Rene Girard – Forging Ploughshares

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Focus on the Devil

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

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

The Focus on the Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul’s Focus on Deliverance from Deception and Death

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

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

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

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

[2] Dawson, 79.

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

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

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

[6] Dawson, 80.

[7] Dawson, 82.

[8] Dawson, 83.

[9] Dawson, 83.

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

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

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

From Mediation Through the Other to Intimate Mediation

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

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

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

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

Faith as Trusting the Mediating Voice Behind the Law

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

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

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

Refusing the One Behind the Law for the Law Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Chantre, 67.

[3] Chantre, 78.

[4] Chantre, 68.

[5] Chantre, 71.

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

[7] Chantre, 71.

[8] Chantre, 72.

[9] Chantre, 73.

[10] Chantre, 66.

[11] Chantre, x.

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

[13] Chantre, 85.

[14] Chantre, 85.

[15] Chantre, 13.

Benoît Chantre’s Girardian Reading of Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Chantre, 47-48.

[3] Chantre, 59.

[4] Chantre, 59-60.

[5] Chantre, 60-61.

[6] Chantre, 61.

[7] Chantre, 63.

[8] Chantre, 64.

[9] Chantre, 52.

[10] Chantre.66.

[11] Chantre, 53.

[12] Chantre, 53.

Why Are Some Blind to the Slaughter?

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were caregivers, described by friends and family as compassionate and kind, and both were killed in the midst of caring for their neighbors. Renee had just dropped off her 6-year-old at school and her final words, in the midst of protesting the actions of ICE, were to give comfort to those who killed her: “I am not mad at you.” Alex’s last words were for a woman who had been pepper sprayed, “Are you okay, are you okay?” He put himself between the woman and her assailants, perhaps the natural response of an ICU nurse. Pictures of Alex helping veterans and offering comfort to patients, reminded me of the ICU nurse who cared for me after having heart problems. She seemed angelic, and Alex was clearly also gifted with compassion. Both Alex and Renee spent their lives caring, until there was no more to give.

The wanton slaughter of these two precious lives is obvious for all to see, such that the mystery is why some are blind to the reality. Beyond the obvious evil of the killings are the slanderous responses, betraying the same blindness. The claims that “they had it coming,” before and after the fact, are made of the same stuff. Clearly the killers are blind, but so too those unable to see that shooting a mother in the face or a man in the back ten times, is not justifiable. Blindness to slaughter of the good and beautiful is exposed for what it is at the cross, however, recognizing this “evil” means exposing the lie of the justifications, the law and order that killed Christ.

There are three levels of “legal justification” surrounding the murders, and accompanying each level is a more profound evil.

The Universal Law in Which the Evil Suffer and the Good Prosper

The main law justifying the killing is on the order of the unwritten law of the friends of Job, presuming “he had it coming,” otherwise it would not have happened. The instinctual presumption that the guilty suffer preserves from the troubling reality. We can identify with the “good” and not worry about the contamination involved in identifying with the “guilty.” In this absolute legalism, suffering is already guilt. The pervasiveness of this understanding struck me, when a local man in our little town was killed by the police and the wife of a man who is now a Republican legislator, immediately pronounced him guilty. The world is divided into the guilty and the innocent and those who are poor, black, brown, foreign, or immigrants, suffer because they probably deserve it.

The law “justifying” the killings and deployed in the form of ICE agents, is aimed at weeding out illegals, foreigners, and immigrants, and has been mainly leveled at people of color. “These people” are not protected by this instinctual law, but are its living proof. Justification is inscribed in the flesh of those being punished and those who do the punishing. Those white citizens who might empathize or even identify with the suffering have placed themselves outside of this unwritten law and are guilty by association. “Clearly, they had it coming.”

This law may float free of religion or it may be codified as part of a religious understanding. It may be called karma, nature, reaping what you sow, or lex talionis, but it is the misunderstood law written on the heart which stands behind many forms of “natural” and religious law.

The Christianized Version of the Universal Law

Ironically, Christians may be the most confused about where Christ stands in regard to the law, presuming that he died to uphold it rather than to expose its deadly nature. Rather than mere blindness, inherited from the universal law on the order of the friends of Job or the aggravated blindness of the scribes and Pharisees, some suffer from a doubly confounded blindness in assigning Jesus’ death to upholding the law that killed him. Penal substitution presumes God does the killing, and the killers are his instruments, assigned to play their various roles so as to achieve an atoning payment. There is a Christianity blinded to the evil which put Christ on the cross, assigning it to God, and it is this form of the religion that confuses God with the victimizers.

Here the Christian friends of Job can quote Romans 13 (in isolation from chapter 12), along with German Christians serving Hitler, justifying the murder of all who oppose the Leader. In this understanding Caesar, the President, the police, the soldiers, or ICE, cannot break the law as they are the law. They embody the law and serve as its instruments. These Christians imagine that their allegiance to Empire and their allegiance to God are one and the same and the presumption is that God put Trump, or Putin, or Caesar in power. The notion is that God ordains specific governments to accomplish his will and this is in line with his redemptive strategy in and through the Church, so that the ordination of Christ and the Church is on a continuum with God’s use of state and law.

