Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Erik Borgman    

The Weak Presence of Grace
A Theological Plea for the Return to the Ambivalences of Modernity

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My colleague as a Catholic theologian Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI but who wants to remain a professional theologian at the same time, as the introduction to his recent book on Jesus makes clear,[1] has recently criticized fundamentally what he calls a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in the Western world, and from there spreading through the world in general.[2] Although René Girard has wholeheartedly endorsed Ratzinger’s view – ‘Yes, he is right’, Girard said in an interview, ‘his formulation is excelent’; and later on he adds: ‘Yes, it is a culture war’; he presents as his opinion that ‘a civilization without religion goes to the dogs’ and that therefore Ratzinger’s challenging of relativism is important ‘not only for the Church and for Europe, but for the whole world’[3] –, my opposition to it is partly inspired by Girard’s theory. In my view there is too much mimesis in it, too much envy on and fear of Islam, that so clearly presents a powerful and unambiguous face to the world without seemingly much in which relativism and which therefore has to be taken seriously by everybody. Should the talk about a ‘culture war’ not be a warning, I wonder, a warning that we, with one of René Girard’s favorite New Testament quotes, are trying to cast out Satan with Satan (Marc 3: 23). This would mean that we may think that we have beaten the evil that threatens us, but are in fact re-enforcing evil in its dominion. I agree that ‘relativism’ is a problem, theologically as well as socially and politically, but absolutism, or even the failure to give room to the relativizing movement in religion in general, and in Christianity in particular, is even more of a problem. Not Christianity should be considered absolute, truth and only truth should be considered absolute. This implies that every truth claim becomes relative.

            As I see it, and as will hopefully become clearer in the course of this lecture, the paradoxical point of Christianity is that its claim that truth, that is indeed beyond all relativity, has taken on the form of relativity and weakness. The truth Christianity presents is therefore not its truth, not the truth of Christianity. Therefore it seems to me that Modernity, with its democratic and anti-authoritarian ethos, its stress on arguments and discussion, its stress also on fallibility realizing that what seems to be true now can be proven wrong tomorrow, has understood something of importance of the self-emptying movement truth has, according to the Christian tradition. Modern thought should therefore not be considered as expressing an enslavement to a self-inflicted ‘Diktatur des Relativismus’, undermining modern civilization itself because all civilization is by necessity based on a foundation it considers to be absolute.

            In other words, there is too much of a Nineteenth Century’s apologetics in Ratzinger’s position. As you may know, in the Nineteenth Century the Catholic Church tried to show how Modernity, with its stress on freedom and autonomy, led in fact to violence and chaos. Obedience to the authority of the Church was presented as a redemption from this fateful threat. It is not that there are no problems with modern conceptions of autonomy and freedom, but the purposely constructed ‘clash of civilizations’ led to mechanisms of scapegoating within the Church, so sharply recognized and criticized by René Girard. Especially theologians and other intellectuals were labeled and condemned as ‘modernists’, people representing Modernity within the anti-modern fort the hierarchy wanted the Church to be. With their exclusion, Modernity and the conflicts it brought with it were symbolically driven out, and the Church was symbolically restored as a harmonious community. Thus it could claim to represent Gods glorious reign, the redemption from all ambiguity of which the threats were so clearly present in Modernity and its social and ideological expressions like liberalism and socialism. The problem of Ratzinger’s position is not just that the mechanisms of exclusion are still at work in the Catholic Church, with the same intention as in the anti-Modernist struggle to avoid rather than discuss certain issues that are central to the Christian and Catholic tradition – recently, for instance, we have seen clear ritual exclusions from theologians addressing the issue of the uniqueness and exclusivity of Jesus as redeemer, and a mechanical repetition of his uniqueness that supposedly guarantees the uniqueness of the Church itself and its necessity for salvation.[4] The fundamental point  is that Ratzinger presents the Church as a save haven from the paradoxes, the ambiguities and the dangers of Modernity. This is only possible by way of symbolic exclusion – which always lead to actual exclusion[5] – of what and who represent these dangers.

            I know that I am not the only one who is so much convinced by the analytical and heuristic power of Girard’s theory of the scapegoat, that he has a problem with his ideas on Christianity as an exception on, and therefore as an salvation from this mechanism.[6] Already on the surface level it is clear that there are all kinds of aspects and episodes in Christian history which can and should be analyzed in terms of scapegoating and excluding. These aspects are not marginal to the supposed core of the Christian tradition. For instance, it would be hard to refute the claim that in fact the confession that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God, has led and sometimes even now leads to anti-Judaism in Christianity. I think this makes it necessary to differentiate between the statement that the Christianity reveals ultimate truth, and the statement that Christianity is superior to other religions as if it would not subject to dangerous mechanisms so clearly present in other religious traditions.

