Author: Paul Axton

Paul V. Axton spent 30 years in higher education teaching theology, philosophy, and Bible. Paul’s Ph.D. work and book bring together biblical and psychoanalytic understandings of peace and the blog, podcast, and PBI are shaped by this emphasis.

The Rule of Faith is the Gospel of Peace  

The “rule of faith” is a short summary of the Gospel (the work of Christ in redemption, creation, and the work of the Trinity), often deployed over and against Judaizers or heretics, to reconfirm the unity of Scripture, or the unity of the faith community.[1] The rule is that handed down by the Apostles and agreed upon by all the churches, and is thus an assertion of authority, completeness, and is unifying. It is a unifying or peacemaking rule or the application of the Gospel of peace, where there is a threat to unity. The Scriptures do not contain this unity apart from the  Gospel, summed up in the rule of faith, but given the fact of the Gospel there is unity to be found within the Hebrew Scriptures, or between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, or within creation, and in this sense, it is directly tied to peace. The rule of faith sums up the Gospel of peace, as a unifying whole (it is pictured in cosmic terms) doing the work of the Gospel, breaking down what would otherwise be a dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile, the Old and New Testament, or conceptions of God, or what Paul calls the “elemental principles” or the “principalities and powers.” Though nonviolence or peace may not be immediately associated with the rule of faith, in the context in which it is used in the New Testament, it is specifically this rule which is deployed to overcome the dividing or violent principles of this world order.

The rule functions in the first instance in regard to creation, and will be deployed by Irenaeus and the Church Fathers against the Gnostics, who would denigrate material creation, and picture salvation as a departure from the material world. This departure is not Gospel peace, as it is dependent upon an antagonistic dualism of the flesh, or what Paul will call the “elementary principles” and it equates salvation with shedding the physical body. The widespread notion in the ancient world, which Paul is clearly opposing (in Gal 3:28 and 6:15), is that the origins or the fundamental building blocks of the universe are based on opposed pairs (earth/air, water/fire) and God is read into this antagonism against the material world. The problem with the law, the problem with the flesh, and the problem with “this present evil age” reduce to the singular problem. The “elements of the cosmos” (στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου) have been made absolute and have not been understood in relationship to God but as opposed to God. The incarnation, the central part of the rule of faith directly contradicts this anti-materialism and is also the direct convergence with peace, as it is on the cross (the culmination of incarnation) that peace is established (Col. 1:20).

The rule of faith disrupts the dualism between heaven and earth and God and creation, by recognizing Jesus Christ as the creator incarnate. It is through the materiality of his blood, the physicality of his crucifixion, the embodied nature of his resurrection (all central to the Gospel or the rule of faith) that he makes peace. The material order, the embodied or incarnate, are affirmed in Christ, but the sting of sin and death are removed. In Paul’s summation of the rule, the incarnation, death, and resurrection are key: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3–5). Death due to sin, burial, and then the defeat of sin and death in the resurrection of Christ, are the crux of faith. There is a defeat of the violence that would obliterate Christ, and this summation of the rule is the defeat of the rule of death: “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death” (1 Cor 15:25–26). The violence that killed him is undone in the defeat of death in his resurrection. He is peace, the “abolishing of enmity,” the uniter of a divided humanity, split by the elementary principles contained in ordinances (Eph 2:14–16).   

Paul provides the example in Galatians, couching the rule of faith in a reconceived cosmic order, or a new creation. He is refuting Judaizers who are boasting in their law-keeping, while he would only boast “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” for through the cross “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God” (Gal 6:14-18). This rule of the cross is apocalyptic, as it deconstructs the cosmos ordered by law (circumcision or uncircumcision) and is the basis of a peaceful “new creation.” It is not simply that Christ’s crucifixion has caused Paul to think less of circumcision and law, than he had previously. According to Louis Martyn, “On the contrary, the cross separated Paul totally from the whole of the religious cosmos, of which a fundamental element was the pair of opposites called circumcision and uncircumcision, the Law/the Not Law.”[2] There is a new rule, a new ordering principle, at the foundation of the world. The former world was founded on violent division; the new creation is unified in Christ.

Paul makes a similar case in Colossians: “When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him. Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day— things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col 2:16–17). The “basic principles” which formerly enslaved and which now threaten again, are precisely those commanded in the law (I Ch. 23:31). The Colossians, like the Ephesians and Galatians, are being lured back into a Judaized Christianity, in which the law is pictured as a necessary first order arrangement (much as in contractual theology). Paul argues that, the specific way in which the reign of death is exercised is through human subjection to laws, principles and powers, which have no substance. They are lacking in truth and reality and yet these shadowy powers once reigned where Christ now reigns (“the substance belongs to Christ”).

The false teachers want to make the gospel a covenantal nomism, in which Christ has met the requirements of the law, so now righteousness has been obtained on the basis of keeping covenant through the law. Paul’s gospel opposes this partial gospel with the pronouncement that the malevolent grasp of the old-world order is finished. Christ has liberated from slavery through his cross. The lie is displaced by the truth as by the cross the cosmos has been crucified to me and I have been crucified to the cosmos (Gal 2:19; 5:24; 6:14). Circumcision is nothing, Jewishness is nothing, Gentileness is nothing, gender is nothing, ethnicity is nothing, philosophy is nothing, as what is taking place is on the order of creation from nothing, but the nothing is exposed in light of the new creation: “For neither is circumcision anything nor is uncircumcision anything.” What is something is the new creation. The old cosmos, with its violent ordering principle has not been repaired, but it has been displaced. The cross has rendered one world dead and buried (the world controlled by death and violence) as the new world of peace is now commenced.

The world, under the rule of the law or the elementary principles is violent and the god attached to it is violent, and this god and world are put to death at the cross. “The antinomies that lay at the foundation of the cosmos have now disappeared.”[3] The cosmos founded on opposed pairs (which for Paul was universal), no longer exists: “For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no male and female; for all of you are One in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27–28). Those in Christ, in rightly recognizing the rule have passed from the old ordering principle (the elementary principles, the binary divisions), in which the Galatians would bite and devour one another, and they need to “take care that [they] are not consumed by one another” (Gal 5:15). There is a violent incapacity and antagonism in the law of the flesh: “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit . . . so that you may not do the things that you please” (Gal 5:17). The deeds of the flesh are inherently punishing: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal 5:19-21). In this sense the rule of faith is no rule or law at all: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Ga 5:22–23).

The rule of faith directly coincides with the Gospel of peace, or the nonviolence of God as realized in the cross. Christ does not coercively throw off the elementary principles or the principalities and powers, but undermines them in accepting the death and violence they met out and defeats them at the cross. This message of a new peaceful cosmic order instituted at the cross, is the Gospel or rule of faith. To believe, preach, or practice, anything less than this rule is to fall short of the measure of the Gospel of peace.

[1] Here is Irenaeus summation of the rule of faith: “The church, dispersed throughout the world to the ends of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples the faith in one God the Father Almighty, “who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them” (Exod. 20:11), and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, incarnate for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets predicted the dispensations of God: the coming, the birth from the Virgin, the passion, the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension of the beloved Jesus Christ our Lord in the flesh into the heavens, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to “recapitulate all things” (Eph. 1:10) and raise up all flesh of the human race, so that to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Savior and King, according to the good pleasure of the invisible Father, “every knee should bow, of beings in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess him” (Phil. 2:10–11), and that he should render a just judgement on all and send to eternal fire the spiritual powers of iniquity, the lying and apostate angels, and men who are impious, unjust, iniquitous, and blasphemous, while on the contrary he should give life imperishable as a reward to the just and equitable who keep his commandments and persevere in his love (some from the beginning, others since their conversion), and surround it with eternal glory.” Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 53-54.

[2] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 565.

[3] Martyn, 570.

Putting on the Mind of Christ Through the Rule of Faith

To say, God is our problem, does not mean that our primary problem is that we deserve punishment and only God can take care of it, it means that our deepest gifts and problems, our neuroses, personality formation, attitudes toward ourselves and others, is caught up in belief or unbelief about ultimate reality or about God, and these beliefs and denials are often wrong. Belief may not capture it, because this may be prior to belief, it may be the impetus to unbelief, but it is our deepest conception about reality. What we project upon God, perhaps even the God we do not believe in, contains the human sickness, and coming to see God rightly is very much involved with the cure. We may have to begin with unbelief, or denial of God, or what we do not believe so as to say what is we believe. Our image of God pertains to our image of everything, and coming to conceive God rightly is the goal of our life and faith, precisely because this contains everything about our conception of the world. This interpretation of all things according to faith, rightly conceived, is captured in the biblical notion of the “rule of faith” (Rom 3:27, which the Church Fathers will also call the “rule of truth” or the “rule of love”). Paul is pitting his rule of faith against what is obvious about God, or seemingly so, as he is vengeful, law bound, and this is seen by everybody: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Rom 1:18-19).[1] This legal, seen, naturally revealed, hermeneutic, working within everyone, stands juxtaposed to the “rule of faith” (regula fidei). This rule is the regula or the regulating mode of conception, a basic premise for reading scripture, and the premise in which scripture is constituted, which suspends a “works of the law” conception. We are naturally given, perhaps due to sin, to a perverse notion of God and the world, and this perception is to be relinquished through the gospel. How this works out in our lives may be a slow process.

Learning to See God Through the Rule of Faith: The Case of John Ashworth and Maximus the Confessor

This struck me in interviewing John Ashworth, a priest, missionary, and peacemaker working in Sudan in Africa. John was suffering from PTSD, having been put in front of a firing squad, after being kidnapped and held hostage. Having experienced many levels of horrific violence, the church gave him leave to undergo recovery. John described to us in an interview, and also describes in his autobiography, his work with a gifted therapist, an elderly nun, who offered “unconditional non-judgemental love” whose “favourite image of God was ‘Beloved’.” He writes, “She led me through a process of examining my own images of God, until one day I was able to say to her, ‘I don’t believe in God any more!’ She was delighted! ‘Excellent! Now that we have discovered the images of God that you don’t believe in, let’s begin to explore the God that you do believe in.’”[2]  

John began to rebuild his image of God, and along with it his understanding of himself and his world. “I had to move on from childhood images of God the stern father, the strict teacher, the controlling judge, an object of fear. We anthropomorphise God but often choose from a very limited range of human characteristics.”[3] The childhood image of God as the enforcer of law, or even more benevolent notions, may still be bound by a letter driven imagery of the human imagination. The visual, the legal, the symbolic (as in Rom 1:18), or any particular representation, will fall short of the all-encompassing reality of the God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). There are a wide range of images, none of which can capture the deep mystery of an all-encompassing compassion, truth, and relational reality, inclusive of much of human reality, but as Paul describes we only come to this realization by the controlling factor of faith: “Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Rom 3:27–28).

John describes a renewed recognition of God interacting within his life, and acknowledging this presence as an act of prayer. “Experiences of community and relationship, the joys of friendship, marriage and family, eating together, working together, playing together, making love together – these can all be prayer. In them God is present whether I recognise that presence or not, and an explicit awareness of that presence is prayer.”[4] John describes a growing recognition, of what in conversation he referred to as divinization, or the Eastern notion of the working of the Trinity in all of creation but also within the self. “This is a God whom I need to find within myself and to allow out in a ‘letting go’ rather than a ‘letting in’. We are not unconnected with the God who created us and the God who became incarnate, the God who is Alpha and Omega, the first-born of all creation (Colossians 1:15) and the endpoint towards whom we are all evolving. Thus relationship is also at the heart of Christianity.”[5] John discovers a means of interpreting all things according to  Maximus the Confessor’s version of the rule of faith, “the rule of love,” drawing all things to God.

In Maximus understanding, all of God’s activity has the single purpose of uniting the world to himself. As Torstein Tollefesen explains, “Maximus asserts that the creation and ordering of the world is an embodiment of the Logos: ‘Always and in all God’s Logos . . . God wills to effect the mystery of His own embodiment.’”[6] The Word of God at work in us produces the same impetus behind and in Scripture. In Maximus’ famous quote, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[7] Or as he describes elsewhere, “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[8] This is Maximus’ rule of faith, which precedes all things and is the purpose in all things, through which we rightly perceive all things. We are to put on the mind of Christ in our perception of ourselves and the world. There is a fusion of cosmology, soteriology, and psychology, in the activity of God’s unifying work. This rule of faith, for the early church, is not simply an interpretive method but it is the impetus behind the writing of the Gospels. The gospel truth precedes the truth of the Gospels, giving rise to their writing and this is what is to be encountered in the Scriptures.

The Rule of Faith as a Mode of Interpreting Scripture and All Things

As John Behr describes the rule of faith, this hypothesis of Scripture, enables “the demonstrations from Scripture to describe, accurately, the portrait of a king, Christ; it is a mode of interpretation delivered by the apostles in their proclamation of Christ.”[9] Scripture is an interpretation of the person of Christ (in both Testaments), and this is the substance of its unity and the point of departure, but Christ is the exegetical means of reading Scripture. Scripture is a confession of faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and this faith first arises in the Apostles and is being preached before it is written. The Church Father, Irenaeus, feels it is key that the apostles first preached the Gospel and subsequently wrote it down, as this indicates it is the continuous preaching in the Church of the tradition of the apostles. It is this word of the apostles that “has been handed down (‘traditioned’) in the Scriptures, as the ground and pillar of our faith.”[10] There is an encounter with a person in Scripture and this person, Christ, is not bound by the letters and writing, but is living. Scripture, tradition, and experience, arise from the authority of God in Christ and this becomes the means of an exegetical reason or explanation about God (Jn. 1:18).

Paul had spoken of the Church as the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), but the living Word, which is Christ, is also rightly described as the foundation: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). The Apostles possessed the fullness of the Word, and so Paul can also describe them as the foundation of the church: “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone“ (Ephesians 2:20). They first embody the Word constituting the continuing incarnation of Christ in the church, then they preach this word and subsequently write it down, but it is the living Christ that is to be encountered in this written word.

Irenaeus suggests that it is not writing per se that constitutes the gospel, as the illiterate “barbarians” who receive this gospel may have it written on their hearts though they cannot understand the words written with ink and paper. It is in fact meant to be an inscription on human character, in the human heart, and is only secondarily written in letters. Irenaeus is describing an encounter with the risen Christ, in the gospel, that is faith, the rule of interpretation. As he will describe, the rule of faith is inclusive of a specific understanding of God as creator, of Christ as unveiling and constituting the inspiration of scripture and delivering from death, and of the Holy Spirit who is being poured out making people righteous and forming a new unified people. One encounters God the Father, God the Son (as Word, Son of God, Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit in the gospel message, and this unity is the rule of faith. Rather than a dividing word of the law, this encounter brings about a transformed imagination, that is no longer shaped by what is obvious in this world (under heaven) but there is a “renewing of the mind” (Rom 12:2).