In this understanding, Roman law and God’s law are united to bring about the death of Jesus, so that he might pay the penalty of the law. God is working out his providential intent to punish Jesus under the law so that he might be punished for all. Rome, with its god-Caesar is not being judged, nor is Israel and its leaders who bow down to Caesar. None are called to repentance, but Israel’s and Rome’s justice are perfectly adequate for God’s purposes. After all, Rome and the Church will unite under Emperor Constantine and this Constantinian Christianity imagines that human law, justice, and government, are in accord with God’s purposes in Christ. In this understanding the economy of salvation works with the economy of human cultures and nations so that salvation comes through Constantinian Rome or Christian America.

People fleeing violence and poverty are subjected to a law, which anyone vaguely familiar with the teaching of Jesus would seem to condemn as evil. Yet, it is Christians, steeped in a religion they link to Jesus, that are blinded to the forces which killed Jesus, which slaughtered Renee and Alex, which continues to kill Palestinians, and which can be linked to a catalog of genocidal violence.

This may seem as close to radical evil as possible, but something even worse is unfolding.

A Scapegoating Christianity

There is an elite who recognize the function of the law in creating scapegoats, who recognize Jesus’ exposure of the scapegoating mechanism, and rather than eschew violence, they are taking control by deploying new levels of violence. The oligarchs backing Donald Trump, and who have also shaped the career of JD Vance, recognize that their accumulation of wealth and power depend upon heightened fear, continued willingness of the masses to submit to authoritarian rule, and ultimately the suspension of democratic society, and several identify as Christians.

The Republican party has a long history of weaponizing Christianity, so as to manipulate the shift that is unfolding. Where I am located, in rural Missouri, thirty or so years ago there was next to no Republican presence, while today the opposite is the case. The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric and action against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war. Establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue originally 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]

Peter Thiel, arguably the key ideologue among the cohort of oligarchs surrounding Trump (including his fellow South African, Elon Musk), writes, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[2] He remains committed to the “Christian faith” but stands “against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” Thiel hopes to use technology, so-called “transhumanism,” to escape death. He plans to create a new order with its own currency, its own social order, and its own interplanetary colonies and is taking active steps to bring this about. He has not only funded Vance but Curtis Yarvin, the architect of “neocameralism,” advocating replacing “democracy with corporate governance, citizens with customers, democratic deliberation with algorithmic optimization.” His RAGE doctrine aims to “Retire All Government Employees”—and Musk’s DOGE (Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency) began systematically purging civil servants following this blueprint.[3]

Mike Brock lists the various means Thiel is deploying, but key to the death of Alex and Renee are his plans for ICE. As Brock notes, “Palantir’s ICE integration means deportation agents use Thiel’s surveillance software for mass raids—over $248 million in documented contracts since 2011, including systems that track Americans’ movements, associations, and communications. This isn’t law enforcement technology but population management infrastructure that makes democratic resistance impossible by eliminating the privacy necessary for organizing collective action.”[4] In Thiel’s overt deployment of scapegoating, some must die that a few (himself) will be saved. In one interview, when asked whether humanity should continue, he was unclear if this was his goal.[5] The overt weaponizing of the power he finds exposed in Christianity (through the work of René Girard), uses the evil power exposed by the crucified, and seeks to manipulate it for his personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

The Exposure of the Lie of Evil

Jesus exposed the lie that God is not with those on crosses, those who suffer, the poor, immigrants and the outcast. God does not wield power through death and suffering but in Christ has defeated this power. He exposes the blindness of those who cannot recognize the innocent victim. In the words of the Psalmist quoted by Jesus, “They hated me for no reason” (Jn. 15:25; Ps. 35:19). They demonize and criminalize Jesus, who submits himself to their blindness as, “These words of Scripture have to be fulfilled in me ‘He let himself be taken for a criminal’” (Luke 22:37; Mark 15:28). As with every scapegoat, Christ is the perceived source of the problem and he is killed to protect the law and the nation. He pronounced his killers blind, both before and from the cross. These blind guides cannot see they are crucifying the Lord of Glory because their vision is distorted by the law, which separates good from evil, Jew from Gentile, clean from unclean, and ultimately God’s people from his enemies. They imagine God is on the side of the victimizers, the crucifiers, those wielding the law and he is against all who fall outside the law.

This blindness is compounded by those who pervert Christianity and see scapegoating sacrifice as God’s instrument of salvation. They fail to benefit from Jesus’ exposure of the lie and due to their misconstrual, there is no rescue available. But there is something worse than this failed form of the faith: those who recognize Jesus was scapegoated, that he exposed and defeated this mechanism, but instead of implementing his defeat of evil they would manipulate it so as to control the world enslaved by its power. They are worse than blind, in that they would use their insight to manipulate the blind. Renee Good and Alex Pretti are victims of this engineered blindness, on display not only in their killers but in those blind to their murder.

[1] See my piece, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?”

[2] He explains in “The Education of a Libertarian” https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

[3] Mike Brock, From the website “Notes From the Circus,” https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-oligarchs-bible-how-peter-thiel

[4] Ibid.

[5]https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=thiel+interview+questioning+if+humanity+should+continue&type=E210US105G91970#id=1&vid=ba10f2404febf524085599d5fd85c897&action=click