            Christianity is unique, of course, just as any other religion is unique, but the truth the Christian tradition claims to reveal is expressed in its relativization of even this uniqueness. Not in holding on to its given identity, but in its ability to transform and let go of its identity by adhering to the truth, Christianity shows that it does not confess to a mythological image of the world and of itself, represented in its heritage of stories and rituals, but to the God who rescues us in and through the ambiguous, violent and dangerous histories that are ours, and that shape us just as much as we shape them.

1.

But we should of course focus on the theory of René Girard. I will try to give René Girard the respect due to him in the only way scholars and academics should recognize, I think: by arguing about what is right and what is wrong in it.

            On of the most deceiving contemporary common sense ideas is that social situations are peaceful and harmonious by nature, and that when they turn violent, there should be an identifiable cause or reason. Simply watching the news on TV, one gets the impression that the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world does not understand that simply breaking down a violent social structure – in Iraq – does not by itself install a social harmony and social peace. Neo-conservatives claim that there is violence because there are still enemies to combat. Liberals think that the local population have to take up their own responsibility and start to built up their county instead of for ever tearing it down and destroying it. But both agree that it is peace and harmony that is natural. Violence is considered to have specific causes, and these causes have to be eliminated in order to let peace emerge. Many people is the West today feel that religion is among the major causes for possible violence. As liberal mythology tells us, it were the religious differences and the inability of religion to deal with these differences that made European history violent on an unprecedented scale during the 100 years war, until in 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia put an end to this violence by subjecting religion to the pacifying powers of the national states. Whenever there is are outbursts of violence in the world, traditional and fundamental cultural and religious causes are searched and a Westphalian-like pacification is strived for. The discussions on the migration of Muslims from the Mediterranean to the societies in Western Europe and their integration are a case in point: problems in the process and occasional outbursts of violence are ascribed either to the fundamental cultural differences between the Christian and the Muslim civilizations, or the intrinsically violent nature of Islam as a religion.

            However, already in the fifties of the Twentieth Century Hannah Arendt made clear how Modern mass-societies in itself produce violence. Not a violent culture is at the origin of violence, but the very existence of culture, creating a realm of non-culture as its excluded opposite. Lawlessness is not a situation where the law not yet rules, but is produced by the law itself. It is the law that produces the exception from the law and therefore lawlessness in the deep sense. The modern nation states produce a huge population that are stateless and therefore have no place to stay and no legal status. They have no national or any other recognized identity, they are nobodies in this world and have to fight not only for their existence, but also for their very right to exist, their right to be seen and considered as human.[7] This shows how violence is not produced by a culture of violence, teaching that to be truly human is to be strong and manly and victorious Violence is produced by excluding people from civilization, as a consequence of the desire to show that we are civilized. To make clear that adhering to our values and rules is the smarted choice, it should be obvious and for everybody that to be excluded from these values and rules condemns one to a less then human life, the lawlessness of the jungle.[8] Which explains, I think, that democracy in today’s global political discussion functions not as an appeal to include and involve everybody in our societies and in its discussions and debates on what ‘the good life’ implies. Instead it tends to function as a mechanism of exclusion, because we ask people first to subscribe to democratic values, thus showing that they are worthy to be included in a democratic order. The only way that they can become included is by showing that they are already included, are already part of the only order worthy to be truly called one. What makes René Girard’s theory of fundamental importance is, I think, that it shows this mechanisms as foundational for human civilized order: the desire to exclude chaos and violence that is always threatening any society from within, leads to the violence of exclusion. This in turn can lead to the violence of the excluded forcefully challenging their exclusion, behaving as what they on a symbolic level are already: the ones without civilization or morality. Thus it is affirmed that the view that they should be excluded was right all along.[9]

The Christian tradition suggests that there is a solution to this problem: ‘Once more they tried to seize Jesus’, it is said in the Gospel of John, ‘but he slipped out of their hands’ (Joh. 10, 39). Jesus is the scapegoat to end all scapegoating, suggests Girard, because he reveals it mechanisms. But this, I would add, should include not just the mechanism by which Jesus falls victim to scapegoating, but also the mechanism by which he ultimately escapes it.

2.