The rule of love or the rule of faith or the analogy of faith, or to say the same thing, the gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning provided in the Scriptures, but with this unveiling there is an unveiling, and unifying, of all things. As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). These events are not obvious in the Hebrew Scriptures, but given these events in the life of Christ, this make sense of Scripture (the Hebrew Scriptures). By the same token they provide an interpretive lens for all things. Given the reality of Christ, the Scriptures provide a vocabulary, a world, a history, which can be read in this light, but so too the experience of the world. The canon or measure of Christ certainly is a means of interpreting Scripture but it is the means of apprehending all things. There is a conversion of the imagination, a depth perception no longer delimited by “things under heaven.”

The Rule of Faith as a Mindset

There is the interworking of the apostolic preaching, the rule of faith, and the role of Scripture, but according to the New Testament and the early church fathers, this rule of faith is at once to be a personal mindset and an ethical orientation organizing, not just Scripture, but one’s life. That is, this rule is more than a proposition or rule in the ordinary sense, but is the means of seeing and measuring all things by the peace and love of Christ. The rule is linked with unity and peace, it is linked with apprehending rightly, and it is linked to making critical judgments, and all of these are linked with putting on the mind of Christ. Which is to say this rule of faith is taken up, cathected (to redeploy Freud’s word) into the self as part of one’s character and one’s apprehension of the world.

Paul explains that the “analogy of faith” works in conjunction with preaching and teaching and he wanted every prophecy and every teaching to be conformed to the analogy or likeness of faith (Rom. 12:6). The application or extrapolation of the kerygma may be the specialty of the prophet, but Paul calls every Christian to “appraise all things” according to the mind of Christ. Putting on the mind of Christ means that the individual is enabled to make authoritative judgments, informed critiques, “so that we may know things freely given to us by God,” so that we combine “spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” and thus come to understand those things that “are spiritually appraised” (I Cor. 2:12-16). This spiritual individual has the wisdom provided by God, where the natural man, or literally “a man of animal soul,” is incapable of discerning things according to the Spirit. Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide into all truth (Jn. 16:13) and Paul seems to be applying this to the individuals in the Corinthian church.

In dealing with those who are challenging his teaching and authority in Corinth, Paul explains that they are using the wrong measurement: “they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves,” thus “they are without understanding” (II Cor. 10:12). Where they measure by human, self-established measure (measuring themselves by themselves), Paul “measures by the measure which God has given me.” As he explains to the Ephesians this is “the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). This is the measure that, rather than stirring up human antagonism, is the means by which “we all attain to the unity of the faith.” Here is Maximus rule of love, drawing all things into the unity of Christ. Our usual measure, in which we measure ourselves against others, stirs up jealousy and violence. The force that killed Christ, namely the measure of man, is countered by Christ and the rule of faith. That is, the peace of Christ embodied in nonviolent love and nonviolent resistance, is the counter to the human rule and is the goal and means of the rule of faith, a deep transformative grammar preceding what is “clearly seen” (Rom 1:20).

From the Rule of Law to the Rule of Faith

There is a double meaning to this rule or canon, in that it is not simply a measure but is to “rule” or to be predominant in thought. It is an alternative to the rule of the law, both as measure and means, in that the law divides and diminishes but this rule speaks of a corporate identity in the Holy Spirit (no longer focused on “I” or law as in Romans 7), which has cosmic implications for those in Christ: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (8:19), as they will reveal what is not now “clearly seen” or seemingly obvious. God understood in a relational identity, rather than a legal identity, is “Abba, Father.” The work of the “I” as measure and end, is displaced by the “rule” of the Spirit of life (8:2) which results in freedom from slavery to fear and a reconstituting the Subject as a child of God. The Pauline “body of sin” (6:6) or “body of death” (7:24) is displaced in the resurrection life of the Spirit (8:10-11) which is the beginning of cosmic redemption – “the redemption of our bodies” (8:23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8:21). This is not a condemning measure but redemptive. The measure and means that is predominant, is self-measure, how I measure up to others, or even within myself, or what is obvious to all, as if declared from what has been made (Rom 1:18ff). This natural measure belongs to the natural man, whose mind is captured by condemnation, but “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1).

The unification and participation Paul is describing is the realization of the rule of love. The law of life frees from the rule of law and letter: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:2). There is a deep psychological shift in passing from measure of the law to the measure of faith, in and through which all things are reconceived. The law aroused an unquenchable desire, that is the desire for unity invoked or propelled by alienation. The fear and slavery under the law of sin and death, with its work through deceptive desire aroused by the law, became “another law” (Rom 7:23, ἕteronnόmon), but this law is now voided along with all of its various machinations. Law as measure and means seems to be part of the process of maturing, or being “tutored” (Galatians 3:24), but we pass from the tutor to a more fulsome reality that no longer requires this guide. The Spirit gives the righteousness of God or the promise of life indicated in the law, and the law’s “righteous decree” of life has been fulfilled. This then results in the capacity to “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:4). This walk is characterized in all of its phases by the power of life which enables the mindset and hope of the Subject in Christ.

The Rule of Faith and the Problem of Suffering

In our discussion with John Ashworth, he described a new way of viewing his own suffering and trauma. He had arrived at a moment of unbelief, or a denial of the God in whom he formerly believed, due to the violence he had witnessed and to which he had been subjected. It reminded me of the sort of protest atheism of Ted Turner, who had started as deeply religious, but with the prolonged illness and tragic death of his younger sister, Mary Jane, Turner turned to something of a protest atheism, as he was very angry at the God in which he did not believe. It is a story that could probably be repeated many times over, as in the case of Charles Darwin, whose oldest daughter, Annie, fell ill, or Samuel Clemens or Albert Einstein, all of whom came to unbelief due to suffering. The typical apologetic might attempt to explain, to make the suffering somehow beneficial, but there is really no answer of this sort, though suffering is thematic in Scripture.

John Ashworth describes an ability to see suffering in a different light: “Despite the hardships I regard it as a privilege to have shared the suffering, experienced the solidarity and camaraderie, and to have been part of something worthwhile. That’s what keeps me going and sustains me during difficult times, along with the knowledge that it’s not me who bears the responsibility of bringing peace and justice to Sudan and South Sudan.”[11] Or as he says elsewhere, “God is with us, not in an abstract and spiritual way, but in a very real and concrete way. God has experienced the sufferings of God’s people.”[12] He describes the work in analysis as realization that it may be in peak moments, “with a beautiful view, with joy or sorrow, with pain and suffering, with love and human relationships, with birth or death or other rites of passage” that we know God’s presence.[13] His book is a long meditation on suffering, and coming to recognize God in the suffering.

Where in Romans 7 Paul describes an unbearable suffering, in Romans 8, he provides the metaphor of childbirth, in which to couch and reframe human suffering. “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom 8:22). Paul’s description of hope (the unseen, over and against that which is seen and obvious in Rom 1:18ff) allows for a full engagement with the vicissitudes of suffering as this suffering and even death is no longer definitive or determinative of life in light of the hope of certain glory. The “present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8:18) as neither “death nor life” can separate from the love of God (8:38-39). Hope and faith embrace the dynamics of change, as it is focused on certain future fulfilment of a promise which cannot be obtained” within the framework (“under the heavens” (Rom 1:18, the possibilities inherent in the present). Faith and hope bear an unfinished (unseen, and beyond the heavens) embrace of the future, the possibility of growth and change. This hope directly counters the futility of sin (futility or matiotēs connotes what pseudos “lie” meant in Genesis and in Romans 1:25, “they exchanged the truth for a lie”). There is not an abolition of the present world so that heaven might take its place but a transformation on the order of birth, in which the pangs of suffering are fulfilling a purpose. With the “adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23), the purpose of creation’s suffering will have appeared and the longing of hope and faith fulfilled.

Paul’s resolution to the alienation of the law is to become a child of God, the realization of faith. Where the sinful mind is by definition “hostile to God” the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the measure of the law (8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). The move from law as alienating and oppressive to the law written on the heart (Jer. 31.33) is a description of the rule of faith, a character shaping way of apprehending. Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7.24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, “Abba, Father” (8:15). The measure and means have changed. The God who is law giver in ch. 7 is Abba in ch. 8 and this difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself who testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). This inward testimony is the measure of faith in the transformed mind.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

[1] Thanks to Brian Sartor for inspiring many of these thoughts. Listen to our podcast here, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/brian-sartor-describes-pauls-deconstruction-of-the-teaching-of-the-false-teacher/

[2] John Ashworth, Journeying Toward Nonviolence: My Life in Sudan (London: Redhaven Books, 2026), 87.

[3] Ashworth, 88.

[4] Ashworth, 90.

[5] Ashworth, 91.

[6] Torstein Tollefesen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.

[7] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1  Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7, paragraph 22. 

[8] St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions to Thalassius, question 60, paragraph 3

[9] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 37,

[10] Behr, 39.

[11] Ashworth, 15-16.

[12] Ashworth, 61.

[13] Ashworth, 89.

The Survival of the Devil in Theology and His Destruction in Paul

Many commentators presume that in Romans (7:7 ff), Paul is repeating the Edenic scene of the fall in Genesis 3, and is demystifying the story, explaining that which animates sin, or that which gives it a speaking role, is a deception in regard to the law (the role of the Decalogue is also presumed to be proleptically contained in the original prohibition). He displaces the serpent with sin, repeating throughout the events of the fall, so that “the serpent deceived me” (Gen. 3:13) becomes “sin deceived me” (Rom. 7:11) and the deception regards the 10th commandment on coveting, which serves to sum up the previous 9 commandments, while also centering in on the point of the original prohibition in Genesis. Covetousness or desire of the other, be it God in Genesis or the neighbor in Exodus (20:17), is the root problem behind sin’s deception.

Paul locates this Edenic event in “I” and describes the unfolding of death, not simply as physical demise, but as an internal split, in which he is pitted against himself, incapacitating his will in a psychological and spiritual bondage (7:14). He sums this up as “sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (7:11). The “promised life” is death, which in the lie is the special knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) or the law enacted. The attempt of the “I” to possess the commandment, is turned back on the subject, and sin-possessed (λαβοῦσα) “I”. Where sin lies dead in Romans 7:8 apart from the law, under the law the “I” lies dead in v. 9 and sin becomes an animate force in the exchange.

Paul then goes on to explain how it is that Christ addresses this situation, defeats it, providing life in place of death dealing desire and deception, summed up as, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (8:2). What he has described in the shorthand of the early Church Fathers is dubbed “Christus Victor,” the defeat of sin, death, and the devil. It is also described, in a slightly different image, as “recapitulation” (as in Romans 5 Christ retraces and reverses the steps of human history, succeeding where Adam failed). 

Paul’s description by-passes a Devil centered atonement, but unfortunately subsequent explanations of Christus Victor will focus on the serpent and the Devil in a manner that will give them a key role, and then in legal theories of the atonement, though the key role of the Devil is displaced, the law will begin to play the same central function. The Augustinian, Anselmian, and Calvinist, readings will mystify the problem of sin in original sin, in legalistic notions requiring restored honor, or a punishing payment, missing where and how this dynamic unfolds. Paul’s demystification of the serpent and the law, locates the dynamic of sin in a process of reification and personification (either a demonizing personification or a reification of the law) that names the mystery of sin as enfolded in its blinding deception. Sin is not a mystery but a system, with its own logic and structure, and in the explanation of its structure lies the explanation of its propagation.

Early explanations of Christus Victor and then legal theories, fail to locate sin, as in the woman’s and Paul’s complaint – “the serpent/sin deceived me” (Gen. 3.13; Rom. 7.11), which are held together in the “I” as an existential self-identification within Adam or humankind. The failure is within humanity (corporately and individually), and is in a particular dynamic, which projects, reifies, and destroys. In the deception the law, language, the symbolic, is a means of establishing the self, but it is the self that has become the sight of a destructive desire. The deception produces an inverted economy of exchange in which life is gained through death, which is the pull of this desire.

The Focus on the Devil

The early Church Fathers, in their working out of Christus Victor, are still bearing the weight of what René Girard refers to as “mythological crystallizations” in notions of a personified Devil whom God tricked in Christ, such that there is not a complete exposure of the centrality of desire and its role in reifying, personifying, and projecting. As David Dawson describes, there are still notions of a contest, a “quasi-sportive or pugilistic event” in which Satan deceives humanity and absconds with God’s people, and Christ is able to trick the Devil and win them back. These explanations, in focusing on the Devil, miss the role of desire, as present even in their own explanations. “All the strategies of scandalized desire are on full display, from the Devil’s envy of Eden’s blessedness and inveiglement of human credulity, to the feigned inadvertence of Christs exposure to death and his rival’s homicidal covetousness, which he outfoxes.”[1]

The story is at once mythical and yet descriptive of human failure and conflict. The violence, the reification of death and its power, the fundamental deception as containing the self, reduces Christ to a special version of the scapegoat. Dealing in death as if death is the divine fulcrum, by which to leverage power, is still in place as the ground of society. The victims’ death is still required and divinely-willed, which “occludes the violent role of the human community in the exchange of a merely human victim to save its own skin. That human beings play a passive role in Christus Victor, first as dupes, then captives set free, means that little is revealed of their culpability, which pales in comparison with the malevolence of Satan, the undisputed agent of destruction.”[2] God and Christ are made out as deceivers, with the incarnation a divine hoax played on the Devil. This victim, Christ, is not so innocent, and then in a penitential economy all of the blame will be legally placed on Christ, with both systems missing the point.

The Focus on the Law

Anselm of Canterbury may be one of the most sophisticated theologians to attempt an explanation of the atonement, but rather than begin with a biblical explanation (which is not the point of his effort) Anselm provides what he considers an illustration (at the end of which, he says if it is helpful, use it, if not, dispose of it). The problem is Anselm’s explanation is ingenious enough that it will become the standard interpretation of the Western church, and it will be presumed he has concluded the issue, taking him more seriously than he may have imagined. Anselm moves the discussion from Satan, and presumes the primary issue is meeting the requirements of the law.

Like Paul, he deals with human interiority, focusing not on desire but on will (which he equates with a capacity for keeping the law). Will is the vital force that would take the basic equipment of the rational self, and if restored to its proper “rectitude,” could preserve a subject fully present to itself or able to completely remember itself and in rightly remembering itself encounter God. One is enabled to close the gap in the will by restoring God’s honor to him (an honor impugned by breaking the law), by fulfilling the demands of the law, and thus enabling right willing. But only God is able to satisfy the just requirement of the law, and this he did in Christ, closing the gap in the will. Throughout the book Cur Deus Homo, Anselm describes the atonement in terms of repaying to God the honor taken from him by sin, which makes Christ’s death necessary to pay back to God that debt. For Anselm, Christ’s death works according to the logic of law in that the satisfaction demanded by the law is rendered by Christ (but the economy itself is not disturbed or displaced). Though Anselm is not focused on punishment, it is by means of bearing the requirements of the law that Christ pays the debt. Anselm argued without direct appeal to Scripture (though Scripture is assumed throughout his argument), but the power of his argument was such that it affected future biblical understanding of the atonement. Anselm’s theory of divine satisfaction will dominate in the Western Church (Catholic and Protestant) until Calvin’s additions.

