Tag: René Girard

Theology of the Name: Jesus Christ as the Ground of Language

Is there a direct correspondence between language and reality or is there a complete gap in which language does not refer to any extra-linguistic reality? The either/or answer to the question, more or less, sums up the history of philosophy and a great deal of theology. In an oversimplified telling, modernism and foundationalism presume language corresponds to reality and the questioning of how or if this is so, brought forth nominalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism which presume language is not grounded in exterior reality. Theologically the either/or answer, is not really two answers, as the presumption that there is direct correspondence results in propositionalism and legalism, but so does theological nominalism. Anslem presumes a direct correspondence between law and the reality of God, and he reifies the human word as if it is on a direct continuum with the divine Word, while Luther’s “imputed righteousness” has only the theoretical workings of the law, and does not presume direct engagement with the Immanent Trinity. In the first instance, law and propositions are determinative of access to the reality of God, and in the second instance law and language do not touch upon the reality of God, but this is all we have. Both fall short of the determinant role of Christ as the mediator of a new mode of meaning.

What is missing in the either/or answer is partially recognized in the linguistic turn, in that language can play a variety of roles in regard to meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that meaning is grounded in use, so that embodiment and culture cannot be excluded from meaning (as in the modernist attempt), and in continental philosophy it was recognized the question of correspondence or non-correspondence is preceded by a non-cognitive “being in the world” (which Martin Heidegger will directly relate to the history of violence, see here). René Girard’s picture of language arising around the scape-goated victim, extends this embodied understanding, simultaneously grounding it in the body and culture (the culture arising around the slain victim) but the “transcendental signifier” posed by Girard (the scape-goated victim, giving rise to religious myth) is false. It does not secure meaning outside of time and history though it posits a connection between history and meaning (see the above reference). In the linguistic turn and Girardian theory, language is not on the order of Platonism or foundationalism, floating free of the world, as there is a presumed correspondence, but for Girard this is a false correspondence grounded in a false transcendence.

All of this to say, language, law, or the symbolic order, is not adequate, in and of itself, to attain to God. Language is not naturally imbued with the Spirit, and the word of man is not on a given continuum with the Word of God. Human words fall short of the fullness of the transcendent divine reality, and in Paul’s description (Rom. 3:10-18), like that of Girard, human speech is grounded in violence and murder. Language cannot escape finitude apart from an alternative or true “transcendental signified.” Meaning does not drop from heaven apart from embodied-contextual factors (pure idealism cannot be the case), and those factors as we “naturally” have them are not simply finite, but bound by the mortality and finitude of death in a murderous realism. But the other factor regarding language, revealed in the Bible, is that the word can be transubstantiated, regenerated, and transfigured, so that it is no mere empty human symbol system, but can be combined with the divine nature so as to reveal the divine presence. The Name of God contains God, and this is the primary fact about language.

Sergius Bulgakov finds in the Name of God, an alternative order of meaning, between the finite and infinite or which mediates between idealism and realism, as the stable transcendental signified (the true generation of final and full meaning). The meaning grounded in culture (the language arising around the cadaver or generated through death) is unstable, but this false consciousness is not the final truth of language. The Name of God reveals a transcendence, which gives predication and naming (the order of language) an ontological ground (a true metaphysics). The naming of God as a possibility in language makes all naming a potential predication of the divine order: “Every judgment is naming, and every judgment is a name, rather, is potentially a name, and can become a name.”[1]

Bulgakov is building upon the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, who describes human mind as made possible by “a Mind beyond the reach of mind” and human language as possible through “a Word beyond utterance, eluding Discourse, Intuition, Name, and every kind of being.”[2] Naming and nouns are possible as the original “substantive noun” or that which is both transcendent and immanent has revealed itself: “the grammatical subject of all grammatical subjects, and the grammatical subject par excellence, the foundation of all predicative value, the subject of all predicates, the Godhead, is disclosed as transcendent-immanent” so that all speaking and naming is an approach to that which is not reducible to predication.[3]

This does not foreclose either Girard’s notion that human language arises around the cadaver, nor Feuerbach’s idea that God is a human projection, “an objective projection of their own self.” According to Bulgakov, the truth of the Name, gives rise to the counter possibility: “This illusion is possible precisely because the naming of God takes place in and through human beings; it is their act, the awakening of their theophoric and theophanic potentials, the realization in them of the enclosed image of God, of their primordial theanthropism.”[4] The “theophoric” are words or names that contain the name of a deity, and the “theophanic” is the manifestation or appearance of God to humans (as in the burning bush), which makes possible theanthropism, interpreting divine actions or qualities in human terms. He sees the activity of language as always embedded in this unfolding divine reality working itself out in the human realm. It is not that language is first grounded in a lie (Genesis 3 or the Girardian scapegoat), but lying is made possible by truth. Predication arises through the possibility of universality and in the actuality of God’s revelation, which can be thwarted and perverted.

Where the Girardian or Feuerbachian word would seem to be exhausted by the finite scope of human need, predication is drawn by infinite possibility. There is no end to speaking, as everything can be named, and nothing is exhausted in the name. There is correspondence in the finite order in which every subject transcends its name, but this finite order is due to the transcendence of God: “Therefore, we have here the absolute revelation of the Principle, beyond the limit of the cosmos, in the cosmos, through the cosmos.”[5] Or as he puts it later, “Naming is the operation of God in the human being, the human response to it, the manifestation of the energy of God.”[6]

The Word made flesh is a possibility only for God, but given this possibility there is hominization, or the creation of man as a user of language. There are humans because God is human in Christ, and there is speaking because God has spoken in Christ: “the incarnation of the Word is accomplished not only in the divine incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ but also in the acts of naming that are accomplished by the human being in response to the operation of God.”[7] Bulgakov illustrates through icons, which are images made to reflect the Godhead, but these images are possible because the Name of God is the original and real icon of the Godhead. By the same token, in the Old Testament there are a series of names, Elohim, Sabaoth, Adonai, the Holy One, the Blessed One, the Most High, Creator, the Good – none of which is the proper name, Yahweh, revealed to Moses, but each is reflective of the fact that God has a proper name.

In this case, “when we have, as it were, the proper Name of God, God’s I, the proper nature of the word, its ‘inner form,’ or significance, seemingly evaporates.” With “‘I am Yahweh,’ the independent meaning of the word who is completely dissolves and becomes only a verbal form for containing the Name of God, for containing what is a super-word for human language while being a word that humans accommodate. . . . After this, it becomes transparent glass and only lets the rays through but does not reflect them.”[8] God is present in his Name, just as he is present in the sacramental bread and wine. There was always bread and wine, just as there was the “being” of “I am” (contained in Yahweh) but in the Name and in the Body, God completely reveals himself. “More than an icon, it becomes the temple, the altar, the shrine, the Holy of Holies, the place for the presence of God and of encounter with God.”[9] God is in His Name, beyond the icon and beyond descriptive names, making these reflections possible.

“I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:14). Only after giving his name does God order the building of the tabernacle for his dwelling (Ex. 25:8) through which his presence and revelation continue: “I shall be revealed to you, and above the lid between the two cherubim that are on top of the ark of revelation, I shall speak about everything whatsoever I may command the sons of Israel through you” (Ex. 25:22). The tabernacle and then the temple, are built as a dwelling for the Name of God. In this Name, spoken in human language, God chooses to reveal himself, to pour out his love, in the name revealed to Moses in the Old Testament and then in the name revealed to Mary in the New Testament.

In the Hebrew Scriptures God communicates his Name, but it is not to be pronounced (it is the unspeakable tetragrammaton), and is known only by Moses, and then the high priest, who articulated it only at the festival of purification at the entrance to the Holy of Holies. Moses knows God by name unlike Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Ex. 6:23), and he can communicate the Name. This is not merely the idea of God, but God is in the Name, and this Name is his presence in both tabernacle and temple. The Name is united with the concept of the Glory of God: “and the Lord descended in a cloud and stopped there opposite him and proclaimed the Name of Yahweh” (Exodus 34:5). The “Name of God is taken directly as a real, living force, a Divine energy, which abides at the center of the life of the temple. The temple is the place of habitation of the Name of God; it is constructed for the Name of God.”[10] For example, “then it shall come about that the place in which the Lord your God will choose for His name to dwell” (Dt. 12:11). Prior to the building of the temple, “The people were still sacrificing on the high places, because there was no house built for the name of the Lord until those days” (1 Kings 3:23). Then he says of Solomon, “He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13). Solomon notes that David was disqualified to build a dwelling for the Name, due to violence: “You know that David my father was unable to build a house for the name of the Lord his God because of the wars which surrounded him, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet” (1 Kings 5:3). But Solomon, due to his peaceful reign can establish a dwelling for the Name: “But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side; there is neither adversary nor misfortune. Behold, I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord spoke to David my father, saying, ‘Your son, whom I will set on your throne in your place, he will build the house for My name’” (1 Kings 5:4-5). The Name of God is not merely a sign or substitute for God, but God is in the Name and his glory and presence are attached to the Name. God’s Name can be articulated, and he is in this word. “So they shall invoke My name on the sons of Israel, and I then will bless them” (Nu. 6:27). This is not only a revelation about the nature of God, but reveals the fulness of the power of human language to be made a fit dwelling for God.

Nonetheless, part of what is communicated around the Name, in the dwelling in the Temple with its walls of separation, and in the dread in which the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies, is the transcendence and separation still attached to the Name. In Christ, this wall of separation is broken down and Jacob’s dream will become a reality: “from now on you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending towards the Son of Man” (Jn 1:51). Jesus will open the Name of God to all, taking what was unpronounceable and dreadful and attaching it to his humanity, so that all can walk in the light of his Name.

Jesus connects the tetragrammaton “I am that I am” to himself: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). In this same passage in John 8 he also ties the “I am” to the light he gives (8:12) connecting it to the Logos of the Prologue called the light of men (John 1:4-9). He says, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35, 48); “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5; 12:46); “I am the door of the sheep” (John 10:7); “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11); “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25); “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6); “I am the vine (John 15:1). He tells Philip, that to see Him is to see the Father: “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” (Jn 14:9–10). It is particularly the “lifting up” which reveals Jesus’ identity as the “I am” (YHWH): “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He’” (John 8:28). Here is the realization of Isaiah, that through the “lifted up” servant “you may know and believe that I AM” (Isa. 43:10; 52:13). “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). Sometimes the ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) is explicit reference to deity and the name of God (YHWH) and in others it is implicit.  For example, at his arrest he declares ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) and the guards fall to the ground (John 18:5) and walking on the water he calms the fear of the disciples, declaring “It is I; do not be afraid” (John 6:20).

