Tag: John

Anthony Bartlett’s Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace

We need Anthony Bartlett’s delineation between the clear, apocalyptic, anti-sacrificial, early Girard, and the compromised, muddled, and somewhat defeated later Girard, now more than ever.[1] Tony gently calls us to return to the true vision of Girard, in the midst of this cultural and political moment in which flaky Girardians, such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance rule. It is nearly impossible to initially distinguish between two groups: those Girardians who, like Thiel, would “turn to a new kind of Constantinian order where Christianity accepts the expedient role of force” and those who like the Girard of Things Hidden, who writes, “(The) sacrificial concept of divinity must ‘die’ and with it the whole apparatus of historical Christianity, for the Gospels to be able to rise again in our midst, not looking like a corpse that we have exhumed, but revealed as the newest, finest, liveliest and truest thing that we have set our eyes on.”[2] Girard initially saw no possibility of accommodating his theory to the institutional Church or the “apparatus of historical Christianity,” but then he compromised. Bartlett compares him to Galileo, making his initial discovery, and then under pressure from the Church, or friends such as Raymund Schwager, he backs down. Maybe the earth and its history of violence are true center (he seems to be saying in Battling to the End). Maybe his discovery in the Bible and Christ of a primary “transcendental relation of nonviolence” is inadequate in the face of “reality.”

Girard backs down in his opposition to the term “sacrifice” in conjunction with the death of Jesus. Schwager referred to Jesus’s death as “scapegoat” and “sacrifice” which had aroused his “unease” but he decides Schwager must be right, and he wants to be accepted by the Church.[3] He had wanted to “draw a definitive line between the death of Jesus and the deaths of the gods, since the former was viewed by ethnologists and cultural commentators as the ‘same-old’ mythical story.”[4] Schwager convinced him to drop his opposition to the language of sacrifice, and with this he compromised his original notion of a “symbolically manifest difference, something as visible and tangible as possible.”[5] Bartlett explains that accompanying this shift then was a compromise to what was key in his theory: “This is important as it seems to manifest the intention in Girard of expressing a critical semiotic shift from sacralized Christianity to the new meaning of the Gospels: he talks of a symbolically manifest difference.”[6] His theory had focused on the manifest difference of revelation breaking into human violence in Jesus Christ and making a clear distinction between a violent God and a nonviolent God. There was an absolute and apocalyptic difference, and no notion of some neutral ground with an admixture of violence and nonviolence. “Surely the deep tilt of Girard’s argument was a revelation coming from outside of humanity, and this does have a manifest difference for which it is correct to seek a proper symbolic or semiotic status. Girard’s instincts were by no means wrong.”[7]

“The gospel has its authentic character as a message, an angelion, which stands urgently for itself with its own highly distinctive semiotic status. Early Christianity expressed this dramatic difference by the calling the crucified-and-risen Jesus ‘Lord and God.’”[8] Bartlett dubs this unique relation to God revealed in Christ “the transcendental relation of nonviolence.” This is the absolutely unique transformation, which cannot be laid out on some sort of historical or philosophical continuum. Bartlett recognizes that theology has continually compromised philosophically and historically, by imagining the divine revelation on a continuum with natural revelation, but this is always a compromise with violence. The semiotic shift of Christ is a different order of meaning. It “should be announced as an absolute difference reconstituting human meaning. Anything less is to forfeit the remarkable evangelical breakthrough Girard has himself brought about.”[9]

Girard abandons his clear understanding of Christianity’s uniqueness; there is “archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However it is all sacrifice.”[10] Mimetic desire and rivalry, he concludes are the case for all humans and there is no escape. “I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we be able to elude them? I doubt it.”[11] He had once understood “it is Christ who finalizes . . . the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god.”[12] Yet, in conversation Bartlett asked Girard if God is nonviolent, he answered, “I don’t know.” In his early work Girard sets forth the priority of Christ over subsequent violence.  “’Christ was the last messenger who came first.’ “It is a remarkable announcement of his full biblical thesis, presented with unquenchable brio and clarity, with the theme of revelation running like white-hot lava through its lines.”[13]

By the writing of Battling to the End, however,Girard abandoned his belief in the priority of the nonviolence of Christ. “There Jesus is a last figure at the very end of history whose first meaning has been swallowed up in mimesis and violence.”[14] Girard begins to darkly presume apocalypse means a violent end to all things, and no longer refers to Christ’s apocalyptic breaking into history.

Girard once held that the biblical critique of violence was the basis for a sociological understanding, which arose from a place that was unassailable. He saw the gospel text as working unlike any other as it “breaks away from the rules of ordinary textuality.” As Bartlett notes, “These rules are obviously rooted in the relationality of generative violence.”[15] It is only in Christ, and reading in light of the gospel of Christ, that the violence of ordinary textuality is undone. Girard adds, “If this is the action of the text, the claims of Christianity to make Christ the universal revealer are much more well founded than its defenders themselves imagine, by which I mean those who always blend elements of ordinary sacralization into Christian apologetics. As a result they invariably regress to protocols of ordinary textuality . . .”[16] Bartlett adds, “Christ is the ‘universal revealer’ not ‘the universal scapegoat’ and it is this function that both breaks with past hermeneutics and appears weak before them if new relationality is not fully thematized.”[17]