Calvin’s basic premise is that the debt owed to God is eternal punishment and only Christ can make this payment. The way in which he reaches this conclusion is an intricate argument about one of the most obscure passages in the New Testament, I Peter 3:18-22 (which I describe here). My summation of his explanation is that he fuses Gehenna (the place of future punishment) and Hades (the place of the dead), and argues that eternal punishment should also be fused with the chastisement of Isaiah 53. Then both of these passages should be moved to the context of the trial and punishment of Christ.

The debt owed no longer pertains to Anselm’s will, but to an eternal punishment, which Christ paid. There is a split in God, not in human will, and God must close this gap. Jesus is pictured as being not only forsaken by God but the object of God’s hatred (as I have explained here). As Dr. Abner Chou describes, “In that death the wrath of God was poured out on Christ, and the darkness exploded. In that instant God cursed Jesus, putting Him in a position of absolute, perfect hatred. God hated Him and desired to make Him nothing.”[3] Dan Allender and Tremper Longman propose that, “God chose to violate His Son in our place. The Son stared into the mocking eyes of God; He heard the laugher of the Father’s derision and felt Him depart in disgust. . . . In a mysterious instant, the Father who loved the Son from all eternity turned from Him in hatred. The Son became odious to the Father.”[4] As Tim Keller put it on Facebook (and quickly revised, due to subsequent criticism), “If you see Jesus losing the infinite love of the Father, out of his infinite love for you, it will melt your hardness.”[5]

As Dawson describes, in Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, and Calvin’s penal substitution, it is as if the role of the Devil is projected onto God, giving us a Janus-faced God, with violence and retribution now part of his character. “The victim is now completely innocent and the people stand fully condemned. But then the God of Christus Victor has also undergone a fearsome transmogrification. The Devil may no longer be a player of any consequence but the polarization of divinity into opposed faces has scarcely been reduced.”[6] Christ is now the victim of the Father, who requires death for his justice, and any notion of divine nonviolence (as in Christus Victor) is relinquished for divine retribution as the expression of God’s justice. Now it is God’s justice and violence from which all require deliverance. To fail to locate “divine violence” within humanity and to project it onto God, loses the exposure of human violence, reification and projection onto God: “This will is the divinized energy of the mob, violence writ large. A more unanimous act of murder could hardly be imagined. Christian soteriology now undergoes a last, unprecedented, and ultimately fatal transformation.”[7]

God needs the persecutors as his instruments so that he might have them kill Christ. The war is within God and “Death now expresses a relation of the divine itself.”[8] God is inherently violent, and death dealing and violence, in turn, are divinized. This is arguably worse than paganism, in that there is no room for human entry into this divine economy. “Rather than opening the flow of trade, this annuls it. The act of violence still discharges itself within the closure of the sacred as answering a divine necessity, and its deflection belongs undeniably to an economy of salvation. This economy is, however, petrified at inception, reduced to a theological symbol.”[9] Calvinism may be the final stage of this failure, in which God only provides symbols, and there is no room for a real-world human transformation, a forsaking of violence and entry into peace.

Paul’s Focus on Deliverance from Deception and Death

In Paul’s summary statement of the human problem, which he calls “the body of death” he locates the problem of sin and death as it has impacted the “I”: Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? (Rom 7:24). The law divides, and sin deploys the law in its deception, creating the exchange of life for a living death. “So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (7:25).

Paul’s understanding of the law introduces a series of categories in chs 6, 7, and 8, which demonstrate that the law mediates sin but, in contrast to Anselm’s and Calvin’s understanding, for Paul, the law does not mediate salvation. Salvation destroys the law of sin and death (resulting from the law), and ultimately obliterates any role for Satan in an economy of life and peace. In the conclusion of his letter to the Romans, Paul once again appeals to the image of Genesis (3:15), “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you” (Rom 16:20). The deceiver is destroyed with the sin which animates him.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

[1] David Dawson, Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 78-79.

[2] Dawson, 79.

[3] https://www.adamsetser.com/blog/2015/7/25/the-big-picture-of-gods-mission-a-concise-over[1]view-of-the-entire-bible-by-dr-abner-chou. [June 19, 2018] Quoted from Joshua R. Farris & S. Mark Hamilton, “This is My Beloved Son, Whom I hate? A Critique of the Christus Odium Variant of Penal Substitution” (Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2).

[4] Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, In the Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, [1999] 2015), pp. 184-85. Quoted from Farris and Hamilton.

[5] https://calvinistinternational.com/2017/07/27/tim-keller-the-cross-and-the-love-of-god/ From Farris and Hamilton.

[6] Dawson, 80.

[7] Dawson, 82.

[8] Dawson, 83.

[9] Dawson, 83.

Stanley Hauerwas and the MAGA New Right: Defining and Combating Evil

Stanley Hauerwas, along with the Yale post-liberals, pioneered a radical critique of liberalism, tied as it is to capitalism, individualism, and the nation state. Hauerwas defines liberalism as a set of beliefs built on the primacy of individual autonomy, privacy, rights, and self-interest rather than a shared substantive vision of the good. At one time Christians knew themselves to be “participants in a grand drama of God’s salvation of all creation” but “beliefs” cannot participate in drama. Liberalism robbed Christians of the primacy of a narrative reality.[1] The central point of Hauerwas’s critique is not liberalism or anti-liberalism, but it was a call to the church to be the church. The church, in Hauerwas’s estimate, is the singular community where one encounters truthfulness, or an embodied way of life (a narrative reality), in which the truth about reality emerges. It specifically involves the church community, because living the truth requires formation in principles, such as nonviolence and peace, which are not and cannot be fostered outside of the story of Christ and the church nurtured on this narrative.

The Anti-Liberalism of the MAGA New Right

Among those, such as political science professor Patrick Deneen, who have taken up Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism, there has been a profound misunderstanding.  Deneen has focused on the failure of liberalism (in his breakout work, Why Liberalism Failed) and the need to replace it as captured in Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The second book shifts to a prescriptive and state-oriented blueprint arguing that anti-liberal forces must actively seek a “regime change” to wrestle control of existing political, legal, and economic institutions from the ruling class. In this shift toward state apparatuses, he has abandoned the central point of Hauerwas’s critique. Those like Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and J. D. Vance, who see Trump as the hammer with which to install an anti-liberal authoritarian government, have missed not only Hauerwas’s point but the point of the cross. They too are seeking to defeat evil, but rather than equate evil with what Christ defeated at the cross, these thinkers equate evil with modern ideas, the rejection of an absolute moral order and traditional values, as in a neo-Marxist wokeism. In the words of Trump, the evil they are aimed at is the left: “They are sick, radical left people.” In their estimate, there must be a return to America’s founding principles so as to once again become a Christian nation, even if this requires regime change and a redefining of rule of law. As Deneen advocates, this means employing evil means for good ends, or in his phrase “using Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends,” by which he primarily means reorganizing America’s social order and “replacing the elites.”[2]

According to Laura Field, “When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.”[3]  Christian salvation, Christian ethics, or the teaching of Christ, become secondary in this project in which the religion is weaponized as an anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, and anti-woke, instrument. For example, Yoram Hazony an Israeli political theorist and a leading advocate for national conservatism, “argues that the nation-state, as a homogeneous cultural entity, sets the true foundation of good politics. Despite being an Orthodox Jew, he has promoted Christian dominance in the United States, arguing that ‘the only thing that is strong enough to stop woke neo-Marxism, the religion of woke neo-Marxism, is the religion of biblical Christianity.’”[4] The point is to use whatever cudgel is necessary to defeat the left, and Christianity is another tool in the primary goal of defeating liberalism.

As James Chappel writes, “The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch.” [5]  He cites Deneen, and Rod Dreher, but is focused particularly on Vermeule, the Harvard legal scholar, who is advocating Catholic integralism, or the subordination of the state to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. “It would certainly ban abortion and pornography, and it would likely mandate Catholic education in schools. It is hard to see what place would be made for homosexuals or religious minorities in such a state. What he has said does not bode well for religious tolerance: he has argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office, and that Catholic immigrants be given priority over Muslims, Protestants, and Jews.” [6] In his envisioned technocratic rule of elites, centralized rule will have to undermine the rule of courts and the judiciary. Vermeule’s first book, Judging Under Uncertainty (2006), calls for judges to step back and let expert authorities make complex decisions, and Law’s Abnegation (2016), is about the empirical success achieved so far. “Judges have no business, Vermeule thinks, meddling with technical or regulatory matters, and thus they seldom do. So whatever fantasy we might spin about living in a republic of laws, in reality we are living in a republic of administrators.” [7]  This defeat of the rule of law opens the door for the executive branch, the president, to take control.

More than Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism (they would claim both him and Wendell Berry), these theorists are fostered by the Claremont Institute, building upon the theory of Leo Strauss, and the legal theorist, Carl Schmitt (as I have described here). The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.” [8] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[9] The leader as the embodiment of the law, is the law, and as such serves as something of a Christ-like figure.

The Abandonment of the Cross

Taking charge, gaining control, saving the nation, the Christian definition of evil, is specific to what killed Christ and what Christ defeated in his death and resurrection. Evil is defeated through the work of Christ, and not a human politic or social organization attempting to extend that work. The politics of Jesus institutes its own social structure in the church where he is proclaimed as Lord, and this does not pertain to either liberalism or opposition to liberalism. But Deneen and company miss that Christian salvation is precisely concerned to defeat the state monopoly on the power of life, one which they would institute, through its control of death and destruction. In Hauerwas’s reading, Christ has abolished war and violence and political strife, and along with it the liturgy of the state, which imagines through government, through the president, through the legal order, through the death of the victims of state, freedom is gained.[10]  This is the lie Christ confronted in his life and in his trial and death. With the resurrection, the state power of death and coercion is defeated.

This new MAGA Right, not only miss Hauerwas’ point, but the point of Christianity, which is not to coerce through imposition of Christian doctrine (the point of this group, who would install ruling elites), but to participate in Christian freedom inaugurated in the cross. This freedom is not that of the Enlightenment but neither is it the imposed liberation, focused on a human agenda of gaining control over liberal democrats. In fact, these anti-liberals need to return to Hauerwas critique of liberalism, as it could serve as well as a critique of their aim to gain control, exercise their will, and implement their justice. It is still self-creation, and will to power, but under the auspices of religion. As Chappel notes, their plan “is to be achieved not through a coup but by the installation of a cadre of anti-liberal conservatives into positions of power in the administration. From those perches, they would leverage state power to create a new social order.” [11] Through social engineering they would impose what they perceive to be the Christian ethic, but in their method, they betray the faith they would promote. Peace, non-violence, taking up the cross, cannot be violently imposed. If liberalism seems to promote an ethically neutral state, the MAGA Right religionists have a definitive ethic, but it has little to do with the ethics of Jesus. As Fields concludes, “Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the kingpins of the MAGA New Right, embody a different form of politics. With particular ideas and a MAGA intellectual elite behind them, they are seeking to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share his vision.”[12]

There is a definitive brand of religion and intellectualism behind the chaos of Trump, but those focused on Trump, should not miss that the project is to displace liberal democracy, as if this is the evil Christ defeated. Other than the critique of liberalism, and even this is misguided in presuming the problem is inherent to a form of government, this has nothing to do with Stanley Hauerwas. As Hauerwas has said, “the primary concern in my work has not been to critique liberal society; it has been to offer a vision for the church (in particular the integrity of the church) so that Christians might help negotiate the challenges of a liberal society. . . my position certainly does not entail a wholesale rejection of `secular civilization’, or even of liberalism.”[13] Hauerwas is a man of the church, and a church of a very different kind than those promoting regime change and the installment of an authoritarian government as part of their church work.

The Confusion Concerning Church

Hauerwas is not advocating an overthrow of liberalism or a taking control through regime change, but an acceptance of the already accomplished defeat of the world through Christ lived out in the church. Certainly, the Christian is not obliged to understand evil, peace, freedom and justice, under the dictates of an enlightenment rationality (which presumes such notions are available through a universal reason). The Christian need not presume autonomy, individualism, and universal reason, as defined by liberalism are the case, but neither is this the epitome of evil, as if to oppose liberalism is to side with Christ. The issue, for Hauerwas, is not liberalism or its opposite, but the centrality of Christ and living in a community of believers who learn to live this story. The embodiment and meaning of peace, justice, and freedom are specific to the person of Christ. “Though we continue to live in a time when the world does not dwell in peace, when the wolf cannot dwell with the lamb and a child cannot play over the hole of the asp, we believe nonetheless that peace has been made possible by the resurrection. Through this crucified but resurrected savior we see that God offers to all the possibility of living in peace by the power of forgiveness.”[14] We do not take charge and institute this peace, we receive it and inhabit it.

To take control and direct the Christian social strategy, the MAGA Right’s project, is already an abandonment of Christ’s kingdom. His truth cannot be relegated to human political organization, certainly it cannot be privatized or made to serve another story – i.e., the story of the nation state, the story of the rise of liberal democracy, the story of Rome or America, but neither does it promote Constantinianism or the story of a modern Catholic integralism.

The Church is a Politic and Method

As Hauerwas puts it, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[15] Hauerwas is picturing the role of the church as a practical defeat of evil in living out peace. Peace is its own fruit, and its own end as an overcoming of deception, a defeat of violence and death, and a coming to reality. The church is to be the instantiation of the peace of Christ, and every other means, including liberalism or illiberalism, falls into division and violence. As Hauerwas puts it, Jesus is the embodiment of the peaceable kingdom, he is the embodiment of Sabbath peace. “God’s kingdom, God’s peace, is a movement of those who have found the confidence through the life of Jesus to make their lives a constant worship of God. We can rest in God because we are no longer driven by the assumption that we must be in control of history, that it is up to us to make things come out right.” [16]

The justice or righteousness (or the making right) of Christ cannot be extracted from the church, as if American freedom or liberal justice or illiberal justice, mean the same thing as they mean in the story and rule of Christ. As Hauerwas writes, “We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”[17] The idea of a Christian nation, according to Hauerwas is extraordinarily destructive. Instead, “The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action.”[18] The people of God are the empirical reality of the rule of God, the embodiment of the crucified reality.[19] The point is not to determine the outcome of history, “For Christians hope, is not ‘in the processes of history,’ but in God whom we believe has already determined the end of history in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” [20]

Peace Not Coercion is the Method

For Hauerwas, peace is at the center of the gospel, as violence, whether in the name of justice or equality, is inevitably about power and control over others. Violence derives from the self-deceptive story that we are in control – that we are our own creators – and that only we can bestow meaning on our lives, since there is no one else to do so.” [21] Violence is the practice of a lie, a form of deceived meaning. It is not that violence may not gain short term goals, but Christians cannot rely on a justice that comes from the barrel of a gun, or that indicates less worthy motivations (being in charge), “for God does not rule creation through coercion, but through a cross. As Christians, therefore, we seek not so much to be effective as to be faithful – we, thus, cannot do that which promises ‘results’ when the means are unjust.”[22] The New Right, in abandoning the centrality of peace and nonviolence have missed that violence is the primary problem with liberalism and anti-liberalism, or any means other than the cross. In the name of their Anti as definitive, they stand against the means and method of Christ and the cross.