In the name of Christ the presence of God is readily available: “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:38). The nations are called to take up the Name (Matt. 28:19), to pray in the Name (John 14:13-14), and to abide in Jesus Christ (John 15:4). The dread of the transcendent name Yahweh is removed in the name of perfect love; “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

God in Christ has spoken, lifting up speech to its transcendent purposes in himself:

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:1-3).

Salvation is in and through the name of Christ, as this Word is God (John 1:1).

[1] Sergii Bulgakov, Philosophy of the Name (NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies) (pp. 292-293). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920),  53.

[3] Bulgakov, 293.

[4] Bulgakov, 293-294.

[5] Bulgakov, 294.

[6] Bulgakov, 295.

[7] Bulgakov, 295-296.

[8] Bulgakov, 312-313.

[9] Bulgakov, 314.

[10] Bulgakov, 317-318.

The Erasure of Cosmic and Personal Trauma in the Lamb Crucified from the Foundation of the World

The Jews decide to stone Jesus in reaction to his statement, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58). This statement is on the order of John 1, relativizing creation to the true beginning through the Logos (John 1:1). It is the priority of Christ that gives meaning to the story of Abraham and creation, and not vice versa. Christ’s time bending relativizes Abraham, the unfolding creation story of Genesis, and the unfolding of all history. In the immediate context, Jesus accuses the leading Jews of being subject to lying language and inclined to murder (8:44), including his own impending scapegoating murder, but this is not the first or final word. If, as René Girard argues (see here) language, sign making, and significance evolve around the scapegoated victim, John would subordinate this development (the evolution of language) to Jesus as the prior Word. Prior to the human word there is the divine Word, which is the origin toward which human language, history, and creation are moving. Language may have arisen historically around the scapegoated victim, but this is not the “true” origin of language, anymore than Abraham is the origin of Jesus. In Christ the unfolding of history (inclusive of the darkest episodes) and the unfolding developments of creation (evolutionary or otherwise) are relegated to contingencies, which are neither original nor enduring. The movement of history at its beginning and end, both cosmic and personal, is through the One behind and before all things (Col. 1:13) and in whom all things are summed up (Eph. 1:10).

Note that Jesus uses the present tense, “I am,” indicating it is as the incarnate and enfleshed human that he precedes Abraham. The one who is before Abraham, is the human Jesus who stands before them. He is not claiming his pre-existent, disincarnate spirit had prior existence, nor is he teaching Plato’s immortality of the soul, relativizing the significance of death and the body in comparison to the spirit (not a stoning offence). The “I” before Abraham is inclusive of the entire story of Jesus. There is no breaking apart of Jesus story or subjecting it to a flat chronology. It is not that the Word became incarnate and then suffered on the cross, but rather the One on the cross is the identity of the Word (Logos) and the “I” before Abraham.

This is the way the early church understood the Logos, not as a preincarnate existence, but as Jesus Christ, crucified and raised. Both Cyril and Hippolytus describe the incarnation as beginning, not from the conception or birth of Jesus, but as generated backward in time, having been woven from the sufferings of the cross.[1] It is not that the pre-existent Christ and God have a secret divine story or that the Son had spent a very long time in eternity before the incarnation. As John Behr notes, the early Church did not presume to start with the pre-incarnate Word – in fact he claims, the term “pre-incarnate” is absent from patristic literature.[2] Gregory of Nyssa, for example, begins with the cross and from the cross (in reference to Ephesians 3:18) the height, depth, breadth, and length, of all things unfolds and returns.[3]

The “I am” who faces down stoning has defeated death on the cross. The Jesus prior to Abraham is the embodied, historical Jesus, inclusive of his cross and resurrection. Death is at the center of the conversation, as for the Jews, killing Jesus would put a full stop to the conversation. Jesus is disrupting their control over meaning: “Now we know that You have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets also; and You say, ‘If anyone keeps My word, he will never taste of death’” (John 8:52). Death is their first and last word, but Jesus would relativize and obliterate its significance. They would stone him and he will be crucified, but this murder, the ultimate trauma and shame in their understanding, is not determinate.

The cosmic futility and the human drama are not without suffering, but the resolution to this suffering precedes its development, in the hope toward which it develops. There is a darkness in the history of humankind, in violent, scapegoating religion, perhaps in the entry into the world of signs and religion (the religion and language of fallen humankind), but the darkness of this development through death is neither the beginning nor end. Christ is before all things and all things are through him. The development of this birth out of darkness is guided by the light in his defeat of death (Col. 1:13). As Gregory describes, the cross is divided into four parts because the One upon it binds together in Himself all forms of existence. The apprehension of all things and the reality of all things converge on the cross.[4] The reign of death, which may seem to hold sway over life and history, is rendered as empty as Jesus’ tomb. There is a retroactive effect, in the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8).

The precedence of Christ is the continual reality sustaining the universe: “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). The creation of the cosmos and humankind come through a cataclysmic explosion, the reign of darkness and the breaking in of light, the emergence of land out of the water, the springing forth of vegetation, and the emergence of woman through man and man through woman, but this beginning is preceded by the true beginning in and through the Logos: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:16). There is a futility in creation, on the order of childbirth, but this futility is overridden, healed, or suspended by what is brought forth: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:20–22).

In the same way Christ is the guiding cosmic significance, he is the significance of Abraham and Israel. Paul describes the faith of Abraham, as synonymous with that of Christ, and thus it is resurrection faith (Rom. 4:24). He reads the history of Israel as a participation in the work of Christ: “our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:1–4). The meaning of Israel arises from the significance of Christ. The mana they ate is already the spiritual food of Christ, the water that nourished them springs from the rock that is Christ, and their passage through the Red Sea is already baptism into Christ. As Jude states, it was Jesus Christ who rescued Israel from Egypt (Jude 5).

If Christ is the “I am” before Abraham, the spiritual rock of Israel, the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world, and Christians are those found in Christ, then there is a relativizing and erasing of the sin and death that would otherwise be definitive. In the same way the crucified Lamb precedes his nativity, so too every baptism, every entry into Christ, precedes birth. The new birth is the reality preceding birth, the resurrection is the reality preceding every death, the ascension is the reality preceding every journey through hell, so that our personal history with all of its failings is no more definitive of who we are, than the cross is the last word about Christ: “even when we were dead in our transgressions, [he] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:5–7).

This is not simply a way of understanding the inherent suffering in the cosmos and in human suffering, but is a means to comprehend personal trauma. The darkness and futility of the world take on a particular expression in each of our lives, and that trauma may seem to permanently scar or misshape our lives. Some have experienced extreme evil, such that it may seem to be primary, but Paul relativizes the futility and pictures it as erased in the way the pain of child birth is forgotten with delivery of the child (Rom. 8:22). For Paul, this is an accomplished fact: “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30). In light of the already accomplished glory, the suffering is not comparable (Rom. 8:18). Just as the pain of childbirth is not primary in giving birth, so Paul places all futility in this fading category, in light of the glory of perfected humanity found in Christ.  “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach” (Col. 1:21–22).

Sin is erased, the trauma is removed, death is no more, and this is the defining reality behind all the fading contingencies that may have once seemed definitive. As Jordan Wood puts it, “God’s salvation of the world will, in the end, involve the unmaking and remaking of every tragedy or trauma that ever occurred, even those that from our temporal vantage appear fixed in the past.”[5] He says this in light of the theology culminating in Maximus the Confessor:

[I]t is for the sake of Christ—that is, for the whole mystery of Christ—that all the ages and the beings existing within those ages received their beginning and end in Christ. For the union of the limit of the age and limitlessness, of measure and immeasurability, of finitude and infinity, of Creator and creation, and of rest and motion, was conceived before the ages. This union has been manifested in Christ at the end of time, and through itself bestows the fulfillment of God’s foreknowledge.[6]

Predestination is not bound by sequence or by cause and effect in time, but bends around Christ, in whom all things have been predestined or foreordained in an already accomplished fact to work for the good (Rom. 8:28).

[1] Cyril of Alexandria, First Letter to Succensus, 4. Hippolytus, Antichrist 4. Cited in John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 17-18.

[2] Behr, 15.

[3] Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): The Great Catechism, 32

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jordan Wood, “The End of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Patristic Doctrine of Deification.” Thank you Jordan for sharing this insightful piece.

[6] Maximus, QThal 60.4 (CCSG 22, 75–7; Constas 429). Cited by Jordan, 13.

The Greek Logos Versus Jesus as Logos: Anthony Bartlett’s Completion of the Girardian Philosophical Project

It is not simply that Christ offers a new meaning, built on the same foundation as human religion, philosophy, or culture. There is the exposure of the violent origins of human language (e.g., as in the history of the Greek logos) and the setting forth of a peaceable alternative (Christ as Logos). The thinker who brings this out most concretely is René Girard, but the contemporary thinker who has completed the work of Girard, in his philosophical implications and expression, is Anthony Bartlett. Bartlett (who is now teaching a class with Ploughshares Bible Institute) tells the story of presenting his findings in a seminar, in which Girard was in attendance. Girard responded after the presentation, “Very impressive,” but immediately left. His singular genius in textual hermeneutics, seemingly left him uncomfortable to engage in discussion of its philosophical implications.[1] Bartlett however, through a close reading of Martin Heidegger (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics and violence) picks up where Girard left off.  

Why Heidegger Fails to Discern the Johannine Logos

Girard notes both Heidegger’s tracing of the Greek logos into an originary violence and its contrast with the Johannine Logos, but Heidegger does not draw out this difference as violence opposed to nonviolence but as a difference of violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[2] It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) 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.”[3] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

There is an incapacity to distinguish, and thus the Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought, but 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.”[4] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

Part of this incapacity is explained by Heidegger’s starting point in Being and Time, which is a philosophical articulation of the sense that things are the way they are, and this reality is the necessity within which we work. The primary thing is that man speaks or dwells in language, which does not mean Heidegger’s goal is an intellectual or propositional explanation. “Being there” (Dasein) is the given presupposition and determination, such that one can “take a look” at the meaning of Being, but the point is not to arrive at some “axiom from which a sequence of propositions is deductively derived. It is quite impossible for there to be any ‘circular argument’ in formulating the question about the meaning of Being; for in answering this question, the issue is not one of grounding something by such a derivation; it is rather one of laying bare the grounds for it and exhibiting them.”[5]

As Heidegger puts it elsewhere, “Language speaks”[6] and so too the ground of Being reveals, but there is no penetrating this fact. Rather, what is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward”[7] and the question is to spell out the nature of this relatedness. “The speech of mortals rests in its relation to the speaking of language.”[8] The capacity for difference is drawn together in language. “Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing.”[9] He finds himself in language, and this is the primary fact about him, which cannot be penetrated but must be allowed to make itself manifest. (Thus poetry is the truest and highest art form, in that it allows language to speak.) Human speech locates Dasein not so much in what is said but in the speaking, in the relatedness to language. Heidegger reifies language as the essential relation shaping human reality and he does not presume to go beneath or above this speaking.