Bartlett’s goal in the book is to demonstrate the necessity of thematizing, centering on, making primal, the role of relationship. He sees this as the original failure of Girard, and why his thinking was vulnerable to subsequent failures and shifts. Certainly, it is correct to desire “symbolically manifest difference,” as “it speaks to the sense of the new generative object-sign for human meaning.”[18] But if this new meaning is not grounded in relationship rather than abstraction it will collapse. Thus, Bartlett sees his work as providing a bulwark against this collapse, and he seeks to preserve the stark realization of early Girard, against his own collapse. “He held onto his manifest difference as long as he could, but in the end he let go of it, for lack of feedback and the intellectual shift of categories that would fully vindicate him. His thought was brought back within ‘ordinary sacralization’ because it had not found or expressed its crucial semiotic and relational framing.”[19]

Bartlett has extended and applied René Girard’s theory philosophically and theologically, providing a fresh reading of Scripture, founded, not on ontology or metaphysics but in relationship. Love as nonviolent relation, as in the subtitle of his book, is simultaneously an explanation of reality, and salvation as being brought into that reality. Undergirding Girardian theory is a linguistic and anthropological understanding, exposing relationship as primary. Bartlett does not repeat the Girardian picture of the initial scapegoating entry into language, but he provides Kierkegaard’s definition of self as “a relation that relates itself to itself . . . the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”[20] This is not a relation to language, but it is a possibility within the self, posed by language. “God sets humanity in motion as relation, which then opts for all the wrong solutions within its synthesis until it comes to relation with God.”[21] Bartlett then turns to Martin Heidegger, (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics), Charles Peirce, Jacque Derrida, the Greek philosophical tradition, along with Girard and Scripture, and picks up where Girard left off. As he describes in the Introduction of his book, “This is a book about René Girard wrapped in a book about relation.”[22] Kierkegaard sets the tone of the book, in seeking to get to the bottom of relationship.

In particular he has in mind the relationship of love. “Once the gospel antithesis to violence is established then a project of semiotics rather than metaphysics becomes unavoidable.”[23] In Girard’s theory of hominization, humans enter into language over the cadaver of the scapegoat, which provides the focus so as to give birth to the sign. Difference, life and death, signaled by the cadaver of the scapegoat, acts as the primary focal point that transforms terrifying, chaotic violence into unified attention. The cadaver is the first sign because it is the first thing humans looked at collectively in peace, transforming a physical remainder of violence into the foundation of meaning, language, and the sacred. The manner in which we are all grounded in violence is the beginning point: “A theory of language that clearly recognizes violent origins is then able to open up, simultaneously and necessarily, to a radically alternative language, a message, a gospel, that overthrows those origins in explicit nonviolence.”[24] Part of the saving work of the gospel must be the exposure and overthrow of this inherent violence. To begin in metaphysics or philosophy or in some “natural understanding” involves a continuation in this violent inheritance, opposed to the gospel. In Kierkegaardian terms, this is to continue in the “sickness unto death,” which recognizes in the diagnosis of the disease the primacy of relation (ultimately resolved in Christ).

Of course, this insight is not lacking in Girard; the Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[25] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[26] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[27] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.” Bartlett observes, “with Girard there is a relation to a revelatory ‘other’ (God) hand-in-hand with the human other, but the dynamic is always disclosure. There is something coming from below, as it were, claiming the attention of human history.”[28]

Bartlett is building on his two previous books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard and Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence. In the former is Bartlett’s depiction of Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and the discovery of the scapegoating mechanism, as a necessary step in evolutionary development of language. The sign that arises around the scapegoat initiates entry into language, constituting an originary violence in the human condition. In both Love’s Entanglement and Theology Beyond Metaphysics, Bartlett assigns great weight to Martin Heidegger’s turn from traditional metaphysics to the “firsthand experience of ‘being.’” He explains, that “Heidegger’s intervention is a serious relativizing of core concepts of metaphysics, demonstrating – from the alternative perspective of being – that they are not eternally ‘given’ apart from a history of their conceptual production.”[29] Heidegger undermined the presumed “foundation” of metaphysics, and Derrida would continue in his “deconstruction,” and Girard builds on both. The twentieth century shook the foundations of Western thought and civilization (with two world wars). As Bartlett puts it, “What greater proof could you have of original violence than Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In which case it is even more pressing to discover a source of life ‘in the ruins,’ rather than imagine some kind of return to pre-modern metaphysical order that smiled complacently as all this grew to monstrous term.”[30]

Heidegger is at once a symbol of the Twentieth Century shift, upon which Girard builds. He served to prepare the ground for Girard’s work, but it was Heidegger’s purposeful failure to distinguish the Greek logos from the Johannine Logos, and in conjunction with this a second failure, to recognize that relation precedes being. “You cannot have ‘being’ without difference – the relation – which provides the opening or realization of being.”[31] Heidegger assigns a singular, Heraclitean meaning to logos, presuming the Christian Logos is more of the same. It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role to the Greek logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[32] In Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

The Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought. Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[33] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