[1] A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, 4th edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1981), 11. Robert Jenson, “Hauerwas Examined” in First Things (August 1, 1992). See also  Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114.

[2] Laura Field, “The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right”, New York Times (Dec. 13, 2025). In Laura Field’s book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Patrick Deneen serves as a leading figure and key architect of the postliberal intellectual faction.

[3] Laura Field.

[4] Laura Field.

[5] James Chappel, “Nudging Toward Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism” in Dissent (Spring 2020). https://dissentmagazine.org/article/nudging-towards-theocracy/

[6] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[7] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[8] Damon Linker, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful”, New York Times (May 4, 2025). Robert J. Shapiro, “The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington” The Washington Monthly (February 10, 2025).

[9] Damon Linker.

[10] Stanley Hauerwas, “Ten years and counting: Christianity and the end of war,” ABC Religion and Ethics – https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ten-years-and-counting-christianity-and-the-end-of-war/10101158

[11] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[12] Laura Field.

[13]‘Will the Real Sectarian Stand Up! ‘, Theology Today, 44/1 (April 1987), 87-94. p. 93. Cited in J. B. Thomson, `The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas as a Distinctively Christian Theology of Liberation (1970-2000)’  (PhD University of Nottingham, 2001), 88.

[14] The Peaceable Kingdom, 135.

[15] Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader, John Berman ad Michael Cartwright eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 124.

[16] The Peaceable Kingdom, 134.

[17]Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 47-48.

[18] Resident Aliens, 83.

[19] The Peaceable Kingdom, 107.

[20] The Peaceable Kingdom, 145.

[21] The Peaceable Kingdom, 94.

[22] The Peaceable Kingdom, 104.

Combating America’s Default Atheism and Worship of a Tribal Deity with William Desmond

Sixty years ago, Time Magazine captured the ethos of the day in raising the question on its cover, “Is God Dead?” Among a certain segment of society, represented by such figures as Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, the cry of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman (“God is dead”), expressed the felt need to carry on the work of theology and philosophy without God. It was a time in the United States when secularism captured the mass imagination, in a sensibility William Desmond dubs “default atheism.” In default atheism there are atheistic presumptions that may or may not be fully conscious. While the new atheists gained a popular hearing, there has also been a shift toward religion in politics and in the public imagination, which might be characterized as a “default religion” which unwittingly takes up atheistic assumptions. God’s existence is not the issue, but his moral character reflected in Christ, tied to the ground of being. If the Hebrew Scriptures depict the contention between belief in a tribal God (one who commits genocide, killing the inhabitants of the land to make way for “his chosen people”) and a God who is good, we might have thought the issue was resolved in the Christian picture of the Father of Christ. The God revealed in Christ is universal, the very ground of being as overflowing goodness. Where God is too small, there is a metaphysical disconnect between God, the world, and human interiority, and this disconnect can function as a practical atheism. The question is, if something more insidious than atheism is now at work, perhaps a “default” notion of God more nihilistic in its outcomes than atheism?

Statistically there has not been much of a shift, but in a time when Christians seem to be supporting harsh immigration policies, open racism, and genocide in Gaza (in supporting the present administration) one might expect that there would be a mass moral outcry against detaining migrants in torturous crowded conditions, depriving them of medical care and disappearing them to other countries or within the prison archipelago, arresting children and separating them from their parents, killing women, children, and civilians in Iran and Gaza, and killing U.S. citizens in the streets. One might expect that an administration populated by devout Christians, would have within it a moral counter voice to the draconian policies.

The present administration is made up largely of devout Christians with J. D. Vance (Vice President), Marco Rubio (Secretary of State) Sean Duffy (Transportation Secretary) John Ratcliffe (CIA Director), Linda McMahon (Education Secretary), and Elise Stefanik (UN Ambassador) all devout Catholics. Jonathan Heaps notes in this mornings Commonweal Magazine, that the administration has added one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic intellectuals, Chad Pecknold of Catholic University of America, to serve as Principal Director for Cultural Outreach at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Pecknold is to be the voice of administrations policies, working in Homeland Security’s Office of Public Engagement. He will provide explanation for the policies implemented under former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (now head of The Shield of the Americas) and her replacement Markwayne Mullin (both devout Pentecostals). Rather than a moral counter voice, these prominent Christians are literally the voice promoting the worst cruelties of this administration. Heaps points out that Pecknold, as a professor of CUA is under the authority of the church (serving on “a pontifical faculty accredited by the Holy See.”). As such, he “has been hired to continue to publicly promote the administration’s hyper-hawkish immigration aims, to continue to say things like ‘mass deportations may be a legitimate response to mass migration’” as he has argued in a policy paper.[1] It seems Pecknold will be in charge of justifying the “disappearing” and torture of immigrants and the “de-legalizing more than a million Black and brown refugees.” 

Pecknold is joining a strong lineup of deeply pious Protestant Christians such as Mike Huckabee (Ambassador to Israel and a Baptist Preacher), who stated in an interview that it would be “fine” if Israel took the land stretching from the Nile River to the Euphrates River (the “Greater Israel” promised in the Bible), which would include the eastern parts of Egypt, western and central parts of Iraq, all of Syria, all of Jordan, all of Lebanon, the northern part of Saudi Arabia, and of course all of Palestine the West Bank and Gaza. Huckabee has recently come out condemning Israeli settlers’ treatment of Palestinians, but as U.S. Ambassador he has supported the right to occupy these lands. He has carried out U.S. policy in support of Israel, and the genocidal actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

We could go on to describe the piety of Russell Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget), who has weaponized Trump’s policies against States resistant to his powers (as an outspoken evangelical), or the deep religiosity of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has implemented a policy of “maximum lethality” in bombing Iran, in extra-judicial killings of occupants of boats on the Caribbean, and in ignoring international law in warfare, recklessly killing civilians. We could point to Trump’s own religious concerns in his appointment of Paula White-Cain who serves as a senior advisor leading the White House Faith Office, acting as primary spiritual advisor to the President. Trump’s spirituality may be the most marked characteristic of the pervading religious sensibility. His religion is indistinguishable from nihilism, and though Jesus and God and prayer provide window dressing, any serious notion of God, of Christian ethics, of human compassion or empathy, or of any resistance to secularism or atheism are indiscernible. Trump embodies a religion that has succeeded in emptying the world of Christian social concern. He probably could not articulate the world which foregrounds and determines his actions, but it is clearly lacking in serious recognition of the Father of Christ or of a Christian ground of being. 

The point is obvious, that the Christian religion, as understood and practiced by this administration, and perhaps the religion which garnered the vote to put this administration in office, is more insidious than atheism, in that it worships a God who either allows for or justifies evil. The practical atheism and nihilism of this faith is covered by a veneer of Christianity, but the default atheism of one generation now pervades and foregrounds the religion of this generation. This God is less intellectually viable than the non-existent God of atheism, more of a primitive tribal God, disconnected from the ontological ground of goodness fused to the world in Christ. Whether default atheism and secularism are responsible, or simply a malformed Christianity or both, it is obvious that the God behind America’s religious nationalism and popular ethos lacks the basic qualifications for serious belief.

Godlessness may have so bewitched a generation, that serious consideration of God among philosophers and even theologians, to say nothing of the popular imagination, now seems to elude the Christian majority. It is a fairly simple exercise to pose the moral teaching of Christ against the morality of this religion. Nonviolence, welcoming the stranger, God as love, taking up the cross, forsaking selfish egoism, abandoning greed, giving to the poor, forgiveness, the universal value of all God’s creation and all people, is the entry point into Christianity 101. This moral teaching of Christ and the New Testament does not enter into the cruel ethos promoted by this administration and its supporters. Finite purposes, immediate selfish needs, greed, patriotism, white nationalism, Zionism, racism, all serve the immanent realm and the religion either does not interfere or is made to support this closed moral consideration enchained by worldly concerns (a failed metaphysics and morality). What seems to have been lost with moral seriousness, is a seriousness about God, such that default atheism and default religion occupy the same space. It may be that the popular religion has simply inherited the presumptions of atheism, presuming either that God is totally immanent (identical with the world), or so transcendent so as to be unknowable and unknown or at least not interfering with the world (deism). Transcendence removed from immanence, or an immanence without transcendence, function equally well to preserve presumptions of human autonomy. No God, a non-interfering God, or the world as God, serve the same practices, but perhaps more to the point, none of these systems presume to penetrate beneath the world foregrounding practice.

There is a closure within the self, in Charles Taylor’s description. Religious and non-religious inhabit the same “immanent frame,” existing as “buffered subjects” having closed off the boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical), living in a disenchanted world. “Living in a disenchanted world, the buffered self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundaries of the mind, indeed, negate the very idea of there being a secure boundary . . .”[2] The immanent frame is a practical atheism, excluding the interpenetration of the world and human interiority from realization of the divine.

William Desmond, imagines that we can break out of the immanent frame which binds by a reworked metaphysical recognition. He counters this lost porosity with the idea that there should be a concerted effort to realize the porosity of being, to recognize there is an intersection with the divine in the immanent. To unblock the boundaries clogging porosity, he calls upon a philosophical and theological acknowledgement of being saturated, a “too muchness.” “The very identity of philosophy might itself have to be called into question — an identity to be reformulated perhaps in terms of a porosity of thinking to what exceeds its determination purely through thought’s own immanent resources.”[3] The signs of transcendence intersecting with immanence are in an over determinate being (the idiocy or givenness of the world), in the aesthetics or beauty of the world, in the very nature of human desire or erotics and in, what Desmond calls, an agapeic outpouring. He describes breaching the walls of default atheism through recognition that human existence is between the transcendent and immanent: “Within the between there are hyperboles of being which communicate more than the terms of immanence can circumscribe: pointers to ultimate transcendence as Other to the immanent between.”[4] He describes these hyperboles as throwing us above, pointing both beyond ourselves and the immediate world. In Christian terms, there is an intersection, in Christ, between the immanent and transcendent, which points to the metaphysical reality we inhabit. Desmond’s resolution to default atheism addresses the failures of a default religion with very similar presumptions.

First, there is givenness (an “idiocy of being”), the wonder that there is something rather than nothing. With Pascal, we realize that we exist between an infinite something and an absolute nothing hidden from man:

A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. What else can he do, then, but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end? All things come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes? The author of these wonders understands them no one else can.[5]

The wonder of existence described by Pascal was once readily available, but default religion systematically reduces everything, so as to rid us of being either frightened or exhilarated (enchanted) by the darkness or the light. “Man is a double being, and yet in him the extremities can touch each other. It is as if the extremities flash across the interim between and find their point of intensive condensation in us. There is nothing middling or mediocre about our being between.”[6] The Pascalian realization however, points to the existential divide which will soon follow, in which human interiority is a world closed within itself. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Pascal the only logical Christian, and is one of his heirs. At least Nietzsche’s atheism retained some of the possible wonder, but modern scientism and secularism would reduce all to a grey sameness. Pascal has hit upon the wonder of being, a metaphysical astonishment beyond finite determinations, which for Pascal, as a Christian, pointed directly to God.

Second, is the hyperbole of aesthetics: “The incarnate glory of aesthetic happening rouses astonishment and appreciation before finite being yet seems to exceed finitization.”[7] The world speaks of the glory of God, in excess of its finite possibilities, on the order of a great work of art. “The beauty of creation: integral being lovely for self, splendid immanence as a whole, yet not a closed but rather an open whole. The sublimity of creation: the beyond of aesthetic finitude shattering finitude in finitude and elevating it above itself.”[8] There is an over determinacy in divine goodness showing forth in the shining glory of the world. As the Psalmist declares, “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Ps 19:1-2). “This cannot be just another finite intelligibility, since this is in question, but rather we are pointed to an intelligibility hyperbolic to finite intelligibility. The intelligibility that allows us to render the finite intelligible is not itself intelligible in fully finitizable terms.”[9] It is not just a matter of intelligent design, but what is beyond and provides for intelligence and the rational. “We are awakened to something inexhaustible about the good of being at all. There is something too much about this for us. We are secretly sustained by it, but being so intimate with it, participating in it, we cannot get a fix on it.”[10] Aesthetics (as well as ethics) is a call to a deeper, transcendent being, in the goodness of creation.

Third, there is the hyperbole of “erotics” in which human passion draws us toward the world and toward others, which witnesses to a deep porosity or relatedness, natural and integral to being human. “Indeed, the passion of our being (passio essendi) points to something deeper than just self- surpassing, since it witnesses to a more primal porosity to what exceeds us.”[11] Human passion and erotics continually pull us beyond the self as part of the self: “the erotics of human selving makes us a living incarnation of an aporia of finitude: a living impasse in finite being that cannot pass beyond itself as impasse through its own power alone, even when it seems to surpass itself infinitely.”[12] There is pleasure, delight, or an aesthetic potency made manifest in passion, in recognition or realization of the good. We experience this bodily, but this bodily satisfaction is not simply physical, but points to an ontological depth, the pure goodness of being. This goodness does not by-pass the senses, but in the biblical understanding, this truth is received through the senses. As in the Song of Solomon, the flame of Yahweh is burning in the erotic, directly joined to enjoyment of the divine. 

Fourth, in our relational identity, is the hyperbole of agapeics of community. “There is an ecstasis from fullness giving itself as well as from lack seeking itself in fullness, our being is in receiving and in giving. We are at all, in a primal ontological sense, by receiving our’ ‘to be’, by being received into being at all.”[13] This fourth way intersects with Desmond’s grounding notion of the metaxological or the between, in that this is the grounding reality of the the gift, of receiving ourselves. “There is a sign of this in the ontological situation of our finitude itself: we are given to be before we can give ourselves to be; finitude as such is given, but not given from itself alone.”[14] It puts the stress, not on self-mediation, but the mediation through a community beyond the self, beyond univocal sameness and even beyond dialectics. As he says, “It puts the emphasis on an intermediation, not a self-mediation, however dialectically qualified.”[15] This inter opens the space for God, for community, for otherness, and plurality, simultaneously showing forth the truth in the univocal, the equivocal and the dialectical, but setting these ways in a larger context (the metaxological). As Desmond concludes, “These hyperboles, and most ultimately the hyperbole of agapeic being, offer us the richest senses of the ‘to be’ in finitude that also speak of the ‘too muchness’, the overdeterminacy of being in which we participate in the between. Properly understood, they communicate signs of the overdeterminacy of God.”[16]

This overdeterminancy, I take to be the sign and message of Christ, who brings together the divine and human. While Desmond is working primarily in a philosophical register, with the aim of bringing philosophy alongside theology, perhaps this one step back from theology, in philosophy, provides the necessary interval to recognizing the overflowing goodness of God. On the other hand, his project rests upon his Christian faith, which does not always serve to overtly ground his description. This is not necessarily a defect, but apart from this open recognition, it could be presumed (which is definitely not his presumption) that philosophy, observation, metaphysics, are adequate, apart from recognition that ultimate insight flows from a Christian center. Where this connection is not made (e.g., Nietzsche reading Pascal), one wonders if his descriptions might be reversed. One could restate his project in the negative, and describe how it is that being caught between something and nothing can drain beauty, desire, and love out of the world, in a crushing nihilism. This is the existential possibility that Pascal introduces, which Nietzsche develops, and which a default atheism presumes.