Thus, Heidegger presumes Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek thinker who first develops the history of logos, in his view that “war is the father of all,” has hit upon the origin of logos. Referencing Heraclitus he concludes, violence (German, Gewalt) or war (Polemos) is synonymous with the logos; it is the transformative and creative center. “Confrontation” is the “sire” of all that comes to presence. The gods, humans, slaves and free, arise through “strife” (polemos), as this opposition is what first allows hierarchy, status, discreteness, intervals, and distances. “Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same.”[10] As he says later, “Who the human being is, according to the word of Heraclitus, first comes forth (edeixe, shows itself) in the polemos, in the disjunction of gods and human beings, in the happening of the irruption of Being itself.”[11] Heidegger locates entry into Dasein with “deinon,” designating one who is “violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein.”[12] Heidegger, who fully embraced and never repudiated the Nazi project, sees violence as the creative center from which meaning arises.

In short, humans come into being (Dasein) through the violence of logos. Heidegger locates essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being. “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[13] The human comes into being as what is distinguishable (out of the indistinguishable) through the emergence of opposition in logos, which brings one thing into presence against the other.[14] Logos is this gathering together, the original differentiating, which marks Dasein.

The Differentiation Proposed by Girard

Heidegger recognized and commended the inherent violence of the logos and of Western thought,while for Girard human meaning has violent, irrational, origins in the scapegoat mechanism but Christ poses an alternative meaning system escaping violent origins. Girard agrees with Heidegger in his focus on myth, his picture of an originary human violence, and the presumption that language, writing, or the oracular contains a hidden truth. Heidegger is right about something concealed in language but the “un-concealing” is only possible through the revelation of Christ: “I propose that if today we are capable of breaking down and analyzing cultural mechanisms, it is because of the indirect and unperceived but formidably constraining influence of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.”[15]

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.”[16] 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.”[17] 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.”[18] 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’s Completion of Girard

As Bartlett notes, the gospel consists of transformative news delivered in simile and figures of speech: “Christian faith depends on the popular use of words, with their built-in potential for metonym, allusion and suggestion, rather than strict conceptual-propositional agreement.”[19] According to John “these [signs] are written in order that you may believe” (John 20:30–31), suggesting “it is the overall writing of Jesus’ deeds and teaching that makes the effective gospel.”[20] There is an immediate identity of signs and mental activity (appreciated in Western or Latin study of signs), but what is missed is the identity of Christ as Logos, completely differentiated from the Greek logos.

Jesus Christ, not the slain scapegoat, is the “true transcendental signifier,” the generator of a peaceable order of meaning. In the Logos of Christ there is a defeat of the violence structuring the world, and this involves a “semiotic struggle, comprising stories, law, prophecy, poetry and, last of all, the singular fact and figure of the cross.”[21] This one rejected by men “must always have itself expelled from a world that cannot be its own.”[22] This is the error on which Jewish thought and the whole of Western thought is founded: Jews who believed “they could keep Yahweh in the Temple” or capture Him in the Law, or Christians who imagine there must be sacrifice and at least one scapegoat (necessary violence).

In Bartlett’s summary, “Another way of saying this is that the logos of Christianity is non-violent, is non-violence itself, and will never retaliate. It is precisely by being ‘driven out’ that it reveals itself: a paradoxical, subversive, world-overturning revelation amounting not to the continually misrecognized double valence of the human good, but to a generative new human meaning.”[23]  The Christian Logos not only overturns myth but subverts the ground of Western metaphysics and thought. Christian truth is not to be set along side other truth systems but is singular and overturns the tables of human religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. (In this the project of the poststructuralists, such as Heidegger and Derrida, is brought to completion in the exposure and overturning of the violent metaphysic at the root of human meaning.)

The deep existential choice, posed by Heidegger (summing up the Greek religious and philosophical tradition) and Girard (summing up the Christian exposure of this tradition and offering an alternative) is between a violent and a non-violent (peaceable) organizing center for human existence. As Bartlett emphasized in his lecture, this shift requires total commitment: “You have to go to the heart of it – this is the idea of going to the desert, of changing your life the way Paul changed his, of really taking this thing to heart, because everything is at stake.” Violence is the organizing principle of human civilization, and the empty tomb is a “cataclysmic shock” that provides “no real resolution yet” – “just the radical deconstruction of all familiar structures.” Heidegger retreated into Naziism and Girard did not arrive at total nonviolence, toward which his work pointed. The legacy of the Christian logos is hard to take, hard to assimilate as a way of being human. The vast majority of people, including great thinkers, shrink back from the radical implications of choosing the non-violent path, because it requires nothing less than a complete transformation of how we understand human existence and meaning-making.24

[1] This is too brief and inadequate of a summing up but this is my feeble attempt to capture some of the profound significance Anthony Bartlett is setting forth. His work deserves a wide exposure and I hope this class is the beginning of a wider and much deserved recognition.

[2]René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.

[3] Things Hidden, 265.

[4] Things Hidden, 271.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28

[6] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207

[7] Being and Time, 28.

[8] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 206.

[9] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 207.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 65.

[11] Metaphysics, 149.

[12] Metaphysics, 160

[13] Metaphysics, 160.

[14] Metaphysics, 132.

[15] Things Hidden, 138.

[16] Things Hidden, 275.

[17] Things Hidden, 275.

[18] Things Hidden, 276.

[19] Anthony Bartlett, “Theology and Catastrophe A (Girardian) Semiotics of Re-Humanization,” (Forum Philosophicum 23 (2018) no. 2, 171–188 ISSN 1426-1898) 178.

[20] Theology and Catastrophe, 178

[21] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[22] Things Hidden, 272.

[23] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[24] Thank you Jim for the notes.

Girardian Evolution of Language and the Semiotic Shift with Christ

Religions focused on death, by sheer quantity, point to René Girard’s claim that significance or making signs begins with death and killing (the scapegoated victim). Ancestor worship from ancient Egypt, in African traditional religions and in modern Japan, and the veneration of the dead in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, or the Mexican Day of the Dead, all point to the primacy of death. A new world unfolds from the body of the victim, as is graphically displayed in religious myth. The violence between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Elish) results in the body (the canopy of the heavens) and blood of the god Tiamat (slain by Marduk) providing the raw material for the created order. In Norse creation, the giant Ymir is slain by Odin and his brothers and his body becomes the earth, his blood the seas, and his bones the mountains. In Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl, and his trickster brother, Tezcatlipoca, tore a goddess (or god in some accounts) Tlaltecuhtli in half to make a new heaven and Earth and from the divine body sprouted everything that was necessary for the life of human beings. In Hindu mythology, the Rigveda describes the cosmic being Purusha, whose sacrifice leads to the creation of the universe and all living beings from his body parts. In African mythology, the Dogon people believe that the god Amma created the world from his own body, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and the cosmos. In other myths there may not be as direct a connection, but as in the Japanese myth the death of Izanami precedes and indirectly is connected with the creation of the Japanese Islands. A world of meaning arises in these myths through the dead body of the god.

Girard explains the rise of the sign as directly connected to the cadaver of the victim: “The origin of symbolic thought lies in the mechanism of the surrogate victim . . . It is a fundamental instance of ‘arbitration’ that gives rise to the dual presence of the arbitrary and true in all symbolic systems . . . To refer to the origin of symbolic thought is to speak as well of the origin of language.”[1] The symbol of the sacrificial victim, carrying the guilt and violence of the community, gives rise to the first sign and entry into language: “there is the cadaver of the collective victim and this cadaver constitutes the first object for this new type of consciousness.”[2] The crisis of all out violence and then the resolution in the victim, Girard speculates, brings on the evolutionary leap into language: “As weak as it might be, the ‘consciousness’ the participants have of the victim is linked structurally to the prodigious effects produced by its passage from life to death, by the spectacular and liberating reversal that has occurred at that instant . . .”[3] Around the cadaver, perhaps connected with a cry or meaningful utterance in death, there arises the linguistic ordering of the world: male and female, inside and outside, and good and evil. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly the myth points to the reality of a murder in which the victim is the “transcendental signifier” constituting meaning and from which all potential meaning will arise.

Girard provides a key to the bizarre and otherwise mystical religious myths. They are not reasonable but they give rise to a peculiar order of reason. Reconciliation, community, and communication arise through the original and ritually repeated act. Out of chaos and murder there arises a system of order, held together by signs, grounded, not in some arbitrary arrangement but in warding off violence through the very possibility of signification given in the scapegoated victim. Language has its roots, according to this view, in the possibility of peace through violence, the possibility of inside through casting out, the possibility of friend and family through enemy and stranger. There is an explanation of the binaries in the act from which they are generated. 

But doesn’t this originary violence paint a dark picture of the evolution of the species, as it requires violent death and the worst forms of evil (e.g., scapegoating, discrimination, murder, victimization)? Though Girard is a Christian with a deep belief in the primacy of revelation, he reinterprets the biblical story of the fall through originary violence on a human scale. Does it really matter though, that what comes first is not binaries and opposition (as in structuralism), but a transcendental signified, if this signified is a murdered cadaver? There may be no immediate answer to this question, but the reality of human violence structuring meaning is not speculation, faced as we are with the pervasive reality of violence and evil, but in the Girardian system the darkness is not only offset by Christ but transformed. Meaning is at first grounded in the reality of violence, pointing to the violence which Christ endured, but the teaching of Christ and the work of Christ, displace and transform human systems of meaning, grounding them in a divine order.

This is a move beyond both the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, in that Girard “grounds” signs in the scapegoating mechanism. Structuralism does away with metaphysics as ground and in its anthropological version (developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss) culture is unmoored from metaphysics. According to Anthony Bartlett, culture is set “adrift on a sea of purely semiotic relationships, that is, a kind of language; and, yes, this language was as mobile and uncertain as the sea itself.”[4] The incest taboo for Lévi-Strauss is simply an ordering and arbitrary construct, but Girard points to its prevention of revenge and violence among fathers, brothers and uncles, fighting over daughters, sisters, mothers, and nieces.