To not recognize the violent foundations of language and the possibility of an alternative, or the difference between a Greek and Christian starting point, is to presume an originary violence, and to the degree that theology has girded itself with a Greek philosophical understanding it has a necessary violence at its origins, a charge Bartlett levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). It is a failure to recognize the change in the role of signs, or the profound basis for a new meaning introduced by Christ. It is not simply that Christ gives new meaning, on the basis of the sign system of language in which in semiotics, it is recognized that meaning arises through differences (differences in terms, such as “black and white,” or differences in sounds, or the living and dead body, etc.). The role of difference, of the cadaver, becomes fully accessible in the body of Christ, a living sign exposing the role of the deadly letter written on the grave. The cadaver played the role of a false or mythological “transcendental signified” and the living transcendental signified expose this lie. Christ demythologizes the sign, emptying the grave of its grounding significance. Mythology is a homage to the victim, but in the same sense language, as a repeatable sign system, arises through the clash of difference and the arising of a third element (the reification of death). Christ’s entry into sign making starts with the recognition that death is the ordering principle of a universe of opposed pairs. “It is a matter of turning around with the universe itself and facing the terrible violence of our origins . . . to relate again as if for the first time to the victims at its core. We are called to relate in nonviolence and forgiveness where before we related in blame and murder – because it is in this way that root relationship is both acknowledged and made good.”[34] Ultimate meaning is not grounded in the dead victim but the living Christ who has emptied the grave of its deceptive meaning.

Much of Bartlett’s work is given over to demonstrating Christ’s change of the meaning of signs, or more accurately Jesus bringing about a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The sign of Jonah (the scapegoat thrown overboard), taken up by Jesus, undoes signs built upon sacrifice and death, as there “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[35] The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance. Rather than satisfy the Pharisaical demand for a sign, he indicates the only sign he would give is the sign of Jonah, who was thrown into the abyss and was then delivered (which is what they will do to Jesus). The sea is representative of the abyss, the chaos, that the scapegoat was meant to tame. Jesus confronts and overcomes the abyss in his death and resurrection, defeating the very impetus behind scapegoating religion.

Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21), the explanation of which closes Bartlett’s book. The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). “So, it is the same battle, against the violence of the deep, gained victoriously by the peace-bringing word and presence of Jesus.”[36] In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in the storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.

Connected to the walking on the water is the feeding of the five thousand, a proleptic Eucharistic event: “The dramatic entirety of the scene has to be taken into account: the journey accompanying Jesus to ‘a deserted place,’ the weariness and hunger, the complete bafflement of the disciples, and, of course, the mirror hints of the Roman military legion. This is a scene of a new creation, where a new humanity is separated out from generative violence, and it is the significance itself of the whole complex that carries the scene.”[37] The echoes of the escape from Egypt, the Passover, the miraculous manna, the crossing the Red Sea, and the deliverance from slavery. “The bread is the meaning of a new human way of life, one to be consumed for its own sake once its revolutionary semiotics is grasped”[38] which is made explicit in the Passover meal celebrated by Jesus and the disciples.

Theology and not chronology are the main point. In each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[39] The time may be incorrect or inconsistent between the Gospels, but more importantly the meaning is shifted. The point is no longer warding off death through the firstborn. Death is no longer the fulcrum, sacrifice is no longer the mechanism, but the defeat of both in a higher meaning (of relationship). The elements of the meal are made to bear a depth of meaning, fusing together both the Passover and the day of atonement, connecting both to the reality accomplished in Christ (a shared body, a shared life). The bread is part of the Passover meal, but is made representative of Jesus broken body (on the order of the servant of Isaiah), and the wine is representative of his poured-out blood. Jesus commands them to drink the wine, now representative of the blood, but consumption of blood is prohibited in the Temple rite and in Judaism in general. The instruction is clear: “He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’” (Matt 26:27–28). There is no mistaking that the symbol of poured-out blood is to be drunk, a sacrilege for Jews. “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the ‘life was in the blood’ and the life belonged to God alone.”[40] Which is the point; this is no longer a sacrifice. It is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God, not on the basis of death, but in its defeat in history. As Bartlett explains in the case of Mark, “The point for Mark surely is to not narrate a separate ‘spiritual’ body for Jesus on the other side of human life, but to place his triumph right in the middle of human reality and experience. This now is the ‘Kingdom of God come with power’ (9:1)!”[41]

Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle (life will replace sacrifice and death). He is now the lamb sacrificed by our murder, and the disciples become the receptacles of his life, not simply life-blood spilled in death but taken up in new life. This is not a Jewish sacrifice, as in “the biblical tradition of sacrifice, it was imperative that the blood be separated from the body and spilt on the ground or at the altar” (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10-14).[42] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice; even in the early Christian community the Jerusalem Council would continue to forbid consumption of blood (Acts 15:29). “By telling his disciples to drink a symbol of his blood Jesus was transgressing the central vector of sacrifice as it had been formulated in Jewish practice, and He was going against formal sacrificial practice generally. Indeed, he was turning sacrifice into something other than sacrifice!”[43] There is an “eruption of a completely new meaning in life, signified by the miraculous bread,” as the disciple is enabled by his Lord to also give his life, and not strike out in retaliation. The disciples were each enable to enter the jaws of death enabled by the body of Christ. “We know from Christian history that many individuals have done this, finding an abyss of strength within themselves to enter the jaws of violence without retaliation, and leaving behind an indelible witness in the same path and truth as Jesus himself.”[44]