It seems it is this existential nihilism, the crack unfilled by a metaxological spirituality, that has a grip on American Christianity. With Slavoj Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality, but it is the same crack (letting in the darkness and the light) opened in the modern frame. In the “crack” there is a mystery which speaks of excess, which the theologian recognizes as Logos. The God/man certainly makes a moral demand, but this moral demand is grounded in the intersection of time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, heaven and earth, and divine and human in His person – he opens up the metaxological reality Desmond describes. Christ relieves us of the Big Other of the transgressive law, the crushing transcendence, whether in the form of Nietzschean atheism or a demonic theism. Desmond, in spite of his reticence, is a key aid in extrapolating from Christ, to break down the suffocating walls of default atheism, the immanent frame, which has captured the American religious ethos.

[1] Jonathan Heaps, “Chad Pecknold’s New Job” in Commonweal (September 15, 2026).

[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 300-301

[3] William Desmond, “On God and the Between, in Between philosophy and Theolog:Ccontemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Routledge, 2019),101.

[4] On God and the Between, 118.

[5] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated with an introduction by A.J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), 90. Cited in On God and the Between, 110.

[6] On God and the Between, 110.

[7] On God and the Between, 120.

[8] On God and the Between, 120.

[9] On God and the Between, 120.

[10] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) 66. Chapter 6 is entitled “Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good.”

[11] On God and the Between, 120.

[12] On God and the Between, 121.

[13] On God and the Between, 121.

[14] On God and the Between, 121.

[15] William Desmond, “The Fourfold Way” in The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press, Kindle Edition) location 295.

[16] On God and the Between, 121.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

The possibility of a madman having his finger on the nuclear button is our reality: one who would happily despoil the planet for economic gain, support genocide to build a resort, threaten the extinction of a civilization, beginning with the slaughter of children, and one who has threatened nuclear retaliation, asking repeatedly, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” – the mad possibility is now reality. What this madness exposes is the contradiction of destroying the world to possess it, and the singular solution. It is oxymoronic to say peace alone will save, but it should be obvious (and apparently is not) that nonviolence, nonviolence toward the Earth and its inhabitants (which cannot be separated in this nuclear age), is the only hope for human survival. As Martin Luther King said, “The choice before us is no longer violence or nonviolence. It’s nonviolence or non-existence.” The extinction of everything and personal extinction may be equally difficult to grasp but contained in facing this possibility is the singular solution. The meek will inherit the Earth because peace (meekness) is the means of obtaining land, gaining an inheritance, making a civilization, building a city, establishing life, creating the world, and this enfolds the human with the Earth, in a singular destiny – at least this is the story of the Bible summed up in Christ.

Violence and Meekness as Opposed Means of Inheriting the Earth

The Bible pictures the alternatives in a tight axis, spilled blood pollutes the land, while those who “humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways,” will find forgiveness and their land will be healed (2 Ch 7:14). People who do not recognize God pollute the land with violence, so true possession is making the land a fit habitation (for God) through nonviolence: “So you shall not pollute the land in which you are; for blood pollutes the land and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it . . . You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell; for I the LORD am dwelling in the midst of the sons of Israel” (Nu 35:33–34). Cycles of war and revenge destroy human habitation, and God’s presence and inheritance of the land are synonymous with forsaking bloodshed. The Psalmist ties shedding of blood and pollution to idolatry: “they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with the blood” (Ps 106:38). Ezekiel also describes a land polluted by false sacrifice (Ezekiel 36:18) and Isaiah promises the Earth “will disclose the blood shed on it and will no longer conceal its slain” (Isaiah 26:21). As God told Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10).

Innocent blood, crying from the ground is answered, not through the vengeance of Cain or the multiplied vengeance of Lamech, but through Christ: “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel” (Heb 12:22–24). The place names, “Mount Zion,” “the City of the Living God,” “the heavenly Jerusalem,” “the church,” are synonymous with the “righteous made perfect,” as they are cleansed by the one giving voice to all innocent slain victims.

Those who would inherit the Earth through violence are cursed as their land is cursed, due to their bloodshed, however the Bible poses the opposite possibility: “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace” (Ps 37:11). In the beatitudes Jesus sums up the divine plan for Earth’s inheritance, for ultimate satisfaction, for seeing God, for attaining peace: “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mt 5:5–9). Seeing God, being peaceful and merciful, being peacemakers, and inheriting the Earth as God’s children, are a singular realization. The Bible is bookended in Genesis and Revelation with God’s presence in a peaceful garden city, an Edenic sacred place, in which healing and the earthly inheritance are realized, not through violent conquest but through recognition of the victim. This means of inheritance is the story, summed up in Jesus.

True Israel Recognizes God in the Victim

It is to people that are not a people, without a distinctive genealogy, or a distinctive place, to whom God reveals his name and will become a name in which they can dwell. As Anthony Bartlett notes, it is one of the great ironies of the Bible story: “a people and a meaning based in escape from an oppressive king and his state apparatus turn to exactly those political features in order to maintain themselves.”[1] The Hebrews would possess and maintain the land through violence, and yet there is a competing means and understanding of God throughout.

If we read the conquest of Canaan as God’s participation in genocide, and leave aside the counternarrative, necessary to reading the story through Christ, we are left with a contradiction, but if we recognize the identity of God is under contention (in the two methods), we catch the story resolved in Christ. The true name of Jacob unfolds directly when Jacob sees the face of God in the victim he has pinned. He obtains his identity as Israel, in recognizing God in the face of his losing opponent: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved” (Gen 32:30). Seeing God’s face in his victim is the preservation of his life, and thus he is dubbed Israel (“he who struggles with God,” Gen 32:28). The character of God is under contention, and it is rightly reflected in the face of Jacob’s pinned opponent. Immediately after, Jacob says to Esau, “I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably” (Gen 33:10). Jacob is metaphorically pinned, and Esau now bears the divine visage, precisely because Jacob recognizes in his brother the loving mercy he found in his visitor the previous night. The promise is given by Zechariah of a form of deliverance for which there was long preparation: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts” (Zech. 4:6). After being shaped as a people and then destroyed the original possibility presents itself: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech. 9:9).

What is under contention in the Hebrew Scriptures is how to be a people, how to inherit the land, and this is tied up with the identity of God. The resolution is to turn once again to the outcaste, the one pinned to a cross: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). As Anthony Bartlett concludes, “the God whom Israel is in relationship with is a God who does not win by violent means, who in fact loses – and needs “a man” to signify as much![2] The pattern is thematic in Scripture, with Jacob, Esau, Joseph, Job, and Jesus (see here).

The Originary Peace of Creation Extended through the Garden

Genesis begins with a nonviolent creation (over and against typical creation myths), perhaps as part of an understanding worked out in both Genesis and Exodus. There is an originary peace, which explains the garden or the Earth as the shared dwelling of God and humans. John Walton describes the creation story in terms of a temple dedication ceremony, in which the cosmos itself is the resting place for God, reading the six days of creation through the lens of the seventh day. “The temple was made functional in a typically seven-day dedication ceremony” in which “the functions of the temple were initiated, the functionaries installed, and then, on the seventh day, the symbol that represented the deity was brought in and placed in the central room of the temple.” The seventh day is key, “Only then could the temple begin functioning as it was designed to do.”[3] Creation as temple construction is not aimed at describing how but why or for what purpose creation was brought into being. The seventh day as interpretive key for the previous six means that Genesis is not so much concerned to provide a history of material origins as it is to provide an understanding of the theological purpose of the cosmos, which is captured in the image of God’s dwelling come to Earth.

Adamah, or the one of the earth, is appointed caretaker over that from which he is taken (the earth into which God breathed). The earthly garden is the place God meets the humans, and this place is reduplicated in the temple, which is at once a representation of the garden and of Earth, made a fit dwelling for God. When Jesus comes to the temple in Jerusalem, the garden expansion comes to include the whole Earth, as he identifies himself as true temple, the earthly dwelling reconstituted with God’s earthly presence extended to all. Paul consistently pictures salvation under the rubric of new creation, bringing about a universal inheritance, fulfilling the promise to Abraham (Rom 4). This is for all people everywhere: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19), as “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” to “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). This is all inclusive, so as “to reconcile all things unto Himself — by Him, I say, whether they be things on earth or things in heaven” (Col 1:20).

In Revelation the heavenly Jerusalem descends from heaven to Earth, not to destroy the world, but to remake it or complete it (Rev 21-22). The Bible begins and ends with the world constituted as a temple. The biblical story is not one of souls departing Earth for heaven, but of heaven coming to Earth and being made a fit dwelling for God. Earth (adamah) come alive with God’s breath, is ultimately breathed into by God coming to Earth (in the divine adamah, the second Adam), through whom he pours out his Spirit on the world. The prediction of Isaiah, picturing the Earth as the Lord’s Temple is fulfilled: “The mountain of the Lord’s dwelling shall be established atop all mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills and all nations shall flow unto it” (Is 2:2). The Lord’s dwelling place with man brings about an all-inclusive extension of Eden: “Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:1–2). Restoration of mankind, to and through Eden, is a life-giving identification between Earth and God. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city” (Rev 22:14). Citizenship in this city, in this place, is salvation. The tie between inheriting the Earth through nonviolence and the presence and identity of God, are a saving integration.

The Nonviolent Will Inherit the Earth

Jesus is the true Jacob, the true Joshua, in whom the inheritance of Israel is not a piece of land in the Middle East, but the Earth and its people and all that it contains. This is not a diminishment or displacement of Israel, but an expanded understanding and obviously a reworked method of obtaining the land, combined with a revised understanding of God. Killing Palestinians is no more in God’s plan than Esau killing Jacob (rather than being the merciful face of God). The land is not gained, the Earth is not inherited, by military conquest, and the divine kingdom is not established by might, but by a cross (the ultimate meekness). It may be that Israel is behind the attack on Iran, and we know the genocide in Gaza is possible only under support of American presidents, dedicated to serving the expansion of Israel. The sad note is that it is often Christians who confuse this violent expansion with God’s method and with true Israel, supporting this policy which stands opposed to the peace of the Gospel, presuming that slaughtering the meek is the means to inherit the Earth.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022),  15.

[2] Bartlett, 35.

[3] John Walton, “Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order out of Disorder after Chaoskampf” in Calvin Theological Journal (CT/43 (2008): 48-63).

The Spiritual Rootedness of Wendell Berry and Dolly Parton

With the death of Wendell Berry and Dolly Parton within a week of one another, these two with very different audiences, nonetheless spoke from a love and acknowledgement of place with deep spiritual resonances. Their Southern sense of being shaped by a “natural” setting, which included people, meant that their primary medium was art, not because they were departing from reality but because imagination, as much as geography, constituted their place. They were both cultivators of imagination through poetry, song, and story, or the realms rooted in imagination from which and to which they appealed. Both addressed the essential question of what people are for, and their answer came from and pointed to the intimate perspective of grounded community. This may be more ambiguous in Parton’s music and Dollywood than it is in Berry’s self-conscious theological stance, but both evoke a sense of place and belonging.

Though neither was churchy both were churched with Berry a lifelong member of New Castle Baptist Church and a regular attender of Port Royal Baptist Church, and Dolly raised in her Grandfather’s Pentecostal church though she abandoned institutional church. Yet, Dollywood is overtly evangelical in its appeal, with a regular church service held in the park in the Robert F. Thomas Chapel, while Berry makes only a broad spiritual (non-institutional) appeal, but with a more programmatic ideal of recognizing belonging and community. They both spoke from the sense of a structured spiritual community of unconditional love, from which some may have fallen but to which all could be restored. For example, Berry’s fictional character, Peach (in, A Place on Earth) is a lifelong alcoholic, who causes great pain and never recovers, but is loved unconditionally by his sister, Dorie Catlett, in spite of all. Dolly’s favorite and perhaps most definitive song, “Coat of Many Colors,” speaks of the same unconditional suffering love, stronger than poverty and bullying oppression.

The folks of my little country church, who could be the subjects of a Wendell Berry story, live on farms handed down through some three generations, with a deep sense of place, as in Berry’s stories. They know who is doing what on their farms, and they mark place by the generations of people whom they have known all of their lives. Mary Sue, for example, remembers the stories of her grandmother being brought from Kentucky to Missouri, in a covered wagon. The log cabin her grandfather built still stands in some form and her brother, Larry, farms the land of their father, and their son owns an adjacent farm. They have never heard of Wendell Berry, but are quite familiar with the music of Dolly Parton, as consumers of the Grand Ole Opry and the blue grass and country music of this region (Green Top Missouri, just down the road, is home of Rhonda Vincent, the Queen of Bluegrass and of Daily and Vincent fame, whom they follow closely). Our little church and its extended family contain the stories of any group of people, PTSD, suicide, homicide, and acceptance of what Berry calls waywardness. This is something they recognize in Dolly.

Dolly speaks a spiritual and emotional language, from places of suffering. In her song, The Bridge, she sings of love, pregnancy, and abandonment, in which a young woman contemplates suicide: “My feet are moving slowly, closer to the edge, here is where it started, and here is where I’ll end it.” Her songs include stories of stillborn births (“Down From Dover”), shame (“Just Because I’m a Woman”), abuse (“A Gamble Either Way”), adoption (“Doing This for Your Sake”), isolation (“Two Doors Down”), mental institutions (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), and prostitution (“The Bargain Store”).[1] As the Time writer, Shima Oliaee notes in the title to her article, “Dolly Parton Loved Us All, Darlin’.”

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert describe the impact of her healing love. Ebert recounted in his 2011 memoir, Life Itself, that after interviewing Parton, he felt filled with a “strange ethereal grace.” On the flight back to Chicago, when Ebert confessed this comforting sensation to Siskel, Siskel interrupted to say, “This will sound crazy, but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers.” Like the movie critics, Oliaee describes Dolly’s healing presence: “At the time, I was looking for someone or something to believe in. “On the television and in the news, hatred from both sides of the American political aisle had never seemed more grotesque, but at Parton’s show, we all sang together.” Parton toured more than 60 cities all over the country with the same result. “Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if she knew it would be something of a healing tour, the last of its kind she would do.” In Dolly Parton’s world, according to Dolly, “I just think we need to love one another. I think we need to try a little harder. We need to be a little kinder. We need to be a little smarter. We need to have more love and compassion.”[2]

While not necessarily programmatically clear, Dolly illustrated in her own semi-fictional persona what she meant. Openly imitating the town tramp (her words) she dressed according to this exaggerated glamour: yellow hair, bright red lipstick, long nails, high-heeled shoes, and a tight skirt. “I thought [that woman] was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. So I grew up to look just like her!”[3] The irony is not lost, but neither is the empathy. She raised up the lowest, by direct identification. Dolly herself is the personal embodiment of an imagined embrace: “Sometimes you have to look like Jezebel in order to get some angelic things done in the world.”[4]

She grew up surrounded by the glories of the Smokies, but there is no idealized sentimentality in the description of the poverty. Her father, who worked from sunup to sundown, never learned to read or write, but as her father worked, her mother sang the songs from the “old place,” Irish and Welsh folk songs. Music that evoked place as much as Berry’s fiction. And this place of the heart involved a love for all: “I just love people,” she said. “When I look at the audience I see my family. I see the God light, the goodness, in everybody, even if they can’t see it.”[5] Maybe that universal identification is what inspired Nelson Mandella to request her music be played over the prison loudspeakers at Robben Island. If Berry writes fiction which he hopes will inspire action, Dolly embodied a semi-fictional persona, and created a real fictional city, Dollywood, with the aim of making the possibilities of her imagination a reality.

