Achieving security is a primary human concern. Security against disease, oppression, hunger and ultimately death (both natural and unnatural), drives religion and civilization so that every earthly city and religion claims validity by securing, incrementally, against an originary chaos. What distinguishes Christianity is both the mode in which it secures us and its overturning of this imagined originary chaos as chief orienting factor. In the Kingdom of God an originary peace (found in Trinitarian love) is the foundation of an alternative City and an alternative set of peaceful practices. Primacy given to anarchy and chaos results in a life given over to the futility of securing itself. Where God is recognized as the source of life, the violence of the zero-sum game – presuming there is only so much life or being to be had – is displaced by a generous forgiveness whose resource is God. (The 70 x 7 posed by Cain’s mode of vengeance and countered by the extent of Christ’s forgiveness depicts inexhaustible vengeance displaced by inexhaustible forgiveness). Continue reading “Guns, Madness, and Death in the City of Man and the City of God”