Combined with his action in the Temple, in which he halted the sacrifices, Jesus has permanently overturned the Temple tables, so as to set another table with a completely different meaning and economy. God had always sought mercy rather than sacrifice: “For I desire steadfast love (or mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Ho 6:6). Jesus sees himself as accomplishing this reality: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). This is not an economy of sacrifice or exchange but the fulfillment of mercy and love. Though only a minority of Christians may follow Jesus into a martyr’s death the meaning is there for the majority; “the meaning by which they shape their lives continues to eat away at the violent structures of actual historical humanity.”[45]

Blood per se is not violent but contains life, so spilling blood means a violent loss of life. “The blood contained absolutely no violence – on the contrary, it contained non-violence, which is positive forgiveness, peace, love. Only in that way would it be possible to drink and not feel the temple universe crashing down on you in outrage.”[46] To drink this blood is to take up the life of the one giving it, enfleshing the body, not through a continued destruction but through a recapitulated sort of body. To drink the blood, in this meaning, is to recover it from being spilled, as it is taken back into life. Jesus in recapitulating the Temple and its meaning focused on sacrifice, is removing the violence of sacrifice and replacing it with new life entailing the end of death (inclusive of violent sacrifice). “Thus, the ritual meaning of blood its elemental sign value – had been turned from the place where the violence of the group is poured away, removed as to become an inner agent that contains no violence and works proactively to transform into nonviolence and love. This is what it means to eat and drink the Eucharist. It is about as non-sacrificial as you can get.”[47] Though the Constantinian Church might return the meaning of the Eucharist to a sacrifice administered under its power and control, Bartlett ends his book with an appeal in regard to the meals significance: “the Eucharist will become not a badge and communication of official standing, but what it was always meant to be: an ongoing divine mimicry (imitation of signs) available to all human beings. What the Eucharist intends is to teach humans via a set of signs to be as totally nonviolent as God is.”[48]

The Temple recapitulated is clearly those who receive the life offered in Christ: “as living stones, being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5). The command to “do this in Remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) contains the same point, of living out this reality. The focus in Old Testament rites is on God remembering his people, but here Jesus changes the subject; it is his disciples remembering or recapitulating him. Remembering, in Bartlett’s explanation, pertains not to God’s remembering but to the transformation of humankind: “He took God’s act of fidelity – the full story of the Messiah – and held it out in remembrance, not in some heavenly space, but on a human table at the center of human concerns.”[49] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ. This double movement or “double revelation” simultaneously exposes the human violence (e.g., the shedding of blood, sacrifice) and from out of this exposure their erupts a new meaning in Christ (the giving of life in place of the taking of life).

For Bartlett, this is the Girardian synthesis, which Bartlett credits Benoît Chantre with helping to draw: “Chantre sums it up as Girard’s ‘fascinating and complex central thesis . . . it is the disruption of ancient mechanisms for containing violence, in their essential exhaustion, that the true face of man and the true face of God conjointly appear.”[50] The primacy of relation, coming face to face, is key. “The Girardian understanding can tell us that relation throughout the human cosmos is ultimately and thoroughly messianic.”[51] Human history is the story of a delivery, from out of violence and rivalry, into the realization of the fulness of relationship. “Relation is the hidden truth of existence that is more critical to existence than existential moods of anxiety, dread, or even the inevitability of death.”[52] The collapse of the sacred, a sacred constructed out of violence, reveals the individual and the possibility of relation, brought to its fulness in Christ. Sacrifice has lost its power and “it is Christ who finalizes that loss with the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god. . . . The gods of violence are demonetized by the announcement of a god of love; the machine has broken down, the expulsion no longer works.”[53] This is the power of the gospel as Girard originally recognized it and upon which Bartlett is building. God is the nonviolent relation that brings the world to peace.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2026).

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 236. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[3] Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[4] Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[5] Girard, One by Whom Scandal Comes, 43. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151-152.

[6] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[7] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[8] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[9] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[10] Love’s Entanglement, 153.

[11] Girard, Battling to the End, 47, 119, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 153.

[12] Things Hidden, 56. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[13] Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[14] Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[15] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[16] Things Hidden, 66, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[17] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[18] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[19] Love’s Entanglement, 156

[20] Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 21.

[21] Love’s Entanglement, 21.

[22] Love’s Entanglement, xxiii.

[23] Love’s Entanglement, xvii.

[24] Love’s Entanglement, xvii

[25] Things Hidden, 275.

[26] Things Hidden, 275.

[27] Things Hidden, 276.

[28] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv-xxv.

[29] Love’s Entanglement, 67.

[30] Love’s Entanglement, 67,

[31] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv.

[32]Things Hidden, 265.

[33] Things Hidden, 271.

[34] Love’s Entanglement, 135.

[35] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[36] Love’s Entanglement, 170.

[37] Love’s Entanglement, 170.

[38] Love’s Entanglement, 170..

[39] Signs of Change, 168.

[40]  Signs of Change, 171.

[41] Love’s Entanglement, 176.

[42] Signs of Change, 170-171.

[43] Signs of Change, 171.

[44] Love’s Entanglement, 177.

[45] Love’s Entanglement. 177.

[46] Signs of Change, 171.