Berry undertakes this task through his fiction, poetry, political action, and by staying and working on the farm and living in the community into which he was born. As he puts it in Imagination in Place, “I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived.”[6] He acknowledges that this was an inheritance, which he was never without. “Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately.”[7] Nonetheless his is a conscious choice to stay, to be a farmer who writes. He has not lived on the farm to write, though the writing flows from the place. “The place is precedent to my work, especially my fiction, and is, as I shall try to show, inevitably different from it.”[8] He describes this place with the recognition of a university-trained writer, returned home from Stanford and New York, aiming to preserve a style of life through writing and example.

Berry has a clear understanding of the theological ground of his sense of community, deploying Paul’s language “we are members of one another” he assumes this is meant to include all of creation: “Whether we know it or not, whether we want to be or not, we are members of one another: humans (ourselves and our enemies), earthworms, whales, snakes, squirrels, trees, topsoil, flowers, weeds, germs, hills, rivers, swifts, and stones—all of ‘us.’”[9] The “dominion mandate” of Genesis tells us that people are to care for creation, not as exploiters but as part of creation. The sense is of belonging to creation and not it belonging to us. Berry describes an interdependency, which does not make a direct appeal to organized religion, but which seems to require belief. He says, “It seems to me that we belong to each other and to God.”[10] As his fictional character Burley Coulter explains, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but who knows it and who don’t.”[11] Berry imagines he may be improving on Paul:  “All of us humans and all the creatures are, in fact, members of one another, whether we know it or not. St. Paul’s beautiful metaphor is right; it only needs to be more inclusive.”[12] Berry the writer is better than Berry the theologian, in that he is correct in describing a universal salvation, which the New Testament hit upon before Burley or Wendell.

Peter explains there will be a final restoration [apocatastasis] of all things, as God promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21). Paul notes, this restoration is cosmic as God’s purpose is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1:9–10). “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). Christ’s embodiment is extended universally (to all people and all things), throughout every phase of his life, death and resurrection. The Word made flesh is meaning incarnate to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, and is incarnate in the manner of his life. Christ embodies a new sort of human, a new human community, shared in its material and sensuous form.

Berry is correct, this “more comprehensive truth” is not a biological reduction, or a bland egalitarianism. As Joseph Wierbe notes, “Burley is not ‘more comprehensive’ insofar as the meaning of his ‘membership’ is received from something other than the body of Christ; it is not. Berry blames Paul for institutionalizing Jesus’ teachings into a sectional and exclusionary order, which is what Burley resists.”[13] It may be that Berry has not understood the radical universalism he describes, is derived from the New Testament. The fundamental lesson of the incarnation is that embodiment in general is the carrier of meaning, and that Christ’s embodiment is the fullness of meaning extended universally. It is universal in that it is all-inclusive not simply of all people but of everything about them, most particularly their embodied condition. It is this incarnational reality and necessity, in its particular instantiation in Kentucky, which Berry beautifully captures.

Burley Coulter characterizes, what he calls the “wayward” quality of himself and Port William. He rambles in the woods, hunts, fishes, squirrels, and partakes in drinking and dancing and frustrates his friends and family, especially Wheeler who is “committed to considerations of order, regularity, and merit.”[14] Yet Burley is forgiving and capacious in his love. He explains to his lawyer friend, “I ain’t saying we don’t have to know what we ought to have been and ought to be, but we oughtn’t to let that stand between us. That ain’t the way we are.”[15] Burley explains the sense in which being “wayward” should be part of the possibility of community. “If the things of this world are wayward, then he will say so, and love them as they are. But as his friends know, it is hard to be a friend of Wheelers and settle for things as they are.”[16] Wheeler will hardly stand for the possible let alone the wayward, but Burley in his waywardness is also most prepared to accept people and the world as they are. This acceptance strikes Wheeler as an affront to community, a threat to its existence, but for Burley, this is the very love which constitutes Port William membership. “The way a place in this world is passed on in time is not regular nor plain, Wheeler. It goes pretty close to accidental. But how else could it go? A deed nor a will, no writing at all, can tell you much about it. Even when it looks regular and plain, you know that somewhere it has been chancy, and just slipped by.”[17] Not every difference, he explains, needs to be fixed. “All I see that I’m certain of is that it has got to be turned loose – loose is the way it is – to who knows what.”[18] Berry is describing a capacious compassion through Burley, while the rigid legalism of Wheeler pictures a community that does not and cannot exist. Forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance, are the ingredients of true community. Berry is realistic in his portrayal of a robust community, recognizing human failure and the need for acceptance. In novel after novel, he captures the realities of place, its enfleshed beauty, suggesting this belonging is the stuff of an integrated and complete life.

In my part of Missouri disappearance of small farms is a foregone conclusion, though a Port William like membership (Berry’s mythical town) is descriptive of Cairo (our village), if not so clearly defined as a work of fiction. As Berry notes, “works of imagination come of an impulse to transcend the limits of experience or provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole.”[19] At Liberty Church there is no felt sense of resisting (industrialization or urbanization), but simply the sense of caring for this place. The humble little white building (described here) is so unpretentious that it serves as a levelling device, much like the tiny entrance to a Japanese tea room (all are made to bow equally). There is no financial or political gain in this levelling place, but only a singular acceptance. In other words, there is a vested interest, a membership, rooted in this country chapel. This resistance is not ideological or an informed program, but a practical stance, in that we live out our lives with a sense of belonging to this place, described by Wendell and Dolly.

[1] Shima Oliaee, Dolly Parton Loved Us All, Darlin’ Time Magazine (Aug, 25, 2026).

[2] Time Interview.

[3] Time Interview.

[4] Time Interview.

[5] Time Interview.

[6] Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 15.

[7] Imagination in Place, 1.

[8] Imagination in Place, 1.

[9] Morris Allen Grubbs, ed., Conversations with Wendell Berry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 111. Cited in Joseph Wiebe, Wendell Berry’s Imagination in Place: Affection, Community and Literature (unpublished PhD McMaster University, 2013.

[10] Grubbs, Conversations, 107. Cited in Wiebe, 2.

[11] Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 136-137.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Wierbe, 3.

[14] Fritz Oehlschlaeger, The Achievement of Wendell Berry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 144. Cited in Wierbe, 3.

[15] The Wild Birds, 136.

[16] The Wild Birds, 123.

[17] The Wild Birds, 122

[18] The Wild Birds, 122.

[19] Imagination in Place, 3.

Benoît Chantre and the Girardian Crisis of Mediation Leading to the Intimate Mediation of Faith

Toward the end of his life René Girard had grown dark and pessimistic, assuming that in spite of his life’s work exposing violence, pointing out the key role of the scapegoating mechanism, indicating the saving role of Christianity, he nonetheless concluded that humanity was set upon its own violent destruction. In sum, he concluded that Christianity had failed, and that the coming apocalypse could not be diverted. His final book, Battling to the End, contains in the title Girard’s assumption that violence and battle were unstoppable. In this book, which is a conversation with his primary interlocutor, Benoît Chantre, Chantre urges him to a more optimistic understanding in regard to Christ’s historical breaking in to human history, viewing the crisis itself, individual and world-historical, as indicating the answer. It is the logic of law leading to grace, or circumcision indicating baptism, with the second category suspending the violence of the first, but in which the form (law or religion) is preserved. The law and religious practices (sacrificial religion, according to Girard) implode, and Christ intervenes at the very point of crisis of law and religion (the crucifixion), so at that point where humanity would silence and destroy God, is the crisis from which he speaks. It is this logic that I am attempting to trace, how it is that human failure and crisis, indicates the resolution of intimate mediation through Christ.

The way in which we become selves is through a process of inculturation and socialization, so that we learn to talk or simply to be human by imitation and mediation of others. We imitate our parents or siblings and, in this sense, we receive ourselves from others. Their talk, their walk, becomes our own, though this otherness imbues alienation. In René Girard’s picture of hominization or individuation, the process is one of external mediation, in which we follow a model, to internal mediation in which we would become the model, which leads to rivalry. Girard is building upon the Freudian Oedipus Complex, in which the child imitates the father, but then would be the father, with the difference that Freud attaches this to sex while Girard views it as a fundamental pursuit of life. Jacques Lacan shifts the Freudian register out of biology into language, and views the dynamics of the subject, conscious and unconscious, as functioning like a language (I describe this here and here). All are describing a basic drive toward life or being, and it may be that no one of them is entirely right or wrong, as there must be a biological, a sexual, and a linguistic component to being human, which involves the basic drive to be – to be human, to have life, or to attain being, but each also ends in crisis (rivalry, death drive, murder, an apocalyptic end).

From Mediation Through the Other to Intimate Mediation

What the biblical picture adds to being human, is the possibility of the spiritual, the divine, or the eternal, which need not be a departure from biology, sexuality, and language, but just as these might be layered, so too the realm of the spirit. Human spirituality is the final point of integration, holding the other realms in place so as to serve this final phase of maturity (chronologically, but also their driving telos). Even apart from a specific religious notion, to become fully human points to a final integration, in which one is not simply driven by biology, sex, and culture.

This passage, in the description of Chantre (deploying the language of Girard) is from external, to internal, to intimate mediation. It is a passage from nature to grace, or the progression from external mediation into a rivalry in which “enemy brothers duel each other.” Collapse into rivalry and murder is the point of Christ’s intervention: “Only an intimate mediation, the return to faith in a unique Mediator—the one whose Incarnation, for better or worse, has put divinity within reach—can save the religious structure and with it the long process of hominization.”[1] There is a return to a vertical transcendence, not of the unreachable, imperturbable model, but through the presence of Christ in history there is “a growing presence of faith at the heart of the Law: God is no longer the external mediator par excellence, the one who dominates human history, but an intimate mediator, acting and revealing Himself at the heart of history.”[2] Intimate mediation is not through an external model or rival, but through closure of the alienating gap, which can be equated with faith.

Given the logic of mediation, intimate mediation could be seen as the guiding telos of the entire process (of hominization and integration). Being incorporated into the body of Christ, or receiving the Word which is Christ, closes the separation between the model and potential rival or between the self and the law (or language). This is not an impersonal word, but one that is embodied: as “the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one” (I Jn 2:14). Inscription in the Word is not a mere mark on the flesh, but a subsumption of the flesh under the Word: “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col 3:16).

The living Word within brings about a different subject, a true circumcision: “in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead” (Col 2:11–12). It is not a circumcision in which “there are still traces of bloody sacrifice” but it is on the order of baptism, in which there is immersion in the Word, and passage beyond sacrifice. There is a logic in the passage from circumcision to baptism on the order of the logic of passage through external mediation to intimate mediation. The failure of the one, points beyond itself in the way that law points beyond itself. There is a displacement of the law of the flesh, a necessity indicated in this law. “This is the reason why in Saint Paul’s mind baptism must compete in effectiveness with circumcision.”[3] Baptism accomplishes what circumcision could not but in which it is indicated, a circumcision of the heart.

Faith as Trusting the Mediating Voice Behind the Law

Paul understood why Law gives rise to covetousness and murder only after he was a Christian, but was blind to the work of the Law as long as he was serving it. “Only that faith which is capable of hearing The One Who Speaks in the Law makes it possible to avoid the perpetual ups and downs of mediation, for the emergence of this intimate model, ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ deals a fatal blow to the circle of sin.”[4] From within his total devotion to the Law, on the Road to Damascus, Paul hears the voice which all of his effort was dedicated to silencing. In the midst of sacrificing Christians, he encounters the one who would end sacrifice. He is in the midst of transgressing the Law, and would sacrifice the one who embodies the Law, and it is in the midst of this failure that he hears the voice which will give rise to faith. Paul will come to understand his blindness and that of his fellow Jews, as a misrecognition induced by the Law, which does not rely on faith, “they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works” (Rom 9:32). “Lacking faith, the ‘Jews of the flesh’ have had nothing but ‘works,’ that is to say a formalism, a terrified obsession with the Law.”[5] Law was not to be its own foundation, but was a supplement to faith. Paul indicates they have not even attained the law – they “did not arrive at that law” (Rom 9:31). The Law marked that which came before and after it, and they missed this mediating role for the law.

In Romans 4, drawing on the father of the Jews and the father of faith (Abraham, who was called by God from those the Jews would call Gentiles), Paul associates faith with that which precedes Judaism and the Law. The key element of faith is trust in God’s promise to provide life (through a son) in the face of shame and death. Abraham is not able to provide himself life, through a child, so his is resurrection faith (death acceptance) as opposed to death resistance, (Rom 4:24-25).[6] The shame of enduring childlessness in the face of his and Sarah’s being “as good as dead” describes both Abraham’s incapacity and his recognition of this incapacity to propagate his name (his life), and this circumstance is precisely the failure faith addresses.

Paul purposefully references the events prior to the giving of the covenant of circumcision so as to convince the Jewish Christians of the priority of faith over the Law. “For we say, ‘Faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness’” (Rom 4:9). It was credited “Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised” (4.10). Paul’s argument, as to the secondary nature of the Law, is that it is not itself the promise but is a seal or sign (4:11). To presume life and righteousness are in the Law (as Romans 7 is sometimes misconstrued) is to believe the lie Paul is refuting. Life comes from God, and is not simply a product of the natural course of things.

Refusing the One Behind the Law for the Law Itself

The Jews stumble over the stumbling stone: “What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, attained righteousness, even the righteousness which is by faith; but Israel, pursuing a law of righteousness, did not arrive at that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone” (Rom 9:30–32).  They are obsessed with the working of the Law, as if the Law could do the work of faith. The “Jews of the flesh” like all people of the flesh are in servitude to a model, a law, which is not an end in itself. They have tripped over the one who is the foundation of the Law: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame” (9:33). The Law rendered them deaf to the one who speaks in the Law. They have made a fetish of the Law, confusing it with the messianic voice. Their “mindless repetition of the letter, this blind ritualism . . . has made them deaf to the prophets” and this same blind zeal “has made them reject the just one.”[7] Their rejection of Christ is of the same order as all people who have lynched, stoned, and crucified the innocent in the name of their law. They have trusted their own power of mediation through the scapegoat mechanism.

