.”[13]
By the writing of Battling to the End, however,Girard abandoned his belief in the priority of the nonviolence of Christ. “There Jesus is a last figure at the very end of history whose first meaning has been swallowed up in mimesis and violence.”[14] Girard begins to darkly presume apocalypse means a violent end to all things, and no longer refers to Christ’s apocalyptic breaking into history.
Girard once held that the biblical critique of violence was the basis for a sociological understanding, which arose from a place that was unassailable. He saw the gospel text as working unlike any other as it “breaks away from the rules of ordinary textuality.” As Bartlett notes, “These rules are obviously rooted in the relationality of generative violence.”[15] It is only in Christ, and reading in light of the gospel of Christ, that the violence of ordinary textuality is undone. Girard adds, “If this is the action of the text, the claims of Christianity to make Christ the universal revealer are much more well founded than its defenders themselves imagine, by which I mean those who always blend elements of ordinary sacralization into Christian apologetics. As a result they invariably regress to protocols of ordinary textuality . . .”[16] Bartlett adds, “Christ is the ‘universal revealer’ not ‘the universal scapegoat’ and it is this function that both breaks with past hermeneutics and appears weak before them if new relationality is not fully thematized.”[17]
Bartlett’s goal in the book is to demonstrate the necessity of thematizing, centering on, making primal, the role of relationship. He sees this as the original failure of Girard, and why his thinking was vulnerable to subsequent failures and shifts. Certainly, it is correct to desire “symbolically manifest difference,” as “it speaks to the sense of the new generative object-sign for human meaning.”[18] But if this new meaning is not grounded in relationship rather than abstraction it will collapse. Thus, Bartlett sees his work as providing a bulwark against this collapse, and he seeks to preserve the stark realization of early Girard, against his own collapse. “He held onto his manifest difference as long as he could, but in the end he let go of it, for lack of feedback and the intellectual shift of categories that would fully vindicate him. His thought was brought back within ‘ordinary sacralization’ because it had not found or expressed its crucial semiotic and relational framing.”[19]
Bartlett has extended and applied René Girard’s theory philosophically and theologically, providing a fresh reading of Scripture, founded, not on ontology or metaphysics but in relationship. Love as nonviolent relation, as in the subtitle of his book, is simultaneously an explanation of reality, and salvation as being brought into that reality. Undergirding Girardian theory is a linguistic and anthropological understanding, exposing relationship as primary. Bartlett does not repeat the Girardian picture of the initial scapegoating entry into language, but he provides Kierkegaard’s definition of self as “a relation that relates itself to itself . . . the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”[20] This is not a relation to language, but it is a possibility within the self, posed by language. “God sets humanity in motion as relation, which then opts for all the wrong solutions within its synthesis until it comes to relation with God.”[21] Bartlett then turns to Martin Heidegger, (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics), Charles Peirce, Jacque Derrida, the Greek philosophical tradition, along with Girard and Scripture, and picks up where Girard left off. As he describes in the Introduction of his book, “This is a book about René Girard wrapped in a book about relation.”[22] Kierkegaard sets the tone of the book, in seeking to get to the bottom of relationship.
In particular he has in mind the relationship of love. “Once the gospel antithesis to violence is established then a project of semiotics rather than metaphysics becomes unavoidable.”[23] In Girard’s theory of hominization, humans enter into language over the cadaver of the scapegoat, which provides the focus so as to give birth to the sign. Difference, life and death, signaled by the cadaver of the scapegoat, acts as the primary focal point that transforms terrifying, chaotic violence into unified attention. The cadaver is the first sign because it is the first thing humans looked at collectively in peace, transforming a physical remainder of violence into the foundation of meaning, language, and the sacred. The manner in which we are all grounded in violence is the beginning point: “A theory of language that clearly recognizes violent origins is then able to open up, simultaneously and necessarily, to a radically alternative language, a message, a gospel, that overthrows those origins in explicit nonviolence.”[24] Part of the saving work of the gospel must be the exposure and overthrow of this inherent violence. To begin in metaphysics or philosophy or in some “natural understanding” involves a continuation in this violent inheritance, opposed to the gospel. In Kierkegaardian terms, this is to continue in the “sickness unto death,” which recognizes in the diagnosis of the disease the primacy of relation (ultimately resolved in Christ).