[47] Signs of Change, 171.

[48] Love’s Entanglement, 203.

[49] Signs of Change, 172.

[50] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law, Tran. By Trevor Cribben Merrill, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022), xi. Cited in Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement, xxvi.

[51] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.

[52] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.

[53] Things Hidden, 55-56, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.

The Violence of the Law Which Killed Christ

The depiction of Matthew is that the violent would take the kingdom of God by force (Matt. 11:12). This verse marks the transition from Jesus to John the Baptist, which in John is accompanied with the comment that “the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ” (Jn. 1:17). According to Paul, the period of violence, in which the kingdom would be violently manipulated through the “hostility” of the law is exposed and defeated by the one who “is our peace” (Eph. 2:14).  As John the Baptist explains upon seeing Jesus: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Here is the victim of violence who takes away the violence of the world; the Lamb who absorbs and defeats the violence. The explanation comes in verse 18: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18). Jesus is the full explanation or message or exegesis of God. The difference between Jesus and the law defines his message: the law does not take away violence and sin, but in John’s depiction violent men will kill Jesus following their understanding of the dictates of the law. In this killing and being killed is the problem and solution of sin.

As Walter Benjamin depicts the law, it is established through violence and enforced through violence and apart from violence there would be no law.[1] This may seem an unlikely statement, but Benjamin demonstrates the law obscures its inherent violence.

In the notion of natural law (a body of unchanging moral principles), the end point of the law is to establish justice and morality, and violence is a justified means to this end. The violence cannot be posited as part of the goal (as an end) but is presumed to be the means to an end.  For example, the Jews invade the promised land and commit genocide so that their nation and law might be established. White people came to the Americas and obliterated the populations of brown and red people who are excluded by this founding of the law. The law is being inaugurated from out of this originary violence. The question does not arise in natural law whether violence “could be a moral means even to just ends” but violence is taken as a raw datum – a fact of nature or a necessary means. The deployment of violent means to just ends is “no greater problem than perceived in a man’s right to move his body in the direction of a desired goal.” The way you get from point A to point B is the movement of violence. Violence is a “raw material” or means “the use of which is in no way problematical unless force is misused for unjust ends.”

Though Benjamin sees this as a problem predating the modern, he references Darwinian evolution as “rekindling” the presumed naturalness of violence in the modern age. Darwin’s biology, he maintains, “regards violence as the only original means, besides natural selection, appropriate to all the vital ends of nature.” It is a short step from the popular notion of natural history “to the still cruder one of legal philosophy, which holds that the violence that is, almost alone, appropriate to natural ends is thereby also legal.” Just as peace is established through war so too final justice calls for final solutions. And of course, the holocaust (the final solution of the Nazis) looms around Benjamin’s text in our backward-looking perspective.

On the other hand, positive law or those laws created by and passed down through human institutions, presume that violence is a product of history. Violence is certainly part of the means in positive law, but the violence is thought to be a regulative violence. This “limited” violence is judged legal according to its application and who applies it. Where natural law judges in terms of ends, positive law is focused on means. The presumption is that just means will automatically bring about just ends. Where in natural law, the ends justify the means, in positive law, the means justifies the end. The paradox or blindness is created in the two sides of the law, in which in neither instance is the role of violence ultimately questioned.

The inherent injustice is rendered visible when natural law and positive law are set side by side. The understanding that the inauguration of law is through an originary law-making violence exposes the true nature of law-preserving violence. For example, the United States constitutes itself as a legal entity only in denying or deconstituting subjection to the British monarch. If the United States had lost the Revolutionary War, the entire notion of independence would have been illegal. Perhaps the chief perpetrator of the crimes against the monarchy, George Washington, would have been declared the chief criminal, and executed according to the law (law-preserving). To constitute a state is to simultaneously defy the law, and to imagine a people not yet formed as the constituting entity. The violence will have been legal only in the case of victory.

This founding violence is not disconnected from law-preserving violence, as it is always possible for violence to get out of hand. The laws of the state must be enforced for the state to continue to exist. The law founds and preserves the state through the same violence, so that law enforcement is foundational both at the beginning and in the continuation of the state. Benjamin’s point is that what seems to be two forms of violence (law founding and law enforcement) cannot be separated. The law is always in the process of being constituted and legitimated through violence.

 The modern police force demonstrates the overlap in that, though they are thought to be about law enforcement, certain situations call for discretionary judgements which, like the founding violence of the law, will have been made legitimate (in hindsight) because the police embody the law. Just as a king is not able to break the law (he is the embodiment of the law), unless his rule is overturned, so too the police retain a semblance of this original embodiment, if not in theory at least in practice. They are always in the business of establishing the law, and in establishing it making it legitimate.

When the police rob and terrorize citizens, as happened over a long period in Baltimore, it becomes very difficult to bring the law to bear upon the law. In Baltimore, as in the Nation as a whole, this was largely due to the fact that police brutality was focused on the black population. “The fact that the legal order not only countenanced but sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination for most of our Nation’s history-and the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order-set a pattern for police behavior and attitudes toward minority communities that has persisted until the present day.”[2] The black population bears similarities to the Jewish population in Nazi Germany or the Native American population in the period of discovery and settlement. The force of the law makes its primary mark in excluding those who fall outside of the law’s protection.