“The fetishism of the Law is then inscribed in the wake of sacrifices; it is logical that those who retain only the letter of the Law should exclude or sacrifice those who remind them of its sprit.”[8] Silencing the voice behind the Law in the name of the Law, is to reify the letter which kills and destroys the spirit which gives life. This is the very definition of sin, whether found in Judaism, nationalism, paganism, or simply legalism. The sinner refuses the voice behind the Law, as it requires faith. “This God who speaks in the Law is not a God looking down on the world (an external mediator who might always become an internal mediator, provoking sin), but an intimate mediator, a God who is only fully transcendent because he resides in the heart of everyone.”[9] This “intimate mediator” mediates an immanent transcendence which surpasses the natural self, mediated through models, family, culture, law and language. Humans were made for transcendence, for God, for participating in the divine.  

The Final Crisis: The Stages of Mediation Fulfilled in the Last Law of Christ

Paul, Girard, and Freud picture the self as split against the self in a death dealing mediation. Chantre describes the “last law” as providing resolution to mediation under the Law, through the Law of Christ: “According to Saint Paul, it is thus the Incarnation of Christ that operates the unveiling of misrecognition, ridding us of the primacy of works and liberating humanity. The Christ, last prophet, Law made man, sharing the mortal condition without being afflicted by the ‘law of the flesh,’ is at once the last law and the last victim.”[10] In this last law, there “is a shift from one form of imitation to another, from the imitation of an exterior to that of an interior model, from ‘external’ to ‘intimate’ mediation” and this “assumes the gradual rise of messianic transcendence at the heart of world history. This ultimate transcendence (‘authentic transcendence,’ Girard would say) and this ultimate model only appears ‘at the end.’”[11] But whether Girard continues to hold this as a real possibility is questionable in this final work of Girard, with Chantre.[12]

Chantre urged Girard toward this “last law” which Girard’s own work had indicated, but Girard had turned dark, concluding that humanity is heading toward inevitable apocalyptic violence. Chantre points toward a brighter hope in “intimate mediation” through which the Jews of the flesh will have become Jews of the spirit and the “non-Jews according the flesh” will have become “non-Jews according to the Spirit.” All, Jews and Gentiles, will have set aside the law of the flesh, and the “scapegoat mechanism will have drawn its final breath.”[13] The goal of humanity will have been completed, “and man divinized at last; the skeptic (or the enlightened unbeliever) will wonder if man himself has disappeared with the gods.”[14]

This is the solution Paul pictures as inaugurated by Christ in the midst of history. Paul sees a Trinitarian solution to the crisis of the individual and the historical crisis: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:2). The intimate mediation of faith resolves the problem of mediation as this mediation is participation in a Trinitarian reality, which displaces the law of the mind, the law of the flesh, and the body of death, or the Trinitarian absence (the Freudian ego/superego/id or the Lacanian imaginary/symbolic/real). Absence, in this light, was not an abandonment, but in the words of Chantre, it brings on the “exacerbated crisis,” whether of the modern world, or the individual under the law, “which calls for another type of trust, or – in Pauline terms – the irruption of faith at the heart of the Law.”[15] The natural mediation and crisis prepares for the supernatural mediation, life in the Spirit in which the voice behind the Law is heard, the Word from which the self is received. However this might work in world-historical terms, this is the center of the Christian hope, toward which every crisis, world-historical or individual, points.

[1] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 52). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Chantre, 67.

[3] Chantre, 78.

[4] Chantre, 68.

[5] Chantre, 71.

[6] Per my analysis in The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2015) 130-133.

[7] Chantre, 71.

[8] Chantre, 72.

[9] Chantre, 73.

[10] Chantre, 66.

[11] Chantre, x.

[12] The final work is Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre.

[13] Chantre, 85.

[14] Chantre, 85.

[15] Chantre, 13.

Redefining Luther’s “Justification” Through Žižek’s Extension of Girard’s Anti-Sacrificial Reading of Paul

Much of the theology and career of Martin Luther was driven by his obsession with notions of law and justice. He describes a “burning desire” to understand what Paul meant by the term “justice” in the book of Romans, not out of an idle curiosity, but because he was plagued and obsessed: “‘The justice of God is revealed in it.’ I hated that word, ‘justice of God,’ which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.” He describes, “that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience.” There was no assurance, no peace, no satisfaction. “I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments?’”[1]

The Gospel did not relieve his obsession with justice, but aggravated it: “Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath? This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.” The “righteousness revealed” in the Gospel did not help, until Luther discovers his understanding that Christ freely grants this righteousness through grace. He discovers that “faith” displaces works in achieving righteousness. In this new understanding, the justice of God is a “passive justice” in that faith accomplishes what works could not. He discovers, the just person lives by faith, and not by works. “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates.” [2] He begins to read all of Scripture in a new light, recognizing that justice is God’s work throughout.

“Justification” as an Aggravation of Luther’s Struggle with the Law

Now this would make for a happy story, if on the other side of Luther’s discovery, he found peace, but though there may have been improvement, he cannot be said to have stilled his troubled conscience. His psychological and spiritual battles shifted from earning salvation to fighting depression, feelings of divine abandonment, and intense spiritual warfare against perceived demonic attacks. In his 95 Theses, he writes that self-hatred is something to be cultivated until entry into heaven: “The penalty of sin remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inner repentance), namely till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven” (Thesis 4). This self-hatred is posed from the perspective of the God of the law, that demands righteousness, and seems to have not changed in his attitude to sinners, in spite of grace. Even the cross is a sign of God’s hatred, but luckily Christ has born the penalty. However, God, in his hidden transcendence (Deus absconditus) continues to cause suffering and terror, and therefore it is refuge from God that is sought in God (Deus revelatus). “Thus, according to Luther, God reveals himself to sinners wearing a Janus face of both wrathful law and loving mercy. Consequently, believers should be ‘seeking refuge in God against God.’”[3] Luther needs to get rid of one half of God, but this angry transcendent God, the one behind the law, is primary in his thought.

At the same time, his struggle with the devil increased, as he felt the battle with evil was ongoing, within himself. “Christ and Satan wage a cosmic war for mastery over church and world. No one can evade involvement in this struggle. Even for the believer there is no refuge – neither monastery nor the seclusion of the wilderness offer him a chance for escape.”[4] Luther describes an ongoing campaign in which the victory is not yet secured, and he feels this in his mental and spiritual struggle. He describes still waiting on God’s righteousness, as he has yet to receive what is promised.[5] The irony of the shift from the early church’s belief in Christus Victor (defeat of sin, death, and the devil), to a legal righteousness, is that Luther may have solved one problem only to have it multiplied elsewhere. He continues to be tormented, concluding that it is not righteousness per se that is received in Christ, but the qualification for righteousness. We are made worthy to receive the gift, if not the fulness of the gift itself.

The weakness in Luther’s understanding of justification is that in pitting law against grace, he still pictures grace in terms of the foundation set forth in the law. Grace gives what the law demands, but the presumption is that grace still works according to the retributive justice and sacrifice of the law. Under grace, works of the law are accomplished by Christ, and his righteousness is legally imputed to believers. It did not occur to the reformers or to many of their Catholic forebears, that Christ sets aside sacrifice and retributive justice. He exposes and ends the working of sacrifice and the judicial system of righteousness built upon payment and retribution, and in fact the defeat of Satan is involved with, and can be equated with this overcoming of sacrifice. The absolutely transcendent God demands sacrifice under the law (God as a legislative authority), but Christ embodies the law of love and closes the gap between God and the world, posed by the law. According to Paul, “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4) as “He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross” (Col 2:14).

Paul’s Justification in Žižek and Girard as the End of Sacrifice

In Paul’s understanding, justification is making the world right, not through the law, but through Christ. Christ suspends the punishing work of the law, and brings an end to sacrifice. It is not a top-down legislation, but a bottom-up reformation of understanding of God and humanity. If one insists on the terminology of payment, Christ did not pay the price demanded by the law, Christ paid off the entire system, and defeated sin, death, and the devil in the process. Christ would end violence, including the violence of retribution and sacrifice, but also the violence of a masochistic conscience. As René Girard puts it, “The real meaning and function of the Passion” is “one of subverting sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the open, writing it down in the text of all the Gospels.”[6] For Slavoj Žižek, Anselm’s doctrine of “divine satisfaction,” the legal basis of the atonement for much of Catholicism and the basis of Luther’s doctrine, serves this false economy of sacrifice and fails to penetrate the delusion of the fundamental fantasy (the lie) which grips the human subject. With the end of sacrificial religion (the end of the God of sacrifice and law), Luther’s Deus absconditus is exposed as a lie. The God behind the law of sacrifice, behind onto-theology, behind a metaphysical transcendent/immanent dualism is exposed as an idol, and so too the God presumed to be behind the plague of conscience is dethroned. The punishing, transcendent God of the law, is undone by the full revelation of God in the flesh. Paul addresses the anthropological, religious, and psychological nature of this displacement, but it may be that only the combination of Girard with psychoanalysis, can fully appreciate the apocalyptic nature of Paul’s theology.

Žižek’s Extension of Girardian Sacrifice into Psychoanalysis

Girard traces this work of exposure primarily in the realms of religion and religious sacrifice, and though he depends upon a psychoanalytic account of mimetic desire, he sees his work as demythologizing Freud and Lacan or psychoanalysis (in its focus on sex), along with religion. For Girard, the “other” is another person who acts first as model, then as rival, in the obstacle cause of desire, which is desire for life itself. The other person mediates desire and may be Other or divine-like, depending upon the “distance” between self and Other. He speaks of the passage from “external mediation” to “internal mediation” but he is referring to the felt proximity of the other. The external mediator remains distant and undisturbed by the desire he invokes, but in internal mediation the model is brought into the radius of the one following him, and is thus subject to mimetic desire and rivalry.[7] In Girard’s reading, by focusing on biology and sex, Freud missed the primary role of mimetic theory. Freud was too focused on the object of desire, the mother, and missed that primal desire was for being or life. Girard revises and rejects Freud, but as a result, his theory of mimetic desire seems to miss that sacrifice is not simply historically behind the rise of language and signs, but language continues, in the Lacanian portrayal, to exact a sacrifice. According to Marcus Pound, Girard “leaves little room” for “the practice of psychoanalysis, having eliminated “the conscious patricide-incest desire,” he does away with “the cumbersome necessity of the desire’s subsequent repression,” and along with it, “does away with the unconscious.”[8]

As Pound points out, it is Žižek, who “establishes the link between Girard’s thesis and Lacan precisely at the level of sacrifice.”[9] Žižek, building on Freud and Lacan, demonstrates how the sacrificial relation to language is not simply historical, religious, or cultural, but is the abiding reality in the human psyche. What Girard may not have appreciated about Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially as developed by Žižek, is that the Lacanian registers explain the psychoanalytic role of sacrifice. Freud laid out the basic parameters of this self-punishing system, which Luther gives every indication of being subject to all of his life, and Lacan explains the dynamic between the ego and the superego (or the law of the mind and the law of the flesh in Paul) as a relation within language (and not in biology or sex).

According to Lacan, following Freud, the other is not simply an outward model, but in Freud’s language, the image of the father is “cathected” or subsumed into one’s own image. As Freud describes, the “masochism in him creates a temptation to ‘sinful acts’ which must be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience” (The Economic Problem in Masochism, 266). Lacan pictures this punishing conscience as arising in the mirror stage, in which both the image in the mirror (the imaginary ego) and apprehension of this image through the language of the father (the symbolic or the law) constitute these others (the symbolic and the imaginary registers) as two sides of the self. That is, the external mediator, which is nearly identical for Girard and Lacan, becomes a constituent part of what is internal to the Subject, in the psychoanalytic understanding. The original sacrificial relation is established within the Subject (with passage through the mirror stage) between the imaginary (the ego or “I”) and the symbolic (the superego) which establishes the alienated distance from the real of the body.

For psychoanalysis, sacrifice not only controls external violence but it creates “control” over the inward threat of violence. In Freud’s depiction, the ego/superego split, evolves to channel the death instinct, or the energetics arising around the fear of death. Freud refers to the “id” as the origin of the death drive, which is then concentrated in the punishing superego (synonymous in Lacan with the acquisition of language). Passage through the castration complex is the resolution to what, in Girardian terms, would be the result of mimetic rivalry with the model. “The ritual background provides a stable imaginary/symbolic framework by which to answer the question of the desires of the real.”[10] The inner child (the ego) relinquishes the power of the father (the phallus) to the superego, or in Pauline terms takes up servitude to the law. According to Pound, the castration complex describes the inner dimension of Mosaic circumcision, ceding a part for the whole. “For example, in The Book of Exodus, God is about to kill Moses but is only dissuaded through his abrupt circumcision by his wife (Ex 4:24). His sacrificial act of circumcision, ceding his foreskin, serves to ensure the persistence of his being whilst at the same time giving presence to the terrifying God.”[11] Likewise, the sign of circumcision is the original mark of the sign in Abraham by which life is preserved in the face of death. “The cut of Abraham’s knife amounts to the cut induced by the signifier, which determines the subject and brings the differential system of signification into play.”[12] In the castration complex this passage is universal.

The imaginary stage, prior to differentiation, resolves into the ego/superego split, which can be directly laid over the Girardian picture of the sign arising over the body of the scapegoat. The Subject bears the mark of the original sign perhaps literally in their body, which reflects submission to the letter of the law in the castration complex. Prior to the slain victim in Girard, or passage through the mirror stage in Lacan, there is a lack of social order or order in the Subject, respectively. In Girard, hominization and civilization arise around the body of the slain victim, and in Lacan the biological body plays the same role. [13]

In the explanation of Žižek, the passage is from being a body to establishing a symbolic distance from the body (and having a body): “The body exists in the order of having – I am not my body, I have it” (Organs without Bodies, 121). Self-consciousness arises simultaneously with the realization and refusal of the body and its mortal contingencies (sexuality/castration) so that the Subject arises over and against the real of the body. The symbolic or the soul “has to be paid for by the death, murder even, of its empirical bearer” (The Žižek Reader, vii). Where Paul speaks of being split, Žižek describes two bodies, the physical body and the body under the sign (or the soul). That body which one might think can be reduced to the biological dimension is refused: the “subject turns away from her biological body in disgust, unable to accept that she ‘is’ her body” (Organs without Bodies, 93).[14] The price for entry into language, separation from the mother (passage beyond the mirror stage), is an ongoing alienation. The Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration) and sacrifice guarantees that “the Other exists: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice” (Enjoy Your Symptom, 56). This is felt as an all-pervasive inadequacy or guilt. From within the economy of the law (the law of sin and death), the excessive superego injunctions (giving rise to perverse questions such as, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound” (Rom. 6:1)) “no longer imposes specific, determinate, prohibitions and/or injunctions . . . but just reverberates as an empty tautological Prohibition: don’t” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 104).[15] There is no satisfying this all desiring and all-consuming law.