Girard grounds symbolic meaning or language in empirical realities of foundational violence. Meaning is embodied, literally and historically. Signs are not simply an endless interplay with other signs, with meaning fabricated in différance (deferral, opposites, sameness and difference), but the original sign or the transcendental signified is the scapegoat victim. If there is no transcendent or stable meaning (no grounded meaning), then there is no representation of reality or “truth” but only the sign system (the point of deconstruction and poststructuralism). The Girardian system escapes the arbitrariness of an endlessly circulating system of signs, existing only in human consciousness, but it is not that Girard directly rescues truth.

As Bartlett points out, “none of this demonstrates anything real.”[5] The sacred cadaver, or the deified victim – the god, is a necessary fiction falsifying murder and hiding the destructive and cathartic role of violence. “It is a falsification of a real event which, in today’s terms, boils down simply to group murder and a kind of misrecognized foundational PTSD implanted in the collective hominid brain.”[6] The victim, after all, is arbitrary and his significance is false (e.g., he is not the singular cause of trouble) but Girard points to how significance may have evolved through blood and murder. “Girard offers a scientific demonstration of how meaning comes about, how something acts as a transcendental signifier, but not that it really is so, that there is metaphysical truth”[7] but there is the possibility for truth and uncovering truth.

There is the creation of a sign system, a reserve of meaning with a false significance. The tomb and death, grounding the system, refer to a pure absence and nothingness. Death is not restorative and the magic of the scapegoat depends upon a lie. Scapegoating is historically real, following the contours of mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence – so it comes through a certain reality, but it obscures this reality in human consciousness. If it is binaries and linguistic structures all the way down, then there is no intersection with reality and no ground, nor truth (though the transcendental signified of the scapegoat is hardly the “truth”). There is the recognition in Girard of a historical reality and a metaphysic, false though it is. He recognizes the binary function of meaning, but does not presume this alone contains meaning but offers an order of meaning grounded in the realities of human relationships and community. He explains the rise of religious meaning in the scapegoating mechanism as the source of meaning per se, but this false meaning is best understood, according to Girard, against the background of biblical revelation. That is false religion or failed religion provides the context for what is happening in the revelation of Christ.

The body of Christ symbolically presented in the Lord’s Supper is the first instance of a meaning system arising from the living body. He breaks bread symbolizing his body, and offers the cup symbolizing his blood (both before and after his death), with the promise of a new order of significance, not in the reification of the cadaver but in the living body of the crucified and living Lord. Christ reveals the workings of the scapegoating he undergoes, but also establishes a reordering of all meaning and Truth around himself.

Christ takes over the meaning fostered by religion in the same way he gives meaning to the law, the temple and indicated in the original Passover. Christ casts truth backward as well as forward, showing how it is that in him death would Passover, and the covenant with death would be broken. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[8] Throughout, Christ is duplicating and fulfilling or giving final meaning to the history of Israel, which would otherwise have no clear reference. The Exodus of Israel and the original Pascha (or Passover) is the type of the true Passion of Christ (Christ is the true Passover Lamb). The tabernacle and temple are grounded in the reality of Christ as true temple. Moses warded off the deadly snakes in the wilderness but this event finds its true meaning in Christ: “Just as Moses raised the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14). The true bread from heaven (John 6:41–42), the heavenly King and Truth (John 18:36–38), and the true prophet (John 7:47–52), resonate with and complete the prior understanding of the Scriptures.

According to  Behr, “the antinomies of the old creation (male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile—circumcised/uncircumcised) are now done away with, as belonging to a different era; with the revelation of Christ, the world is structured anew, indeed is a ‘new creation’, with its own antinomies—the Spirit and the flesh—resolved and brought together in Christ, the Church, and the Israel of God.”[9] In the words of Bartlett, “there is implied a Christian signifier at work in the world: its truth arrives like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky.”[10] As Girard writes, “What [Christ] brings us cannot come from human beings, and therefore can only come from God . . . the thought that underpins the Gospels must stem from a reason more powerful than our own.”[11] The meaning and reason of Christ transforms human meaning, grounding it not in violence, but in the divine peace that defeats and displaces violence.

Girard provides a deep technical explanation of Christ’s “regenerative semiotics.” “It is from within the biblical system of signs that truth is found, by reason of the quality of the semiotic reversal itself.”[12] “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (Jn 1:18). Christ, the innocent scapegoat, reveals the truth of victimhood and God, generating a new significance, not grounded in violence but in an originary peace and self-giving love.

[1] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Translated by Patrick Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 235. Cited in Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (p. 36). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] René Girard, et al., Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 99-100. Cited in Bartlet, 39.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bartlett, 35.

[5] Bartlett, 46.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Bartlett, 41-42.

[8] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-28.

[9] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 116. Behr is referencing Louis Martyn, ‘Apocalyptic Antinomies’.

[10] Bartlett, 47.

[11] René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer. Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014) 92-93. Cited in Bartlett, 48.

[12] Bartlett, 48.

Forgiveness 

This is a guest blog by Brad Klingele

A dear friend, suffering in a protracted conflict says to me  “I have my story of what is happening, they have their story, and neither story is the real story.” Jesus’ observation that my friend is not far from the Kingdom whispered to my soul.

The end is like the beginning, as Nyssa says. In Christ all of creation will be reconciled to God, such that God will be All in All. We will be reconciled to each other and divinized, participating in the self-gift of the Trinity. Jesus’s life shows us that we are the ones who are violent, and we project our violence onto God and onto others. We live by “the law” when we defend our false self image and an image of a false, retributive and therefore violent God by inflicting death on others. 

Jesus shows us that God is not like this; He comes and predicts that we will murder Him, that we are all murderers from the beginning, and that we try to preserve life by inflicting death on others (John 8). We live by a “law” of violence. We set up rules to live by, and we live by seeking to preserve our sense of self and our very lives in and through protecting our lives and self-image by using violence and preventing a true self-understanding of ourselves as hopelessly caught up in a world-view in which we must use violence to prevent death and prevent seeing ourselves as caught up in this culture, this way of being. Jesus’ life  reveals that from the beginning it is not the case that God is violent, rather, He is forgiveness. 

Jesus refuses to use violence to protect Himself, revealing that God is nonviolent, for when we see Jesus, we see the Father. If we are to become God, we are to live by recognizing that God forgives us and invites us into accepting death and suffering. Death and suffering are not the problem; living by violence and living by an image of God as violent is the problem. God is forgiveness and peace. We needn’t fear death or suffering because God will raise us up when we accept His life and enter into accepting death. In this acceptance, we trust that God forgives us all, and will forgive us all. 

If we want to live a life that is a participation in the forgiving, non-violent God, we too must live by forgiving each other and returning peace instead of violence. We may not withhold forgiveness, we may not return violence, for we are to be the ongoing reconciliation of God and the world by accepting our brokenness, our violence, and enact a different culture, a way of being, that is Divine.

Labelling people who harm us as bad, or as evil, is normally seen as the prerequisite for forgiving; why would we forgive if we had not been harmed? 

It is hard to forgive other people. It is in fact very dangerous; Jesus forgave sins, and people knew that this was a claim to be God. Only God can forgive sins. There are hidden impediments to forgiving that are not normally understood in the literature on forgiveness.

Forgiving others does preserve ourselves from the ravages of anger that injures us. Stanley Hauerwas,  in his Princeton lectures emphasizes that it is much, much harder to be forgiven than to forgive. Rene Girard reveals why this is the case. 

Girard helps us to read, through the Scriptures, that since the dawn of the evolution of becoming human (hominization), we are participants in a reality in which we hide our violence from ourselves and project it onto others and, ultimately, God. 

Before the Gospel, I couldn’t look at my faults because it was too scary and also because at some level surely God hated me. Accepting forgiveness requires feeling accepted and loved in and with many faults. Real love is capable of seeing faults and assuming the best and fully accepting the person as they are; in this unconditional acceptance of myself as broken, we can allow Christ to transform us because we can look at our faults while knowing that our value lies in being loved; we are not loved by God because we are good, we are good because God loves us. 

Forgiveness requires acknowledging that I am blind to the ways I hurt other people. If I can see that I am blind, maybe I can forgive others for their blindness when they hurt me. I am grateful for friends who explain, right away, the ways I hurt them. It is only because they love and like me that I can hear how I hurt them without just despairing. It’s only in love that I can accept my faults. But it still is so painful, to see the seemingly intractable patterns I have of hurting people. 

For most of us, however sophisticated our articulation, we have a kind of first pass Christianity, or Sauline Christianity, meaning Saul before he became Paul.  I have broken a moral norm and I must be forgiven. I am saved insofar as I trust Jesus to forgive the transgression and confess breaking this norm and then follow the norm. Once I or anyone recognizes that they ought to follow the norms and believe the right thing, one is safe. This safety usually extends to “I won’t be harmed” by the results of my breaking of a moral norm; I will have a life that is less troubled. We tend to imagine that the troubles we face are usually due to breaking of a moral norm. And so once I find myself following the moral norms, and someone breaks a moral norm and injures me, I see myself as injured, as righteous, and the other as a worse person than I am. Their injury to me ends up reinforcing my sense of being righteous, and I come to rely on the unrighteousness of others in order to reinforce my righteousness. At a subconscious level, we are seeking safety, a self-image as good, so that we are safe from God and feel good about ourselves, and safe from hell and the consequences of an immoral life. Jesus pokes fun at this with the prayer of the Pharisee vs the Plebian, the woman caught in adultery, and emphasizing the righteousness of prostitutes as distinct from religious leaders.  

This makes nonsense of course, of the cross and incarnation as a mere second-chance, or even infinite chance schema and does little to acknowledge the radicality of Jesus; it makes the following of  norms the primary reality and God’s forgiveness the secondary reality, as James Alison articulates in The Joy of Being Wrong. St. Paul makes fun of this notion in the first section of Romans, but alas, as Douglas Campbell points out, we have lost the context and read it not as a first century Colbert Report sendup, but as an earnest condemnation of those who break moral norms.

We fear death, alienation, poverty, suffering, and violence. We seek security through power, position, prestige, money, and a deontic “objective” truth bereft of the category of relationship. When we ground our identity in these idols we live by “the law.” 

When we live by a concept in which belief in Jesus is essentially following the rules, we derive our security and sense of self from whether or not we are successful in following these rules. We necessarily blind ourselves to self-knowledge because any discovery of rule-breaking is a threat to who we think we are. We become our own saviors because we must succeed in following the rules and we must believe the right thing.