Of course, this insight is not lacking in Girard; the Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[25] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[26] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[27] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.” Bartlett observes, “with Girard there is a relation to a revelatory ‘other’ (God) hand-in-hand with the human other, but the dynamic is always disclosure. There is something coming from below, as it were, claiming the attention of human history.”[28]
Bartlett is building on his two previous books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard and Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence. In the former is Bartlett’s depiction of Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and the discovery of the scapegoating mechanism, as a necessary step in evolutionary development of language. The sign that arises around the scapegoat initiates entry into language, constituting an originary violence in the human condition. In both Love’s Entanglement and Theology Beyond Metaphysics, Bartlett assigns great weight to Martin Heidegger’s turn from traditional metaphysics to the “firsthand experience of ‘being.’” He explains, that “Heidegger’s intervention is a serious relativizing of core concepts of metaphysics, demonstrating – from the alternative perspective of being – that they are not eternally ‘given’ apart from a history of their conceptual production.”[29] Heidegger undermined the presumed “foundation” of metaphysics, and Derrida would continue in his “deconstruction,” and Girard builds on both. The twentieth century shook the foundations of Western thought and civilization (with two world wars). As Bartlett puts it, “What greater proof could you have of original violence than Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In which case it is even more pressing to discover a source of life ‘in the ruins,’ rather than imagine some kind of return to pre-modern metaphysical order that smiled complacently as all this grew to monstrous term.”[30]
Heidegger is at once a symbol of the Twentieth Century shift, upon which Girard builds. He served to prepare the ground for Girard’s work, but it was Heidegger’s purposeful failure to distinguish the Greek logos from the Johannine Logos, and in conjunction with this a second failure, to recognize that relation precedes being. “You cannot have ‘being’ without difference – the relation – which provides the opening or realization of being.”[31] Heidegger assigns a singular, Heraclitean meaning to logos, presuming the Christian Logos is more of the same. It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role to the Greek logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[32] In Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).
The Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought. Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[33] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.
To not recognize the violent foundations of language and the possibility of an alternative, or the difference between a Greek and Christian starting point, is to presume an originary violence, and to the degree that theology has girded itself with a Greek philosophical understanding it has a necessary violence at its origins, a charge Bartlett levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). It is a failure to recognize the change in the role of signs, or the profound basis for a new meaning introduced by Christ. It is not simply that Christ gives new meaning, on the basis of the sign system of language in which in semiotics, it is recognized that meaning arises through differences (differences in terms, such as “black and white,” or differences in sounds, or the living and dead body, etc.). The role of difference, of the cadaver, becomes fully accessible in the body of Christ, a living sign exposing the role of the deadly letter written on the grave. The cadaver played the role of a false or mythological “transcendental signified” and the living transcendental signified expose this lie. Christ demythologizes the sign, emptying the grave of its grounding significance. Mythology is a homage to the victim, but in the same sense language, as a repeatable sign system, arises through the clash of difference and the arising of a third element (the reification of death). Christ’s entry into sign making starts with the recognition that death is the ordering principle of a universe of opposed pairs. “It is a matter of turning around with the universe itself and facing the terrible violence of our origins . . . to relate again as if for the first time to the victims at its core. We are called to relate in nonviolence and forgiveness where before we related in blame and murder – because it is in this way that root relationship is both acknowledged and made good.”[34] Ultimate meaning is not grounded in the dead victim but the living Christ who has emptied the grave of its deceptive meaning.
Much of Bartlett’s work is given over to demonstrating Christ’s change of the meaning of signs, or more accurately Jesus bringing about a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The sign of Jonah (the scapegoat thrown overboard), taken up by Jesus, undoes signs built upon sacrifice and death, as there “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[35] The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance. Rather than satisfy the Pharisaical demand for a sign, he indicates the only sign he would give is the sign of Jonah, who was thrown into the abyss and was then delivered (which is what they will do to Jesus). The sea is representative of the abyss, the chaos, that the scapegoat was meant to tame. Jesus confronts and overcomes the abyss in his death and resurrection, defeating the very impetus behind scapegoating religion.
Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21), the explanation of which closes Bartlett’s book. The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). “So, it is the same battle, against the violence of the deep, gained victoriously by the peace-bringing word and presence of Jesus.”[36] In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in the storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.