The Sacrifice of Christ as Confirmation of the Obscene Law

In Paul’s description of his first encounter with the law, in Romans 7, the law gives rise to what it forbids, and creates a life filled with death. This absolute law requires infinite payment, in Anselm’s estimate, and even this infinite payment does not satisfy the continual pressure of the law’s demands. There is the sense, as attested by Luther’s digression into depression, that Christ’s payment simply confirms the omnipotence of the big Other behind the law. “Christ’s death cannot but appear as the ultimate assertion of the Law, as the elevation of the Law into an unconditional superego agency which burdens us, its subjects, and with a debt we will never be able to repay’ (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 103).

Giving in to the obscene superego demand of the law gives rise to an interior sacrificial economy continually aimed at meeting the all-consuming desire of the law, which is taken up within the self in the split between the ego and superego. It is this perverse superego pressure, equated with the law, which Žižek describes as connected to the reversal of the law’s commands into acts of disobedience (equating the law with sin and sinning that grace may abound).[16] To read the sacrifice of Christ within this economy, with Luther and much of the Christian tradition (reaching back to Anselm), is to reinforce the punishing law in the sinful Subject rather than relieve from subjection the punishing law.

The Faith Of Christ as an Overcoming of a Law-like Faith In Christ

Perhaps the contrast is succinctly captured in the notion of faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice or the faith of Christ in which disciples participate. Faith in Christ is supposed to replace works of the law, but then the problem for Luther and for his Calvinist heirs, is if their faith is adequate, or an authentic faith. Faith in Christ has to do with faith in the propitiating power of Christ’s payment for sin (we can trust in Christ who has paid the penalty), but how much faith is required and how much can we muster? Faith initially seems to relieve the suffering of works, but then there is the same agonizing over the degrees of faith that might be necessary. Luther sees faith as simultaneously positing wrath and love, and he sees suffering very much like the friends of Job, as caused by God’s wrath. Job, and the widow of Nain, in his sermons, are examples of God causing suffering, and faith acknowledges this and is saving, only if it does not give in to despair.[17] Given these requirements, faith seems to induce a doubtful suffering, picturing God as randomly causing suffering and demanding a steady un-despairing faith.

In contrast, the faith of Christ calls for participating in Christ’s faith (walking as he walked and living as he lived) and this constitutes a deliverance, as people are freed from sin, not by Christ’s death as such (as a sacrifice), but by sharing in Christ’s death, by dying to sin, to the way of the flesh (and sacrifice). There is the faith that claims, Christ died and we do not have to, or the faith that would take up the cross and follow Christ. Propitiating the works of the law through dying is only something Christ can accomplish, and the believer is reduced to a spectral witness and belief, very much as on the order of the spectral relation to the law (being outside the law and being outside of Christ).

The alternative is to take up the subject position of Christ and “die to” the identity found in Adam (the subject of the superego) – having the faith of Christ (ridding one’s self of the superego supplement to the Law and sacrifice) or one can have faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice. It is a choice of understanding the death of Christ as a sacrifice, under the law, with Luther, or recognizing that the law is not the basis for understanding Christ.[18] In this second, apocalyptic understanding, the Subject is so drastically reoriented through identifying with the death of Christ that this constitutes a new form of the Subject. “Here enters the ‘good news’ of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it IS possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo the founding decision, to start one’s life all over again, from the zero point – in short to change eternity itself” (On Belief,148). This making right is not by the scale imposed by the law, but it is a new cosmic order (as in Girard’s ending of sacrificial religion) and a new sort of Subject (as in Žižek’s non-sacrificial Subject).

[1] Martin Luther, Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Works (1545) Translated by Andrew Thornton (https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/2/ml-1545.htm).

[2] Preface to Luther’s Works.

[3] Sasja Emilie Mathiasen Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God”: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God (Open Theology 2018; 4: 658–674) 659. Citing Luther, “Operationes”, WA 5, 204, 26-27: “… ad deum contra deum confugere.”

[4] Heiko A. Oberman, “Luther Against the Devil,” Christian Century 107 no. 3 (1990): 75-76 Cited in Tenzan Eaghll, Martin Luther and the God Who Acts: Finding Common Ground in the Current Debates on Justification, (University of Calgary, MA, 2010) 23.

[5] “The world is a house… but I am outside the house, on the roof, not yet in heaven, but also not in the world. I have the world beneath me, and the heavens above me, and so I am suspended in faith, alone, between life in the world and eternal life” (WA 1. 199, 3.) Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 223. Cited in Eaghll, 42.

[6] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) 181.

[7] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 64). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Marcus Pound, Lacan and Girard: Sex and Non-violence (Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2003, 21, 1:///), 6.

[9] Pound, 6.

[10] Pound, 7.

[11] Pound, 7.

[12] Pound, 8.

[13] Pound fuses the Girardian and Lacanian passage: The mirror image is the monstrous double, the surrogate victim who promises to bring wholeness by standing in for the community as a whole. It is thus synonymous with the imaginary phallus, which is nothing but the imaginary “I” whose sacrifice gives birth to the ego ideal.”Pound, 8.

[14] See my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 119.

[15] Psychotheology Sin, 118.

[16] Psychotheology, 118.

[17] Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God.”

[18] Psychothelogy, 122-123.

Benoît Chantre’s Girardian Reading of Paul

Among the several recoveries of Paul found in Girard and spelled out by one of his premiere French interpreters, Benoît Chantre, is recognition that Paul is picturing salvation in anthropological terms. That is, Paul is describing the human predicament, whether religious, psychological, or social, as a manmade and human problem. In Girardian terms, people are mad with religion, with sacrifice, with violence, and the compulsion to repeat, portrayed in sacrificial religion is the human sickness Christ addresses. They may have contracted the disease, in any of its infinite manifestations (religious, social, or psychological, all of which are mixed and merge), but it consists of the desire to obtain the being of the Other (to be God). The admired model becomes the envied obstacle-cause of desire, but for both Paul and Girard, going to the end of the sickness is on a continuum with the cure.

Paul’s personal/religious break(down) on the Road to Damascus is contiguous with his recognition of the Messiah, as failure of a false transcendence, a false God, a false sense of law, is on a continuum with the truth. When his world falls apart, the significance of the Messiah stands out in full relief. It is not that “original sin” is moral, but as Paul shows (in Romans 7:7), it pertains to covetousness, or in Girardian terms it is mimetic rivalry (the same thing). The law is not impotent because its maxims are inadequate but the law is impotent because it creates covetous rivalry, as in the biblical story of the fall. Adam and Eve are jealous of God, their model, and as with any model, rivalry ensues. They would imitate him, in his containing and dispensing laws, and they would be him (knowing good and evil). Given the opportunity, adamah (human kind) would kill God. Their problem pertains to misoriented desire, misrecognition and deception. They would be like God, knowing good and evil, and they imagine this is the mode to life and the means to avoid death.

Paul concentrates his explanation of the human predicament, as it pertains to the law, but this law is not just the the Jewish law, but the universal “law of the flesh,” which Paul explains in regard to both the Jewish Law and the law given to the first couple. As Chantre puts it, “the essential function of the law necessitated a decisive confirmation and a decisive transformation.”[1] The confirmation traces the pattern of the universal fall, in which the object cause of desire becomes the obstacle. “For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Rom 7:7–8). The prohibition or obstacle gives rise to what it forbids, murder and sacrificial religion. Cain’s sacrifice is reproduced in sacrificial religion, culminating in the sacrifice of Christ.

Christ exposes the nature of this scapegoating sacrifice in his passion and death but this is not simply exposure of false religion but, according to Chantre, it is the revelation of a new sort of “immanent transcendence.” “It causes the advent of a completely different type of transcendence—the transcendence of parousia, the growing ‘presence’ of another transcendence, which this time is at the heart of human history.”[2] The gap or distance in the law prompts an escalated desire to possess the law or to be interpolated into the law (to be possessed or a possessor of the law). Paul’s questioning of the law in Romans 7 describes a failed interpellation from which the law is enacted as an outside force. The woman consorting with her lover, in Romans 7:1-3, only understands herself over and against the law, while she may imagine her relationship to her lover in some way pre-exists her relationship to the law. As Slavoj Žižek asks, “Is not this hysterical distance towards interpellation . . . the very form of ideological misrecognition? Is not this apparent failure of interpellation . . . the ultimate proof of its success . . . that is to say, of the fact that the ‘effect-of-subject’ really took place” (The Indivisible Remainder, 166). For Žižek, there is only the failed subject in regard to the law, and this failure constitutes the subject. The distance between the subject and the law is the enactment of the only possibility of the law and the failure is the power of the law to create subjects.

According to Chantre, “The subject, raised in the Law and guided by it, suddenly enters into rivalry with the commandment.”[3] Transgression is the attempt to obtain what stands behind the prohibition. There must be life in the law, according to the serpent, and God is holding out. The reification of the law (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), or the law of the flesh, keeps one eating the deadly fruit to obtain life by taking and grasping the law. “Veneration of the Law has become an obsession with the Law and the benevolent God has become a jealous God who opposes my own will, blocking my way. We are no longer dealing with a transcendent God but with a God made from human hands, an idol.”[4] This idol demands death as the means to life.

In Pauline and Girardian terms, this failure is the beginning, and not the end of subjectivity as it prompts the turn to authentic subjectivity. The move is from an external desire and rivalry, an external mediation to an intimate mediation, which brings with it an ultimate collapse. One begins to act, possessed by desire: “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Ro 7:17–18). This demon that inhabits me, is a “deviated transcendence” that “pushes me to do what I don’t want to do, that ‘disorients’ my desire, which was originally a desire for God, by offering mirages of a jealous divinity.”[5] This “deviated transcendence” is the counterfeit image of the Law, in which God is a jealous rival in the pursuit of self-divinization.

This “ontological sickness” brings on “all manner of covetousness” and ultimately experience of the law of sin and death. “When the external mediator becomes internal and when admiration is transformed into rivalry, when the model become too close is suddenly fetishized, the subject, obeying the law of desire, enters into a mimetic crisis that is one and the same as sin.”[6] The desire for God’s law becomes the desire to become God’s law, which brings on the split and collapse of the subject. “I do what I do not want to do” . . . “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom 7:15,11).

Paul is split between the law of his mind (reason) and the law of the flesh. He is caught up in the movement described by Girard, between “games of external and internal mediation, admiration and rivalry, ‘mimetic models’ and ‘rational models.’”[7] The back and forth speaks of a compulsion to repeat, in which the self is at stake. “I would gain myself through repetition.” “For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:14–15). The practice repeats itself as “the sinner always believes he can extricate himself from sin through a reiterated veneration of the Law: ‘So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good.’”[8] More veneration repeats and tightens the circle as the grab for God’s transcendence grounds one in the flesh.

The law gives rise to sin, and sin is the failure of the subject, but this failure precedes the remedy. Mimetic desire, or covetousness of the law, takes a particular course, pointing to Christ. It might be described as a process of maturing, in which the father as model becomes obstacle and rival giving rise to murderous desire. There is a collapse of an outward structure that constitutes an inward desire and structure, in which one becomes both father and child, law and subject, so that the social structure becomes a deadly psychological structure. “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Ro 7:10–11). The law, meant to be a barrier to mimetic rivalry, provokes it, mediating what it forbids.

This external mediation is taken up within, the law of the flesh, in which the model is a rival, producing the war within and without. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Ro 7:24–25). The law is a dead end that leads to Christ, but this dead end must somehow be pursued to appreciate the alternative. It poses the choice between a renunciation of the violent attempt to obtain the law, or a complete renunciation of violence and entry into an alternative Kingdom. It is not attachment to the law, but to Christ, through faith, that enacts true subjectivity.

Those who “were made dead to the law through the body of Christ” no longer serve the letter of the law as they have dispelled the fantasy of this failed interpellation. Imitating Christ closes the gap. There is no distance, no failure of interpellation, as the law of Christ incorporates into his body. “Only an intimate mediation, the return to faith in a unique Mediator—the one whose Incarnation, for better or worse, has put divinity within reach—can save the religious structure and with it the long process of hominization.”[9] There is a turn from the external models, mimetic rivalry to a different order of transcendence – an immanent transcendence in which we identify directly with Christ. “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:1–2).

The passage is from being captive to a deadly law which has been at work throughout history in religion and society and in the human psyche, to freedom in Christ. “Thus faith does not suppress the Law; it ‘frees us from it,’ says Saint Paul, ‘delivers’ us by suppressing a proximity that too often risks degenerating into promiscuity, which is to say into ritualism and into transgression.”[10] The point at which man failed, in the flesh, Christ enters in. Christ fulfills, completes, and takes the place of the Law. The misorientation to the Law seemed to promise the Father through the Law, but Christ delivers God where the Law could not.

The passage is from out of violent sacrificial religion into imitating Christ, the model with whom we have a direct identity. The Law mediates, not the Father, but sin, and the emptiness of sin points to the fulness of Christ. Law will lose its “alienated” character of an external force brutally imposing itself on the Subject the moment the Subject renounces its desire for completeness within the self (the law of the flesh). There is passage through destitution, death, and rebirth: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3–4). Christ has destroyed the cycle of punishment and veneration of the law, as the law of the flesh is set aside for the law of the Spirit. Paul, due to the law, was persecuting and killing Christians, but now the law has been nailed to the cross. God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ, accomplishing what the law could not (2 Co 5:18–19).

There is now a new law at work, which still involves imitation and repetition, but repetition is no longer the deadly spiral of oscillation. The law of the flesh has been replaced by the law of the Spirit of Christ: “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Rom 8:6–9). The law creates hostility and jealousy, as it creates the impossible pursuit of God through the law. This fleshly law distances and alienates, and this is its work, while the Spirit is God dwelling in the flesh. The intimate transcendence displaces the distancing hostility. “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness” (Rom 8:10). Mimetic desire, rivalry, and murder, are exposed and resolved: “the Resurrection resolves the enigma of the founding murder; the Passion, the event of the death and resurrection of the victim, is the ultimate variation on the religious structure.”[11] The work of Christ does not ignore this religious structure but intervenes and delivers from it, and this is resurrection power. Life in the resurrected body of Christ directly answers the deception of life in the Law.

Religion, society, the self, fall apart but this failure is on a continuum with the coming of the Kingdom. The crucifixion or collapse of everything is followed by resurrection of the victim. The innocent victim, Christ, brings an end to scapegoating and sacred violence: “the Passion is a dynamic repetition of the religious structure, which is itself defined as a first repetition, the sacrificial victim repeating the scapegoat victim and reactivating the first trauma for cathartic ends (or as a vaccine against violence). This third form of repetition deepens awareness of the origin, working back to violent foundations.”[12] The violent foundations of culture and religion are exposed, bringing the human kingdom to a close with the coming the Kingdom of Christ.

[1] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 55). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Chantre, 47-48.

[3] Chantre, 59.

[4] Chantre, 59-60.

[5] Chantre, 60-61.

[6] Chantre, 61.

[7] Chantre, 63.

[8] Chantre, 64.

[9] Chantre, 52.

[10] Chantre.66.

[11] Chantre, 53.

[12] Chantre, 53.