When others cause injury, we see them as outsiders and ourselves as insiders. And so we must compound our self-identity by setting boundaries in which those who have broken the rules are bad, while I, who live righteously, am good. Jesus punctures this when He says “no one is good but God alone.”

In this schema, we necessarily place others on the outside and ourselves on the inside in order to feel secure. As Paul says, who will free us from this prison?!

How do we learn the real story we are living in? Jordan Daniel Wood, explaining Maximus the Confessor’s theory of sin, explains that sin means that we pour our lives into something that is not real, because we don’t understand ourselves or God, and so we create a false incarnation. Freeing ourselves of the false self, as Thomas Keating calls it, is, according to Nyssa, like cauterizing a wart; the condition of the skin is not its true condition, and gaining true skin is painful. We think we are losing our very self, but it isn’t who we are. This is why sin is so painful; God is simply giving us our true self, but it feels like we are losing ourselves, it feels like punishment. It is not punishment but healing. Elsewhere, Wood explains that Origen tells us that God does in fact fulfill His promise in Jonah to destroy Nineveh, but in doing so He saves. God destroys what is false in order to restore Nineveh by restoring it to its true self. Jonah is rather put out by this; he wants Nineveh destroyed, not saved. 

Anthony Bartlett places Jesus’ entire self-understanding of His ministry in the sign of Jonah; Jesus invites us to see ourselves as Jonah; we are violent and want our enemies vanquished. We, like the followers of Jesus before the Resurrection, imagine God as violent, but it is we who are violent, and Jesus refuses to return our violence, instead, Jesus returns after we murder Him and forgives us. 

James Alison explains that the culture we live by, one of self-deception and violence, is not the center of reality; Jesus’ forgiveness is. Jesus lovingly accepts our violence, a willing victim to us, in order to reveal His love for us and our violence. We need not hide our violence from ourselves because we see that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Now, we needn’t hide from ourselves our violent ways, we can see them and know that Jesus’ love is greater than, and precedes, our violence. 

The Fall, explains Alison, is not the defining reality; forgiving self-gift is. God is self-gift, God is love, and in Jesus we see that we no longer need scapegoat others in order to hide our brokenness from ourselves; we can trust Jesus who reveals through His kindness and His complete self-gift that will win over all of us, for “God desires that all will be saved,” and Jesus reveals the truth that He will win over all of us to His manner of Being; self-gift. 

The Gospel reveals what we cannot see; we are murderers who are forgiven. We cannot see ourselves if we don’t know first that we are loved and then can see the ways we hurt others. Universalism is necessary for seeing this; we need God’s help, not protection from God. Only a God who saves all can do this.

We don’t know what it means to be a human or who we are, until Jesus reveals who He is, as the true Human, and then who we are called to become; participants in His Divine-Humanity as members of a communion of mutual self-gift, which is the Church. 

In most approaches to forgiveness, we end up as the Pharisee “thank you Lord that I am not like this tax collector.” We are, in fact, constantly messing up, and only by trusting that God will keep transforming us can we allow ourselves to perceive our constant messiness. Shusako Endo’s Silence has a hero that we tend to miss; Ichiro. Ichiro is the one who is most like us; he doggedly seeks forgiveness. The Jesuits constantly seek to be heroic. Ichiro constantly seeks forgiveness.

Dostoevsky’s Zosima explains that we are all responsible for each other’s sin. This is not pious hyperbole; we are inescapably caught up in relationships with each other in which we are continually blind to the ways we hurt and scapegoat and seek protection from self-knowledge, from suffering at each other’s hands. This is why nonviolence, whose active form is peacemaking, is essential to participation in becoming one with Christ, who is ontologically incapable of retribution or violence. Our experience of suffering is never from God, but only from our brokenness. In the eighth chapter of John Jesus tells His interlocutors that are seeking to kill him. They hide their violence from themselves and accuse him of being crazy. 

We too are all caught up in killing Jesus whenever we injure others; “Saul Saul why are you persecuting Me?” When we are angry with anyone, we miss that we are all made in God’s image and likeness; “amen, amen, I say to you, whenever you are angry with your brother you have committed murder in your heart.” When we live so as to use violence in any form to protect ourselves from suffering we live according to the history of the fall “you are children of Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning.” Girard explicates this reality handily in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Today more than ever we hide vengeance from ourselves more easily because we outsource vengeance in the judicial system, as Girard explains in Violence and the Sacred. Within this context we misunderstand justice as retribution. True justice is restoration to Christ. 

When we know that we are loved in our bones no matter what, we can begin to see ourselves as we are; loved and brought into Jesus’ healing restoration. We are loved by Jesus precisely as people caught up in violence. Jesus was able to enter into the human culture of violence and offer love and forgiveness because Jesus knew He is loved by the Father in the Holy Spirit. Jesus is willing to suffer our violence without resentment

Forgiveness requires accepting, without resentment, our own participation in violence. In Jesus we can experience ourselves as loved by the Father in the Spirit. This often happens when we experience, usually, in at least one concrete, specific person in our life, the unconditional love, which is in fact the love of Jesus. As we experience this unconditional love, we too can then turn and offer the same to concrete, specific people in our lives. 

Salvation then, is, the concrete specific participation in a particular community of people who, knowingly (as Christian) or unknowingly (in Christ) enact mutual self-gift, nonviolence, forgiveness, and unconditional love. This does not mean that we must not try to avoid injury, or that we don’t engage in trying to change the violence we experience at the hands of others. Jesus shows us His radical form of engagement, without violence, harsh words, or retribution “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” Salvation is a communal participation in self-gift within a community of specific people with whom we practice mutual self-gift. We begin to offer  this self-gift even to those who have not yet accepted or returned this self-gift. God is love, meaning self-gift. Salvation given to humans because it is divine-humanity. 

Finding Christ in the Collapse of Civilization

 So Jesus also suffered outside the city to make his people holy with his own blood. So let us go to Jesus outside the camp, holding on as he did when we are abused. Here on earth we do not have a city that lasts forever, but we are looking for the city that we will have in the future. Hebrews 13:12-14

Within the Republican Party Christianity is being weaponized, as either the means of establishing a Christian civilization, or as an instrument by which Christians, at least a few, might manipulate the masses. The former notion, of establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1] The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Roberson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken on a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war.

JD Vance however, falls into the second category in that his is not the goal of Christian civilization, but is aimed at a ruling elite (perhaps Christian) taking power. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel and a student of the work of René Girard, converted to Catholicism, after hearing a lecture by Thiel and recognizing through the work of Girard, that his life was given over to mimetic desire and competition (the heart of Girard’s theory). In this talk, as described by Vance, Thiel described the coming reality of future Yale graduates: “We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”[2] Vance came to recognize that raw ambition and mimetic desire were the driving force in his life: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” That realization brought a change of heart: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”[3] He even describes how he and his friends used to find a scapegoat to abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously, yet it is clear that his conversion, and entry into politics has not ended his scapegoating but simply redirected it. Now he cynically deploys what he formerly counted as sin, for the greater good. His attack on Haitian immigrants, which he acknowledged was a fiction, is useful for garnering political support. As he put it on CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He counts himself a Christian, but his Girardian Christianity presumes society will continue to operate through mimetic desire and scapegoating, and if Christians are to rule (to accomplish good), they must deploy this mechanism (evil?) to their advantage. As Ward describes, “Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.” In this, he is following Thiel, for whom Girard has provided an insight into how to manipulate markets and politics, not so as to follow Jesus, but to gain the upper hand in the rivalries constituting culture. The Jesus stuff pertains more privately and locally, but at the level of culture and civilization many Girardians eschew the notion that Christianity can serve as cultural or social foundation. Culture is built upon scapegoating and sacrifice, and Christians, presumably a Christian elite, can only deconstruct and manipulate this reality.

However, even in the former category of those promoting Christian civilization, the deployment of Christianity is no less instrumental and cynical. Jordan Peterson, among the most well-known promoters of Christian civilization, is unique in that he makes no pretense of being a Christian. In his “Message to the Christian Churches,” he describes the key role churches can play in fighting the culture wars, especially on behalf of young men (presumably white) who are made to feel the brunt of cultural guilt. He characterizes this cultural moment as the war against boisterous male children playing with toy guns, competing against one another, and the demeaning of patriarchal male dominance (which he seems to promote). He sees the attack on masculine exercise of power, the war against marriage, the presumption that healthy human activity is despoiling the planet and that human wants and needs are to be curbed, as leading to docility (the feminine?). All of this, in his picture of political correctness, is blamed on healthy male competition, pursuing the masculine virtues, or the masculine spirit of adventure (which Peterson encourages). Peterson names Derrida’s attack on the logos or logocentric society (seeming to confuse Derrida’s phallocentric logos with Christian Logos), equating the enemy with politically correct anti-masculinity, a bloody Marxism, or the work of deconstruction. He notes that the church needs to steer young men back to the adventure of life, to find a woman, to care for a garden, to build an ark, to conquer a land, to build a ladder to heaven, to make a more abundant life. The church he notes, may be rooted in the dead past, but nonetheless there is wisdom to be found in this tradition – the primary thing is not personal belief, but duty to the past, and the broader community of family, city, and country. So, the church must target young men and revitalize a masculine form of civilization.[4]

As Paul Kingsnorth notes in a talk at First Things, the one thing left out of Peterson’s recommendations is Jesus Christ, and of course along with Christ the virtues of humility, peacemaking, giving up worldly possessions, love of God and enemies.[5] He cites the passage in James, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:1-3). As Kingsnorth describes, what is encouraged could be equated with the seven deadly sins. Pride in masculine acquisition (greed), an open allowance for sexual desire (lust), and acknowledgement of mimetic rivalry (envy, wrath), all topped off with industrious leisure (sloth). Civilization clearly precedes the particulars of Christianity, Christian teaching, or Christian notions of redemption in Peterson’s formula. Christianity is an instrumental means to engage in the culture wars, and in Peterson’s description, Christ does not enter into the discussion at all.

Another example of this instrumental deployment of Christianity on behalf of civilization is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who describes her “conversion” to Christianity from atheism as a necessity to equip for “civilizational war.”[6] She describes her passage through radical Islam to atheism, and then to Christianity, with the last being motivated by concern for engaging in the war for civilization. The threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism” from the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia, and the rise of global Islamism, threatens the West ideologically and morally. As she says, “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Though her faith may be sincere, she expresses the key motive of her Christianity as civilizational. Afterall, “We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.”[7] Much as Vance is willing to engage in violent scapegoating for pragmatic purposes, pragmatism and civilizational survival are key to Ali.