Connected to the walking on the water is the feeding of the five thousand, a proleptic Eucharistic event: “The dramatic entirety of the scene has to be taken into account: the journey accompanying Jesus to ‘a deserted place,’ the weariness and hunger, the complete bafflement of the disciples, and, of course, the mirror hints of the Roman military legion. This is a scene of a new creation, where a new humanity is separated out from generative violence, and it is the significance itself of the whole complex that carries the scene.”[37] The echoes of the escape from Egypt, the Passover, the miraculous manna, the crossing the Red Sea, and the deliverance from slavery. “The bread is the meaning of a new human way of life, one to be consumed for its own sake once its revolutionary semiotics is grasped”[38] which is made explicit in the Passover meal celebrated by Jesus and the disciples.
Theology and not chronology are the main point. In each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[39] The time may be incorrect or inconsistent between the Gospels, but more importantly the meaning is shifted. The point is no longer warding off death through the firstborn. Death is no longer the fulcrum, sacrifice is no longer the mechanism, but the defeat of both in a higher meaning (of relationship). The elements of the meal are made to bear a depth of meaning, fusing together both the Passover and the day of atonement, connecting both to the reality accomplished in Christ (a shared body, a shared life). The bread is part of the Passover meal, but is made representative of Jesus broken body (on the order of the servant of Isaiah), and the wine is representative of his poured-out blood. Jesus commands them to drink the wine, now representative of the blood, but consumption of blood is prohibited in the Temple rite and in Judaism in general. The instruction is clear: “He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’” (Matt 26:27–28). There is no mistaking that the symbol of poured-out blood is to be drunk, a sacrilege for Jews. “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the ‘life was in the blood’ and the life belonged to God alone.”[40] Which is the point; this is no longer a sacrifice. It is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God, not on the basis of death, but in its defeat in history. As Bartlett explains in the case of Mark, “The point for Mark surely is to not narrate a separate ‘spiritual’ body for Jesus on the other side of human life, but to place his triumph right in the middle of human reality and experience. This now is the ‘Kingdom of God come with power’ (9:1)!”[41]
Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle (life will replace sacrifice and death). He is now the lamb sacrificed by our murder, and the disciples become the receptacles of his life, not simply life-blood spilled in death but taken up in new life. This is not a Jewish sacrifice, as in “the biblical tradition of sacrifice, it was imperative that the blood be separated from the body and spilt on the ground or at the altar” (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10-14).[42] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice; even in the early Christian community the Jerusalem Council would continue to forbid consumption of blood (Acts 15:29). “By telling his disciples to drink a symbol of his blood Jesus was transgressing the central vector of sacrifice as it had been formulated in Jewish practice, and He was going against formal sacrificial practice generally. Indeed, he was turning sacrifice into something other than sacrifice!”[43] There is an “eruption of a completely new meaning in life, signified by the miraculous bread,” as the disciple is enabled by his Lord to also give his life, and not strike out in retaliation. The disciples were each enable to enter the jaws of death enabled by the body of Christ. “We know from Christian history that many individuals have done this, finding an abyss of strength within themselves to enter the jaws of violence without retaliation, and leaving behind an indelible witness in the same path and truth as Jesus himself.”[44]
Combined with his action in the Temple, in which he halted the sacrifices, Jesus has permanently overturned the Temple tables, so as to set another table with a completely different meaning and economy. God had always sought mercy rather than sacrifice: “For I desire steadfast love (or mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Ho 6:6). Jesus sees himself as accomplishing this reality: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). This is not an economy of sacrifice or exchange but the fulfillment of mercy and love. Though only a minority of Christians may follow Jesus into a martyr’s death the meaning is there for the majority; “the meaning by which they shape their lives continues to eat away at the violent structures of actual historical humanity.”[45]
Blood per se is not violent but contains life, so spilling blood means a violent loss of life. “The blood contained absolutely no violence – on the contrary, it contained non-violence, which is positive forgiveness, peace, love. Only in that way would it be possible to drink and not feel the temple universe crashing down on you in outrage.”[46] To drink this blood is to take up the life of the one giving it, enfleshing the body, not through a continued destruction but through a recapitulated sort of body. To drink the blood, in this meaning, is to recover it from being spilled, as it is taken back into life. Jesus in recapitulating the Temple and its meaning focused on sacrifice, is removing the violence of sacrifice and replacing it with new life entailing the end of death (inclusive of violent sacrifice). “Thus, the ritual meaning of blood its elemental sign value – had been turned from the place where the violence of the group is poured away, removed as to become an inner agent that contains no violence and works proactively to transform into nonviolence and love. This is what it means to eat and drink the Eucharist. It is about as non-sacrificial as you can get.”[47] Though the Constantinian Church might return the meaning of the Eucharist to a sacrifice administered under its power and control, Bartlett ends his book with an appeal in regard to the meals significance: “the Eucharist will become not a badge and communication of official standing, but what it was always meant to be: an ongoing divine mimicry (imitation of signs) available to all human beings. What the Eucharist intends is to teach humans via a set of signs to be as totally nonviolent as God is.”[48]
The Temple recapitulated is clearly those who receive the life offered in Christ: “as living stones, being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5). The command to “do this in Remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) contains the same point, of living out this reality. The focus in Old Testament rites is on God remembering his people, but here Jesus changes the subject; it is his disciples remembering or recapitulating him. Remembering, in Bartlett’s explanation, pertains not to God’s remembering but to the transformation of humankind: “He took God’s act of fidelity – the full story of the Messiah – and held it out in remembrance, not in some heavenly space, but on a human table at the center of human concerns.”[49] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ. This double movement or “double revelation” simultaneously exposes the human violence (e.g., the shedding of blood, sacrifice) and from out of this exposure their erupts a new meaning in Christ (the giving of life in place of the taking of life).