In the New Testament, Ephesians brings out the inherent hostility of the Jewish law in the portrayal of antagonism of Jews toward Gentiles. Christ “broke down the barrier of the diving wall” as he “abolished the enmity, which is the Law” (Eph. 2:14-15). The Jewish law was built upon exclusion of Gentiles, as this exclusion was definitive of what it meant to be a Jew. The markers of the law in sabbath keeping, in the food laws, and in circumcision, marked out the Jews. The Jews were marked in the flesh, they were marked through special time, and they were marked by special food. Gentiles did not fall within but stood outside of Jewish law. Roman law functioned in a similar manner through the special mark of crucifixion. Roman citizens were those protected from crucifixion and those who could be put on crosses were not counted as citizens.

This explains who killed Christ (the law enforcers) and why. The sabbath law, the laws of cleanliness and restricted association (no Samaritans or Gentiles allowed), the rules governing the sacredness of the Temple, and the laws against blasphemy are all going to be leveraged by the Jews to kill Christ. As Jesus explains, this is a fulfillment of their law: “But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (John 15:25). Their use of the law blinds them to their violence.

The Psalm Jesus is referencing directly links the action of the persecutors to a lie: “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause; mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies” (Ps. 69.4). As the Psalm describes, those doing the persecuting have a murderous zeal for the temple which consumes their victim (69:9). It is their zeal for the sacrificial system rather than a true understanding of God’s desire that has them persecute and oppress this messianic figure. The prayer of the Psalm is answered in Christ as “their own table before them [has] become a snare” and “their sacrificial feasts [have] become a trap” (v. 22). The Jews would destroy the true Temple and the true embodiment of the law to preserve their law. In the end, the Jews forsake their own religion and national messianic hopes by proclaiming, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). In order to fulfill their zeal for the law by killing Jesus, they forsake their law and religion.

 The Romans, in the person of Pilate, would mock Jewish pretensions to independent nationalism by declaring Jesus the Jewish King and then having him beaten and crowned with thorns. The crown of thorns, the royal robes, the declaration of Jesus as King of the Jews, may be Pilates means of deriding all things Jewish. The Romans are going to do their part in destroying the Temple, as Pilate is concerned to quell an insurrection by enforcing Roman justice, despite his own declaration that Jesus is innocent (John 19:4). He is afraid of uncontrolled violence should insurrection occur.

When the Jews appear before Pilate, he tells them to judge him according to their own law (John 18:31). They later indicate that this is precisely what they have done: “The Jews answered him, ‘We have a law, and by that law He ought to die because He made Himself out to be the Son of God’” (John 19:7). This frightens Pilate, as this is to usurp not only Jewish law but the foundation of Roman law, embodied in the son of God – Caesar. Roman law and Jewish law converge then, in the necessity of killing Jesus. The Jewish high priest speaks for both Jews and Romans in proclaiming, “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (John 11:50).

In Giorgio Agamben’s depiction, the supposed universal condition of law is established by the particulars of exception. The very root of human polity is structured around a necessary exclusion of one form of life, bare life (homo sacer). It is only where bare life is structured and ordered in the city that it can be said to be “good life.” The power of the state or sovereign power establishes itself through this power of exclusion, the exception upon which the rule is built.[3] Homo sacer is stripped of legal status and falls outside the political community and is among those continually and unconditionally exposed to the potential of being killed. This power of death, deciding who dies outside the city, establishes the life of the city.

Jesus dies outside of the city, beyond law and religion, reduced on the cross to bare life. Christ as the exception, however, forever exposes the basis upon which inclusion and law are constructed.

“For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity” (Eph. 2:14-16).

Jewish law, Roman law, and the universal violence of law are defeated, for he has abolished the enmity of the law, he has broken down the hostility of the law, and he Himself is our peace. Law-founding and law-preserving combine to destroy the One who embodies the true law of love but, as indicated in the Temple incident, out of this destruction Christ raises up the true Temple of peace.

[1] Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 19-3-1926 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1996) this single article can be accessed at https://fswg.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/benjamin-critique-of-violence-new-translation.pdf What may be less obvious is how the United States “War on Terror” or even the “War on Drugs” implies and justifies holocaust like violence as a justified means toward a just end. For a goal as illusive as a pure race, the destruction of all terrorists, the end of the drug trade, all out and continual violence is seemingly justified.

[2] Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Police: A Minority View” in Perspectives on Policing, (Published by the U. S. Department of Justice, no. 13, January  1990).

[3] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 18.

Easter Life as Truth

The Gospel of John sets forth an alternative definition of truth which distinguishes the theological enterprise from every other truth endeavor. The life and light found in Christ are not of the world though they light up the world, simultaneously providing a new definition of truth (life, light, the way) and a new understanding of the world. Theology begins with this presupposition, set forth in John, that the Logos of Christ, the Word of the Cross, the Gospel, is the principle through which creation has its beginning (its arche) and end. Easter sums up the incarnate life of Christ, referencing all of the life of Christ, but John sums up creations purpose in the story of Christ (summed up in Easter). John begins with the Word of the Gospel (this is not a partial word, or a reference to the preincarnate Christ), but the Redeemer is portrayed as the Creator, with time unfolding from the middle and extending to the beginning and end. This truth sums up and surpasses every other form of truth.