Of course, this instrumental deployment of a civilizational Christianity has nothing to do with the actual Christian faith. Christ is not on the side of this sort of civilization or culture, which is seen as foundational and in which religion is simply a support. God and Christ are not on the side of kings and cultures, but these are consigned to the Evil One, who is the power behind the throne (in Luke 4:5-8 the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms in the world and says all these kingdoms “have been handed over to me, and I give them to whomever I wish” and Jesus does not challenge his claim). As Kingsnorth points out, there is a good argument to be made that Jesus should have taken the deal. Why not rule, so as to bring about a more benevolent state, and as with Vance to do good for the poor, or with Thiel so as to bring about a more successful technological innovation, or with Peterson to combat political correctness, or as with Ali, Bannon and Trump, to combat other civilizations. Politics for the greater good, Christian civilization, Constantinianism, world peace through greater strength, feeding the poor on the leftovers of an over-abundant wealth, isn’t this worthwhile, or could it be that the Devil is wrong? Perhaps he is not wrong, in that he has a winning formula, but wrong in that this is not the plan of God for his people.

God is not to be found among the powerful, the cultural elites, the men of war, or in the stability of culture, but he came as a poor carpenter, and associated with the poor and the sick, mostly avoiding the centers of power, and was crucified outside the city in the name of a civilization already failing (and which like all human civilizations was bound to disappear) . As the verse of the epigraph indicates, those who follow him are to imitate this humble life-style, leaving everything for his sake, and taking up the cross of affliction outside the camp (the circle of civil powers). The choice is between the logos and city of man (civilizational Christianity or Constantinianism) or the Logos and communion of Christ (outside the city).  

[1] See my piece running this down, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?” Here

[2] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic” in The Lamp (Issue 25), https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance

[3] Ian Ward, Politico, 09/18/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401

[4] See the talk here https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog-posts/article-message-to-the-christian-churches/

[5] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2

[6] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war” in Unherd (November 11, 2023), https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/ 

[7] Ibid.

A Sermon by Mr. Michael Hardin, PreachingPeace.com

Preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Kingsville, MD Christ the King Sunday, November 22, 2015

Scripture: John 18:33 – 37


33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ 34 Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ 35 Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ 36 Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ 37 Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

Sermon
Pilate might seem like the ultimate 21st Century Post-Modernist. “What is truth?” he says. What indeed is truth?

In Pilate’s time, of course, there were plenty of philosophies floating around the ancient world: Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Syrian, Egyptian and more, many more. And here’s Pilate, the Curator of Judea, confused by the whole mess, standing before a Galilean peasant who has the audacity to challenge him, challenge his authority but very covertly. If you have a Bible, you might like to follow along in this text. Now, I told Dan I don’t think I have ever preached on this particular text before, although when I was a pastor I did follow the lectionary cycle so there is a chance that back in the day I did.

But I was really struck this week in my work as I reflected and prepared for today. Here’s what’s really interesting from this particular text for us today. It’s not a question of what constitutes some sort of generic philosophical truth. And that’s how the tendency of preachers is to read this text. What is truth? Who can know the truth? How can you know the truth? How is truth even to be known? Is there such a thing as truth? And this is the dilemma the plagues the academy that I’ve been involved in for 30 years reading thousands of books by philosophers and theologians, and they all scramble really, really hard to try and figure out.. what is the truth? But in our Gospel, it’s already been said that the truth is not a concept. The truth is a person.

This changes everything because it takes the category of truth out of some sort of way to divide good and evil, right and wrong, true and false. It places it right into the category of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who he is and how he lived his existence. And in this text, right here before Pilate is going to come the key element of that which constitutes truth.

Truth is non-violent.

Jesus will say to Pilate in response to his question “Are you a king?” And Jesus says, “If I was a king of this world, my foot soldiers would have fought in the garden.” There’s an irony here, isn’t there? Because we know that Peter himself drew a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane to protect Jesus, slicing off the ear of a young man named Malchus, a servant of the Chief Priest. So, the fact is, Peter in the garden perceiving himself as a foot soldier of the truth, drew a sword and chopped off the ear of a man. And it’s a good thing he didn’t just run him threw. He just managed to miss this poor guy’s head. Peter was looking to behead the man. Think of this in terms of where we’re at politically today. Peter is no different than anyone in ISIS at that point in the garden. He thinks he’s going to protect Jesus by taking his sword and chopping the fellow’s head off. He misses, thankfully. The guy only loses an ear, which, according to the text, Jesus immediately replaces.

But when Jesus stands before Pilate, he’s very, very clear that his foot soldiers, that is, his true followers… do not bear arms. His followers will not take up weapons to protect him. Now there’s a double irony here. Not only does Peter take up the sword, but in this last week since the bombings in Paris, on Facebook, on Twitter, in the news, on blogs, and webcasts, Christian preacher after Christian preacher and lay people have said unequivocally that we have to take up arms against ISIS. And to that I want to say “Blasphemy!” The follower of Jesus does not take up arms, because the way he reigns, is not of this world.

Jesus is a substantively different leader than President Obama or Vladimir Putin or any other leader on the planet. Every single leader on the planet that runs a nation state or any government, with few exceptions, has a standing army and that standing army is there to protect the people. There is no way a civilized leader with a standing army or the power to push a red button and drop nuclear bombs or to command drones that kill innocent civilians can call themselves a follower of Jesus. They are just kings of this world just like Pilate, and they don’t get that truth has nothing to do with retaliation, nothing to do with violence.

When Christians come to the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, our tendency is to say “Oh. The people rejected Jesus because they wouldn’t accept his divinity, they wouldn’t accept his claim to be God.” That is not the case. What they specifically rejected was his claim to represent a non-violent God, a non-retaliatory God, a God who would have nothing to do with justice as “eye for eye’ and “tooth for tooth.” That god doesn’t exist. That god is an idol. That’s the god that was believed in by Second Temple Judaism. That’s the god that was believed on in Rome in its many forms. The only God to ever claim non-violence is the God and Father of Jesus, so much so, that this God alone of all the gods forgives.

The great critic of the New Testament, Rudolph Bultmann, was even able to say “Only the God of the Gospel forgives.” Forgiveness is not a category that’s used of figures like Zeus or Apollo. Only God forgives. Only the Maker of heaven and earth loves, forgives and chooses to lay down God’s own life and in the resurrection, not to come back as a retaliatory figure. And that’s what absolutely scared the disciples spitless on that Easter Sunday. They were waiting for vengeance. They had fled, they had betrayed, they had denied Jesus; it was their own people that crucified the Messiah. And surely sittin’ in the room that night when Jesus appears to them, all they can think of is the structure of their theology which requires justice, which requires vengeance, which requires god to satisfy god’s own honor. And so Jesus’ first word to them is the last word that will ever be spoken. “Shalom. Peace. Don’t be afraid. My Papa does not respond to violence with violence, and neither do I.”

And that is the truth that Pilate had in front of him, and that is the truth that confused him. How could this person claim to be a king and yet not take up arms? How is that truth? How is it? How is it that Christianity for almost two thousand years… and one could in fact argue this could be traced to the Jerusalem Church, but I won’t do that. I’ll just go seventeen hundred years with Constantine, not worry about the first three hundred. How is it that for seventeen hundred years we have managed to merge and mingle that which the Gospel has kept apart: God and violence? How is it that we as Christian theologians, as Church, as Christianity have married the two things that God has rent asunder: life and retaliation?

The Gospel text for today is so loaded with irony that if we look at our own historical situation right now as Church, all we can do is repent, because it is in the Name of Jesus that George Bush took this country into Iraq. It is in the Name of Jesus that Christian preachers on the radio and TV would have us sacrifice our young men and young women in Syria. It is in the Name of Jesus that the Airforce Academy in Colorado with its chapel shaped as F-16 jets sits and plays its video games and drones and kills innocent civilians right and left. We as Americans, we’re not just killing foreign terrorists, my friends.

Two days ago, we bombed a house that killed a two year old girl. A two year old girl. We did. That was done in our name. We, a Christian nation, killed this little girl. We don’t know the truth. We are so far from the truth in American Christianity, we’re no different than Pilate, or Peter in the garden, or James and John who would call down violence on a Samaritan village. And like them, we, too, are confronted with the Risen Christ who does not come back with revenge. Jesus did not come back with revenge and retaliation on Easter Sunday, and he’s not coming back in the future with revenge and retaliation.

Some years back, where I live in Lancaster, I drove by a church sign out front – you know all those church signs you read when you’re driving past churches – it said “Jesus is coming back and boy is he pissed.” I don’t worship that Jesus. The Jesus I worship is the Son of the Father. The Jesus I worship is homoousius, of the same substance, of the same reality as the Father. The Jesus I worship is non-violent. The Jesus I worship is forgiving. The Jesus I worship is loving, and nurturing, and compassionate, and merciful, and generous. And so is Papa.

The God who now looks down upon you does not look down upon you with hatred. The God who looks down upon you now doesn’t look at your life and demand or require some atonement from you. The God that makes heaven and earth looks down upon you as His precious children. And He looks down upon the ISIS terrorists as His precious children. And looks down upon that two year old that we killed in His Name as His precious child.

We are all on trial today in American Christianity. We are all on trial. It’s not for us to sit and equivocate about the nature of the truth – Well, Jesus got angry in the temple. Well, Jesus said why don’t you buy a sword – and to try and find a way out, a way back to the kingdom of this world. It is our place to listen only to his voice and recognize that he alone, he alone reveals the character of God. And he alone is the one who comes in that revelation and reconciles us by being crucified on a Roman cross.

How many crosses do you suppose there are in this sanctuary, pictures and icons? And from that cross he prays, “Father. Don’t forgive them! Get them back! Send some bombs on them! Kill them!” Does he do that? Does Jesus say that?….. He says “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And that is our problem. We don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to the issues of violence and justice, retaliation and revenge.

If we are going to follow Jesus, there is only one way, only one way. And that way is the same way he went. “If you would be my disciple, take up your cross.” To take up your cross doesn’t mean to suffer. It means to learn to live with the same measure of forgiveness that Jesus himself preached and taught his whole ministry. As he died, over and over again from that cross he was saying “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

René Girard, the great thinker that just passed recently, said “There are only two things that can reconcile: violence and love.” Violence does reconcile, my friends. When we take our anger and hostility out together against someone, when we as a group blame someone for our woes, when someone in our family systems we perceive is the trouble, we blame them for all the woes in the family, when we scapegoat others,.. we can be reconciled. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Violence does reconcile.