For Bartlett, this is the Girardian synthesis, which Bartlett credits Benoît Chantre with helping to draw: “Chantre sums it up as Girard’s ‘fascinating and complex central thesis . . . it is the disruption of ancient mechanisms for containing violence, in their essential exhaustion, that the true face of man and the true face of God conjointly appear.”[50] The primacy of relation, coming face to face, is key. “The Girardian understanding can tell us that relation throughout the human cosmos is ultimately and thoroughly messianic.”[51] Human history is the story of a delivery, from out of violence and rivalry, into the realization of the fulness of relationship. “Relation is the hidden truth of existence that is more critical to existence than existential moods of anxiety, dread, or even the inevitability of death.”[52] The collapse of the sacred, a sacred constructed out of violence, reveals the individual and the possibility of relation, brought to its fulness in Christ. Sacrifice has lost its power and “it is Christ who finalizes that loss with the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god. . . . The gods of violence are demonetized by the announcement of a god of love; the machine has broken down, the expulsion no longer works.”[53] This is the power of the gospel as Girard originally recognized it and upon which Bartlett is building. God is the nonviolent relation that brings the world to peace.
[1] Anthony Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2026).
[2] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 236. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151.
[3] Love’s Entanglement, 151.
[4] Love’s Entanglement, 151.
[5] Girard, One by Whom Scandal Comes, 43. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151-152.
[6] Love’s Entanglement, 152.
[7] Love’s Entanglement, 152.
[8] Love’s Entanglement, 152.
[9] Love’s Entanglement, 152.
[10] Love’s Entanglement, 153.
[11] Girard, Battling to the End, 47, 119, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 153.
[12] Things Hidden, 56. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.
[13] Love’s Entanglement, 154.
[14] Love’s Entanglement, 154.
[15] Love’s Entanglement, 155.
[16] Things Hidden, 66, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 155.
[17] Love’s Entanglement, 155.
[18] Love’s Entanglement, 155.
[19] Love’s Entanglement, 156
[20] Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 21.
[21] Love’s Entanglement, 21.
[22] Love’s Entanglement, xxiii.
[23] Love’s Entanglement, xvii.
[24] Love’s Entanglement, xvii
[25] Things Hidden, 275.
[26] Things Hidden, 275.
[27] Things Hidden, 276.
[28] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv-xxv.
[29] Love’s Entanglement, 67.
[30] Love’s Entanglement, 67,
[31] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv.
[32]Things Hidden, 265.
[33] Things Hidden, 271.
[34] Love’s Entanglement, 135.
[35] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.
[36] Love’s Entanglement, 170.
[37] Love’s Entanglement, 170.
[38] Love’s Entanglement, 170..
[39] Signs of Change, 168.
[40] Signs of Change, 171.
[41] Love’s Entanglement, 176.
[42] Signs of Change, 170-171.
[43] Signs of Change, 171.
[44] Love’s Entanglement, 177.
[45] Love’s Entanglement. 177.
[46] Signs of Change, 171.
[47] Signs of Change, 171.
[48] Love’s Entanglement, 203.
[49] Signs of Change, 172.
[50] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law, Tran. By Trevor Cribben Merrill, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022), xi. Cited in Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement, xxvi.
[51] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.
[52] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.
[53] Things Hidden, 55-56, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.
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