Living Truth versus Dead Truth

What exactly is truth? There are factual trues (the cat is on the mat), historical trues (Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492), scientific trues (water is H20), but when Christ says he is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), the very definition and function of truth are changed up. The trues of the previous order pertain to the world and are constituted as true as they reference this order but to treat the truth of Christ as merely factual, historical, or scientific (though this reduction marks modern theology) is to miss the “living way” in which this truth pertains.

There is a certain deadness or irrelevance in the former trues. At some point in time or at some place or within the framework of this world these things correspond to a state of affairs. This truth reduces to packets of information which serve as code about something, but does not really encompass cats, mats, the person Columbus, or the wetness of water. These things show up in the world as “facts” but they are after the fact and do not pertain to fullness of experience. This particular cat has moved on, Columbus is long gone, and H20 references component parts that convey nothing about drinking, swimming, or sailing. The experience of these realities is not captured in their “truth” but these are things which have presented themselves, and are referenced in trues about them, but this truth does not pertain to or capture present or past experience. There is no life in this truth as the truth which is life cannot appear under its reduction to DNA, neurons, and physical particles. Life cannot appear under the parameters of truth of the world.

Christ’s truth claim, of being the way and the life, is a truth that exceeds the factual, historical, scientific, or the predominant philosophical notions of truth. This is a living or lived truth, in that life is the truth and the sharing in this life is the truth. This means it is experienced, it is subjective and the truth of a subject, and it is a first order truth (it is not about something else). Where Heidegger wants to locate truth in the “world’s worlding” (imagining the world is the ultimate context which will show up the truth), Christ says his truth is not of the world. His truth and life are not the “ways” of the world and he pictures a complete humanity as not of the world: “because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:14). This does not mean that the truth resides elsewhere, but his truth is not from or contained in the world but encompasses the world. Christian truth locates and relativizes the creaturely order: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3).

The ungraspable realms of time, space, language, and embodiment, taken as the parameters of truth, necessarily divide and deal out death, but where these creatures serve their proper end of conveying truth and not containing the truth they are relativized. Time alone would deprive us of all things in that there is no present but only the past and the future converging in an instantaneous, annihilating now. Embodiment is subjection to times entropic arrow, pointing us to the grave upon conception. Creation’s big bang points to its explosive end. Where creation as medium constricts the message, death and entropy seem to contain the original nothingness as the absolute from which the world emerged.  What appears is disappearing and what is heard is continually lost in the wind of time.

Isn’t this just a depiction on the order of Paul’s: “For, indeed, the form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31)? Truth, as it is in this world, cannot be pinned down as it is continually passing away. It appears complete after the fact. This truth is dead on arrival. Before it arrives from out of the future it is unknown and it is only made known in passing. No one knew about the cat (the one on the mat) or Columbus before they showed up, and attached to their appearance was their disappearance, and only in disappearing are they fully known. Only then do we have a definitive word. The epitaph is the final and full word.

The cross and Easter displace the finality of the epitaph as the “lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) is the Word which was in the beginning, which is God and is with God. “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:18). The resurrection of Christ is the final and full word, displacing death with life: “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:4). His life is the light of truth, as he is the beginning, the source, the head (with the “beginning” in John 1:1 meaning the same thing as in Colossians 1:18), and not simply the first in a temporal line. The form of life “is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) as this life does not reveal itself in the world as it exceeds the world. This life precedes the world (at its foundation – Eph. 1:4) and surpasses the world: “When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory” (Col. 3:4). But this resurrection life is in effect now: “Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth” (Col. 3:1-2). This is not a passage out of the immediacy of life but it exceeds time and place in the experience of life.

The prologue of John might be rendered: At the source of all is the Word (the crucified and risen Jesus), and the Word is God and from out of this Wisdom is life and all things. As John Behr puts it, “As such, this verse is nothing other than a summary of the whole Gospel: that Jesus is in first place on the cross, as the head of the body, as the king in authority upon his throne, and as the source and fulfilment of all things; he is going, through the cross, to the God and Father; and, as the crucified and ascended one, he is confessed as God.”[1]    

United Truth Versus Divided Truth

The former truth (fact, history, science) is a truth that is divided, whereas the truth of Christ is indivisible. We speak of the cat and mat, Columbus and his dates, and the hydrogen and oxygen in conjunction, locating them in time and space in reference to other referents. This truth is extrinsic to its object, showing us something about what it names. Christ’s claim to truth refers to himself. Though we might speak of him historically (born in Bethlehem), factually (died under Pontius Pilate), or even scientifically (he was biologically human), his truth encompasses and exceeds trues about him, to include himself as the truth. Seeing him, hearing him, knowing him, is not divided from what is seen, heard and known. He is the light and what is first illuminated is himself. He is the word and what is heard is himself. The revealer is the revelation in that his revelation is self-revelation. In each instance, this is life gained in the seeing, hearing, knowing and living.