But that’s not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Love reconciles. Love absorbs the pain. Love absorbs the violence. Love say “You can kill me, but I believe in a God of love. I believe in a God that raises the dead. I believe in a Kingdom to come. Your liturgy is suffused with this language, the language of truth, the language of the reign of God. Listen to what you just said in the prayers. Listen to what you’re going to say next.

God is good. And this is the Gospel of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

(Register for the class with Michael Hardin: René Girard and Nonviolent Atonement here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings). The course will run from the week of October 7th to December 6th.)

The Satanic Scandal Versus the Scandal of the Cross

In the Bible, both Jesus and Satan are skandalon, or stumbling stones. The scandal or offense, entraps, snares, obstructs, and causes a fall. It is translated as “cause for stumbling,” “cause of sin,” “difficulty,” “hindrance,” “hindrance in the way,” “make fall,” “pitfall,” “stumbling block,” “temptation,” or “temptation to sin.” The Psalms often revolve around those who would kill by laying their snares (Ps. 38:12), setting a hidden trap (Ps. 140:5), and the trap setters imagine they are hidden (“Who can see us?” (Ps. 64:5)), and this is equated with being an evildoer (Ps. 141:9). Intermixed with all this trap setting is the fact of human desire acting to lure one into the trap, thus Saul uses his daughter Michal as a lure for David (1 Sam. 18:21), Joshua warns that the Canaanites, their idols and presumably intermarrying with them, will be a snare (Josh. 23:13), and so too God warns “their gods shall be a snare” and they shall “become adversaries to you” (Judg. 2:3).[1]

Idolatry is equated with a form of prostitution, and the idols play the role of harlots entrapping worshippers in a deadly embrace (e.g., Ez. 16). The obstacle cause of desire, whether idols, gold, golden idols, sex objects, or golden-phallic-idols, consist of giving a divine like status to an obstacle (the obstacle to true divinity). The idol is a scandal, because it simultaneously takes on a divine role and becomes an obstacle to God. The false transcendence gives rise to an exponential desire, which makes the idol “the quintessential scandal, in the Old Testament,” according to René Girard.[2] Entrapment due to desire, whether unleashed by idols or sex objects – which are often equated by the prophets, indicates that human lust plays a deadly role, creating the skandolon.

Idols are a scandal for the Jews but so are Yahweh (e.g., Is. 8:14-15) and Jesus (Matt. 21:42-43). Falling over either sort of scandal causes an exposure, a failure, or a point of shame. The scandal exposed in idolatry concerns the exponential nature of human desire – it is beyond being satisfied and is inherently deceived. That is, there is no end of this pursuit and no gaining what is sought (Ezekiel 23); thus, it is portrayed as deadly in a three-fold sense: it leads to child sacrifice; it imagines death or the grave (what has no life) can give life; it is connected to shame (a living death). Paul equates works of the law, love of money, or simply greed, with idolatrous desire (Col. 3:5-11; Eph. 5:5; Gal. 4:9) and the Christian who would do such things is annulling the scandal of the cross: “Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished” (Gal. 5:11). Every phase of the life and death of Jesus might be equated with a form of scandal: his encounters with the scribes and Pharisees, his teachings and parables, but most significantly the cross is a scandal (I Cor. 1:23). To miss the key role of the skandalon is to miss the significance of Christ.

The competition between the one whose head is crushed and the one whose heel is bruised (Gen. 3:15) involves all of human history and all humanity. That is, the satanic scandal is not nonhuman but, as in the story in Genesis 3, it is the offense of the autonomous human world, presumed as sufficient (the knowledge of good and evil, the idol, the law, etc.). The provenance of this mysterious serpent, linked to satan (perhaps not Satan, but the satan(s)), is of the earth, and the poison he imparts, John sums up as a singular deadly presumption: “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world” (I John 2:16-17). The term “cosmos,” which depicts a closed world, is John’s word for capturing this world of lust or desire, which prides itself on the presumption of life. This is of the world – it is earthly and human in its origins and end. This pride of life describes the original temptation, but is the ongoing presumption that life is “my” possession, while simultaneously in the “lust of the eyes” and the “lust of the flesh” the object of desire (life, being, substance) is lacking.

The role of the serpent is not mentioned by either John or Paul, and yet both seem to be referring directly to the Genesis account. In Romans (7:7), the law models desire or plays the serpents role, in giving rise to desire. For John, love of the cosmos gives rise to the lust of the eyes. Like the serpent which appears from the earth and disappears into dust, this desire is earth bound in its instigation and pursuit. To assign a metaphysical reality to this serpent may be to miss the nature of the scandal. Lust and desire arise around the illusion that the object of desire, be it the idol, money, or some desirous other, can impart substance (life, wisdom, being). The turn to violence to extract this substance from the blood of Abel, the blood of Joseph, or the blood of Christ, is the end point of this obsessive desire.

The scandalous lie, in Isaiah and which Paul takes up in Romans, depicts the rulers of Jerusalem entering into a pact with Sheol (the place of the dead) or a “covenant with death.” This is to make “falsehood” a refuge and it is to attempt to hide behind a deception (Is. 28:14-15). Paul repeats this accusation when comparing faith and works pitting faith (the true refuge) against the law (a lying refuge): “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.” The human race, in the image of Isaiah (repeated by Peter and Paul) have entered a covenant with death, and Christ has annulled the covenant and its effects: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a tested stone, A costly cornerstone for the foundation, firmly placed. He who believes in it will not be put to shame” (Rom. 9:31-33; Is. 28:16). The Romans, like the Galatians, are being lured by a false teacher to trust in the law; to locate life in their doing of the law, rather than in Christ.  Paul fuses two passages from Isaiah, to picture the singular stone as both tripping up those who are “missing the law,” bringing them to shame, while those who have faith (trust in this scandalous stone), will not be put to shame.

The cross is a scandal, in light of the presumed self-sufficiency (of the Genesis lie, of the covenant with death, or the doing of the law), as it exposes the scandalous lie denying the reality of death and desire. This spiritual battle is not devoid of flesh and blood, but culminates when the one who is lifted up casts out the prince of this world, and as a result all of humanity is drawn to the crucified (John 12:32). It is the “lifting up” which reveals Jesus’ identity as the “I am” (YHWH): “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He’” (John 8:28). Here is the realization of Isaiah, that through the “lifted up” servant “you may know and believe that I AM” (Isa. 43:10; 52:13). This lifting up is a saving revelation, applied from “In the beginning” of John: “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:4-5). The darkness of the cross is the end point of the satanic scandal, as the cross reverses and exposes the scandal. The stone of stumbling has become the corner stone of a new living temple (I Peter 2:4-8).

The interplay is between the scandalous lie and the scandalous truth in regard to death, with the stone of stumbling or the scandal serving as either headstone or cornerstone.

[1] The list is from David McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels: Jesus, Story, and Offense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 8.

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 421.

Mimetic Desire Giving Rise to Sin: René Girard and Exposure of the Scandalous Lie

René Girard was insulted with “Girardian Theory” as a description of his work, as mimesis, which is central to every phase of his work, is a well-known phenomenon, recognized from Plato onward in western philosophy and thought.[1] It is not as though Girard discovers mimesis, but he uncovers the logic of mimetic desire in the model of desire, the obstacle cause of desire (the skandolon), and ultimately the founding murder and sacrificial religion. Girard calls his project “mimetic theory” as the entirety of his thought, whether on the novel, anthropology, religion, or theology, is a prolonged description of the workings and logic of human desire, which is mimetic or an imitation (desire is not our own, but what draws into community). Its mimetic quality gives rise to and explains the range of interpersonal dynamics, from envy, pride, rivalry, violence, scapegoating, sacrificial religion, and in turn is a key point in understanding the Judeo-Christian religion in its exposure of this dynamic.

On a surface level the arc of the theory is easy to summarize but may not be convincing, as its inner logic depends upon recognizing the nature of desire which has each of us in its grip and which we have a vested interest in misrecognizing. That is, we are all implicated in this story, and unless we recognize this by penetrating our own self-deception, it is not only Girard, but his identification of the heart of the New Testament, that may fail to impress.

The problem is two-fold. First, the lie surrounding desire is the notion that desire originates within us. It is “my desire” and this is the most private and intimate thing about me. Isn’t desire an expression of my inmost self, arising spontaneously from what is the very center of personhood? The desiring subject, though kept hidden, is taken to be the true subject. An imitated desire, under this definition, is inauthentic and is unbelievable. Corporately and individually amidst the worst forms of evil, as Jesus pointed out from the cross, we do not know what we are doing. We cannot get a handle on the truth, as there is disability in identifying the scandal (the cause of sin) giving rise to human desire.

Second, though envy, jealousy, inadequacy, shame and pride are a universally recognizable part of human experience, there is also the profound sense, as with desire, that these are peculiar and private. This is so personal and shameful, we are unlikely to admit this truth to ourselves, let alone to other people. The tendency is to obscure the underlying feeling of emptiness, of not being enough, of lacking in being, giving rise to desire. To put it in biblical terms (recently rediscovered in psychology), shame is an unbearable experience which requires it be hidden in pride. This truth is hard to bear and describe but is so recognizably the case, which explains the key role of the modern novel in Girard’s discovery.

Anyone who has tried to write about themselves may understand the temptation to flattery and deception – everything rings hollow and false. There is a reason hagiography was and is the predominant form of biography and autobiography and has been for millennia. Inflation, a façade, is much easier to accomplish, and perhaps less painful, than truth. Truth can be sordid, dark, painful to read, and painful to write, yet the best novels touch upon a truth that is immediately recognizable.

The compressed development of the “I” novel in modern Japan illustrates the point, that a certain masochistic destructiveness takes hold in the “confessional novel,” making it the most dangerous profession in Japan (due to suicide). The truth of the human condition can become overwhelming (especially in the Japanese novel which is often entirely lacking in redemptive elements). Likewise, reading Dostoevsky is not hard, simply “because of all the names,” but because the depth of darkness is hard to endure. Envy, rivalry, lust, murderous intent, and the pride that prevails in the human condition reaches uncomfortable levels of intimacy. The best fiction takes up a realism that dispels romanticism and which reduces most mere history (personal or corporate) to a form of fiction.

According to the histories of the novel, this modern literary art form takes as its point of departure and development entry into human interiority presumed throughout Scripture. As Erich Auerbach and others have pointed out, from Genesis forward, the literature of the Bible is developing a technique of interiority which will only be fully appreciated and deployed in the modern novel. The “violation of consciousness” or the presumption to enter into human interiority is the working premise of Scripture, taken up in the modern art form. What separates second rate literature from literary masterpieces is the capacity to deal truthfully with human interiority. According to Girard, the “romantic lie” is thoroughly exposed by “novelistic truth”[2] and this novelistic truth is afforded through biblical revelation.

The romantic lie is a manifestation of the singular lie that life, substance and being reside within. The serpent of Genesis models a form of desire, in which divine life is graspable and consumable. The mediation of desire in the tree of knowledge, is the obstacle to its realization (divine life). It is an obstacle to the fulfillment of the promised desire, but the failure of the lie is not its exposure, but a doubling down on extracting life from death. The scandal initiated by the serpent identifies the role of Satan. Satan is the “adversary” or the original fabricator of the obstacle to desire through misdirection of the lie.

Christ directly identifies Peter with Satan and the scandal, as Peter is caught up in human desire in his attempt to misdirect Jesus away from the cross: “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block (scandal) to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.” His specific guilt is imitating the crowd (saving himself, as evidenced in the High Priest’s courtyard), rather than imitating Christ: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Mt 16:24–25).

Mimesis is not inherently sinful, but the scandalous model becomes an obstacle, unlike the model of Christ. Cain kills able to obtain his place before God. Lamech is a serial murderer, as he would reap divine vengeance and take the place of God. The generation of Noah is consumed by mimetic desire and rivalry until all differences are drowned in sameness. The desire prompted by the lie is exponential. Participation in the divine life is not through extracting life from death (violence, scapegoating, crucifixion) but through taking up the cross. Jesus explanation to those who would kill him is that they are caught up in a murderous lie: “You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). They are carrying out the desires of the devil in their murderous plots.

To ignore the mimetic nature of desire is to miss the fundamental impetus to evil. The role of the “model of desire” and the structuring role of the model turned obstacle (the skandolon), give rise to sin. The obstacle cause of desire, is the direct experience of the lie the New Testament calls the skandolon, or in its verb form, skandalizein. The noun gives rise to the verb or is the cause of sinning. Thus, the New American Bible translates Matthew 5:30: “And if your right hand causes you to sin (skandalizei), cut it off.” 

Excision of the scandal is not accomplished through cutting off the hand, but through crushing the head from which it arose. The murderous logic of mimetic desire is undone in Christ’s exposure of its dynamics.

[1] This is the beginning claim of Michael Joseph Darcy,  (2016). René Girard, Sacrifice, and the Eucharist (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/45 This dissertation is one of the finest summaries of Girard’s work I have come across.

[2] As Darcy points out, “The French title of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, or literally, ‘romantic lie and novelistic truth.’” Darcy, 2.

Imitation as Salvation

A central motif of Scripture, obscured by Martin Luther’s reaction to works righteousness, is the focus on imitating Christ. As Adam Koontz points out, “Luther’s confrontations with Anabaptists in the 1520s and 1530s caused him to react strongly against their urging a very literal imitation of Christ that excluded the just war tradition of Christian political thinking.”[1] The way I experienced this obscuring of imitation may be typical. It was not that the idea was ever directly dismissed, but in my seminary education the focus was on harmonizing the Gospels; rather than studying the life and teaching of Christ as a model to be imitated, the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain were relegated to the old covenant of works. In turn, “taking up the cross and following Jesus” was displaced by the notion of Jesus final payment for sin; that is, “Jesus died so that I do not have to.” Faith alone may not completely exclude the notion of imitating Christ but it is made secondary, as Luther demonstrated in his preference for the term conformitas Christi to imitatio Christi as a way of deemphasizing the Anabaptist focus.

Though imitation is central in Paul’s theology, Pauline theology (which in the Reformation is taken as the central theology of the New Testament) as interpreted through Luther and Calvin, makes very little (theologically) of the life and teaching of Christ. Focus on Christ as a sacrificial payment displaces the theological significance of the historical Jesus. It is not so much that Paul trumps Jesus, but Luther’s and Calvin’s Paul trumps the Paul focused upon the historical Jesus. “Faith alone,” penal substitution, anti-works, renders imitation of the historical Jesus secondary. For example, Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament is focused on Paul’s theology and within Paul’s theology imitation is all but dismissed.[2] In this understanding, the historical Jesus is more of a problem to be solved than a model to be followed. After all, Paul had no link with the historical Jesus and the Gospels are inconsistent and need to be harmonized in order to recover the historical Jesus.

 At a popular level, something like imitation of Jesus resurfaced in bracelets (WWJD which played off the 19th century novel by Charles Sheldon, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?). But it may have been that this reduced to a religious fad, as it was focused on an ethical decisionism (a questionable sort of ethical foundation), rather than taking the life of Christ as key to theological understanding. So too, the Anabaptist notion of a literal imitation of Christ did not set imitation within a larger theological understanding.[3] Anabaptists could read the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ other ethical teaching quite literally but Anabaptists would fall short, for example, of someone such as Thomas à Kempis whose theology is one in which imitation is the very fabric of salvation (see below).

There are the specific passages that command imitation but much of the vocabulary and theology of the New Testament presumes imitation. Walking as Christ walked, putting on the faith of Christ, taking up the cross, being in Christ, being a disciple of Christ or being part of the family of Christ is premised on imitation. The central significance of imitation is lost if Christ is primarily a payment for sin or a legal remedy obtaining imputed righteousness. But what if imitation of Christ is in fact the primary means of salvation, a salvation not merely of a future estate, but a present tense realization of “putting on Christ” and a putting off of evil? Could it be that imitating Christ is salvation, is atonement, is an ethic, is a theology?

The purpose behind the writing of the New Testament beginning with the Gospels, is that the life of Christ is a model around which his teaching and Christian teaching coheres. The incarnation, the life and death and resurrection of Christ is not primarily a doctrine, a set of propositions, or an institution, but it is a life which in its opening message calls out “follow me.” The reason for recording this life, the reason for prompting a particular ethic, or a particular understanding and doctrine, is to bring about reduplication of the life of Christ in his followers. It is his life that is being shared in the gospel message, so that imitation and participation are the very substance of salvation.

Paul’s Gospel coheres around the understanding that imitation is the mode of salvation. His suffering, his imprisonment, and his manner of life are part and parcel of the gospel he is modeling so as to be imitated: “Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life” (I Tim. 1:16). Bad models and rivalrous imitation looms in many of Paul’s letters. As I previously described it (here), to the rivalry prone lovers of hierarchy and false power in Corinth, Paul has a singular recommendation and resolution: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). The danger is that they would create a scandal of imitation gone bad: “Give no offense [do not become a scandal] to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 10:31-11:1). To be saved, is to imitate Christ.  

Where Paul has been present, he can simply appeal to himself as the model, but as in Ephesians the model is God revealed in Christ: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Eph 5:1–2). This appeal to imitate God comes after specific descriptions of what imitation will entail: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Eph 4:32). The appeal throughout Ephesians is that being members of one another in Christ entails adapting his form of life: “if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self” (Eph. 4:21-22). Even and especially the most intimate of relationships is to be carried out in imitation of Christ: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph 5:25).

In what is considered to be one of his earliest letters, Paul explains that the Thessalonians have come to have hope in Christ through imitation and that they are spreading the Gospel as others imitate them: “You also became imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia” (I Thess. 1:6). The imitation of the Lord, and of Paul, and then of the Thessalonians is the way one enters into the “power” of the Holy Spirit and the “conviction” of the gospel (1:5). Imitation is the way the gospel spreads as becoming imitators of Christ and the apostles is the way one receives the gospel – it could hardly be otherwise. Imitation is a sign of election and is the way the Gospel works “not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit” (1:5). Imitation takes up the suffering of Christ but also the joy this entails (1:6). Paul describes his imparting of the gospel as a giving of his own life: “Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives” (2:8). The life of Christ in the life of Paul is the very means of providing sustenance, just as a “nursing mother” imparts sustenance and her own life to her children (2:7).

The way the gospel is taken up and the way that discipleship continues is through imitation of a model: “For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, because we did not act in an undisciplined manner among you . . . but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you, so that you would follow our example” (2 Thess. 3:7-9). This is what it means to “hold to the traditions” and this is the point of being taught, whether verbally or in writing. It coheres as a model to be imitated, resulting in “good work” (2 Th 2:15–3:1). Tradition and gospel and rule of faith contain a living model, a life that is to be shared through imitation. Apart from imitating the life thus conveyed, there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith.

Each of Paul’s letters is premised on imitation, but perhaps none more so than Philippians. The irony is that in interpreting Philippians, if it is not understood that both Paul and Christ are models to be imitated then the very substance of what Christ has done is obscured. That is the entire movement of Christ is not a one-off payment but is meant to be a manner of life: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Php. 2:5–8).

If we imagine Paul is describing Christ’s movement from his preincarnate state to the incarnation, this is hardly something we can imitate. As James McClendon describes it, “Hence, the dominant feature of 2:5-11 has never been a heavenly-descent myth, for it is not a passage about the pre-incarnate acts of God, but one that juxtaposes Messiah Jesus’ earthly vicissitudes with the vast claim of his Lordship – on earth, but also in heaven and over the nether world.”[4] Jesus’ refusal to grasp equality with God must refer to the temptation in his incarnation, a temptation we experience and resist through imitating Christ. Paul’s premise throughout is to encourage imitation as a means of discipleship: “Brethren, join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us” (Php. 3:17). Jesus is the primary model, the pattern which Paul has also modeled.

Christ’s Lordship is established through his suffering and death on the cross and this is the pattern that is to be imitated. His manner of life, his humility, his suffering, and his death, is the archetypical pattern and not simply a one-off payment which cannot be replicated.  The “image of God” which he models and which the first pair and their progeny failed to live up to is not some “designated state but a task set, not an ontic level enjoyed but an ideal to be realized.”[5] The path of servitude and suffering is the model of the divine image Christ modeled and which his disciples imitate.

The conclusion: it is his life that is being shared in the gospel message, so that imitation and participation are the very substance of salvation. Apart from imitating the life thus conveyed, there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith. On this basis, Thomas à Kempis opens his book The Imitation of Christ, urging a focus on the study of the life of Christ as the means to imitate his life and attain to his understanding: “’HE WHO follows Me, walks not in darkness,’ says the Lord. By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort; therefore, be to study the life of Jesus Christ.”[6]

[1] Adam C. Koontz, The Imitation of Paul in the Greco-Roman World (Unpublished Dissertation, Temple University, 2020) 10.

[2] Ibid, 3.

[3] There was a move toward a Christus Victor reading of the atonement but this did not displace penal substitution among Anabaptists.

[4] James McClendon, Doctrine: Systematic Theology Vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) 267.

[5] McClendon, 268.

[6] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (The Catholic Primer, 2004).