Greek philosophical truth (arguably the characteristic philosophy) makes division an absolute, separating the forms of truth from their appearing so that the H20ness of water, and not the water itself is its truth. The truth of the water, the cat and Columbus reside outside of their passing physicality and time bound nature. Truth, for the Greeks, is what is unchanging and therefore the signs of these changing things are their truth. In turn, the Being of the world equated with the essence of God reduces the living God to the Unmoved Mover of the philosophers, trading an appearance, an apparition (a lie) for the God revealed in Christ. The same principle is at work in each realm of truth, as the language (or signs) takes precedence over what they signify. The description, name, location, date, chemical composition, are the things that can be said about objects. These things show themselves as external to the reality shown. Appearance apart from substance or an empty word devoid of content is of the order of a lie, which may be why Christ contrasts his identity and truth with a language grounded in a lie (John 8:44). The lying word is bound by and binds its adherents to the temporal order (“Abraham died, and the prophets also” (John 8:52) and that is the end of the matter according to his interlocutors).

The Logos of Christ stands over and against this divided logos in that the word of Christ is not about him, describing him, reducing him, but it is Him. “In the beginning was the Word and this Word was with God and was God” (John 1:1). To speak or hear this word entails the full phenomenological reality of who he is. There is no division between the sign and what he signifies. The passage of this sign into flesh, into the spoken word, into history, into time and space, is not diminished by these means but the mediums are relative to who he is. Time and history do not diminish his abiding presence (e.g., “I am before Abraham”). Embodiment does not delimit his universal incarnate presence (e.g., “Where two or three are gathered, I am there.” “I am the Alpha and Omega.”) This revelation makes of time and space his effective presence. He gives himself through these media but what is given exceeds the creaturely order through which he gives. Those who receive this gift receive life and this life is who he is and this is a truth not bound by the divisions of language, time, space, and embodiment.  

The Phenomenology of Suffering as Model of Life in Christ

According to philosopher Michel Henry, one way of getting at the difference between the truth of the world, in its divisiveness, conjunction, and otherness, and the truth of Christ, in its self-referential unity, is through the phenomenology of suffering. “Suffering experiences itself,” as Henry describes.  “It is only in this way that suffering speaks to us; it speaks to us in its suffering. And what it says to us, by speaking to us in this way, is that it suffers, that it is suffering.”[2] Rather than a mere appearance, a name, or a fact (the truth of the world), suffering does not appear external to itself or as other than itself.

So too the life and truth of Christ are not other than himself and those who enter into this experience share the unified life of Christ. What is manifest in Christ is not a power, or life, or redemption separate from Christ. The revealer, revealing the revelation, manifests himself in the fullness of human experience. “It is the first decisive characteristic of the Truth of Christianity that it in no way differs from what it makes true. Within it there is no separation between the seeing and what is seen, between the light and what it illuminates.”[3] This truth is “irreducible” to the concept of truth which dominates the world. “What manifests itself is manifestation itself. What reveals itself is revelation itself; it is revelation of revelation, a self-revelation in its original and immediate effulgence.”

Henry, having begun with the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, concludes with the idea of a pure revelation and phenomenology: “With this idea of a pure Revelation – of a revelation whose phenomenality is the phenomenalization of phenomenality itself, of an absolute self-revelation that dispenses with whatever is other than its own phenomenological substance – we are in the presence of the essence that Christianity posits as the principle of everything.” This pure experience of life through access to God by means of his self-revelation consists of a singular “phenomenality proper to Him.” It “is not susceptible of being produced except where this self-revelation is produced and in the way self-revelation does so.”

This revelation is redemptive as it is a sharing of life in his light: “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:4). The temporal, intellectual, sensual, concentrated as it is on appearances exists as a form of darkness and incomprehension of light and life: “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:5).

The equating of life with the essence of God and with the opening of God in Christ, Henry maintains, is thematic in the New Testament. He references the following examples: “I am the living one” (Revelation 1:17), “the living God” (1 Timothy 3:15), “by him who is declared to be living” (Hebrews 7:8), “He who is living” (Luke 24:5). The point is that this is a life opened to all: “‘Go, stand in the temple courts,’ he said, ‘and tell the people these words of life’” (Acts 5:20).  Henry’s focus is on developing these themes from John, as in the prologue, “In him was life and this life was the light of men” (John 1:4). “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). This life given to the Son is opened to all humanity: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25); “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). The divine essence is explicitly stated to be that of Life, “the bread of life” (John 6:48) and “the water of life” (John 4). The life Christ gives provides open access to God and in the New Jerusalem: life is opened to the nations in the river flowing “down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life” (Revelation 22:2).

Life reveals itself in a two-fold sense: “it is Life that achieves the revelation, that reveals – but, on the other hand, that what Life reveals is itself.” Henry concludes, “Living is not possible in the world. Living is possible only outside the world, where another Truth reigns, another way of revealing. This way of revealing is that of Life. Life does not cast outside itself what it reveals but holds it inside itself, retains it in so close an embrace that what it holds and reveals is itself.” This folding in of truth and life in a unity which is unbreakable is the revelation of Easter. Death, difference, distance, time, cannot disrupt the resurrection life, the condition of all true experience.

(Register for the upcoming Class on the Gospel of John starting May 9th here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 260.

[2] Michel Henry, Words of Christ, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012) 74. Quoted in Behr, 276

[3] Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford University Press, 2003). This quote and the following are from an online excerpt: https://philosophiatopics.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/i-am-the-truth-ch12-pdf.pdf