Theologically speaking, what is at stake in Girard’s theory is a soteriology, a description and an analysis of what is wrong with the world, how the world lieth in evil, how it is subjected to sin, and a theory of how Jesus redeems us human beings from this evil, frees us from sin. I will come back to Girard’s soteriology, but first I will try to make clear how we should look at Christian soteriology. To clarify this, I turn to an excerpt from the new novel of the South African writer John M. Coetzee, entitled Diary of a Bad Year. The novel will be published coming January; the excerpt is published in the issue dated July 19, 2007, of the New York Review of Books.[10]

As was also the case with his Elisabeth Castello, Coetzee’s new novel apparently consists of large portions of essayistic texts; the pre-published ones are largely on the state. The problem with thinking about the state, and especially about its origins, Coetzee argues, is that we can only think about it as parts of a state. To be able to live we have to behave is ways the state allows us to behave. To be able to be heard, we have to argue in ways the political system enables us to argue. In Coetzee’s view, this means what Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan reconstructs as a voluntary act of human beings – the myth that, and I quote Coetzee here:

in order to escape the violence of internecine warfare without end (reprisal upon reprisal, vengeance upon vengeance, the vendetta), we individually and severally yielded up to the state the right to use physical force (right is might, might is right), thereby entering the realm (the protection) of the law.

is describing our situation, but not how it came about. We have no choice but to submit to the forces of the state and to surrender our own power to the power of the state, because, as Coetzee puts it, ‘those who chose and choose to stay outside the compact become outlaws’. So everybody who is able to discuss these matters, is by definition in.

            At first sight, Coetzee seems to believe Hobbes to a large extend, at least in the sense that what the state has to do is to avoid the war of all against all. Interestingly enough he states this explicitly in Girardian terms. The ultimate danger is unlimited rivalry between what could be seen as twins, those who are so alike that there is no way of making an a priori distinction. What he calls ‘René Girard’s fable of the warring twins’ is especially pertinent in situations in which it is unclear who rules, for instance when one ruler has to be succeeded by another. The central problem of every society according to Coetzee is not how best to be ruled, but how to be ruled at all, not by the best of laws but by any law. The ultimate issue is the avoidance of civil war. Pacification in traditional societies is effected by presenting the monarch as the one chosen to rule by absolute choice, be it divine or natural. In democracy pacification is effected by allowing people to choose their own rulers, thus suggesting that they themselves ultimately rule through those who are ruling them.

            Going along with Hobbes in this way brings Coetzee to a Machiavellian understanding of politics: the politician should not do what is good, but what is necessary to protect people from the random violence of civil war. This does not exclude scapegoating or victimizing people who are subject to the power of the ruler. This even has become common sense in our world after 9/11. Coetzee relates to us how in Australia, were he now lives, members of the general public give as their opinion that, while they concede that torture is in general a bad thing, it may nonetheless sometimes be necessary. ‘In general they are scornful of absolutist opponents of torture’, Coetzee adds. ‘Such people do not have their feet on the ground, do not live in the real world.’ It is the truth, so enigmatically revealed by Caiaphas in the Gospel of John, admitted to without any hesitation and without any awareness that they reveal anything that should remain hidden by the vox populi: ‘It is better… to have one man die for the people, instead of having the whole nation destroyed (John 11: 50).’ According to the author of John’s Gospel this is a mysterious truth, and in the interpretation of René Girard it is a redemptive truth. ‘Actually, he did not say this of his own accord’, the Gospel of John says, ‘rather, as he was High Priest that year, he was prophesying that Jesus was going to die for the nation’ (11: 51). In Girard’s interpretation this means that Jesus reveals how political order is based on victimization and scapegoating, thus leading those who follow him to a situation where scapegoating is ended and has become obsolete. But as Coetzee makes clear, but in fact was already shown by Hobbes and Machiavelli: revelation does not automatically lead to redemption.

            Thus the critical question is: does the Gospel of Jesus lead to redemption, real redemption from the mechanisms of exclusion and victimization? I would suggest that when we are only saved from the mechanisms of scapegoating, exclusion and violence by believing that we are saved from them through the history of Jesus as Divine revelation, as Girard’s theory sometimes suggests, we are not saved from it at all. What is asked from us, then, is again subjection to an idea that is claimed to be universal, but can only suggest that this claim makes sense by at least symbolically excluding everything and everyone that is does not concede to its truth. The one doubting or denying that Christianity is the absolutely truth and superior to any other religion becomes at least partly responsible for the fact that the violent mechanisms of scapegoating and exclusion are still functioning.

            Coetzee argues that moralizing against the mechanisms of scapegoating and exclusion, after 9/11 so easily adhered to by the general public, does not help. The only thing that could help, he says is that the metaphysical status of what Machiavelli calls necessità, the politically necessary to avoid civil war is shown to be fraudulent. Coetzee gives two hints how this is possible. The first one is rather straight forward. He suggests that people in Australia are not very much interested in politics and consider politicians as ‘the bastards’, that is to say as those who act as guards of this nation that grew from a community of ex-convicts. Here in Coetzee’s eyes an intuition comes to light that what is supposedly necessary from the perspective of the state, is not what is necessary from the perspective op the people that simply want to lead a decent life. ‘Whether the citizen lives or dies in not a concern of the state’, writes Coetzee, of course suggesting that this is what matters most to the citizens themselves. The huge efforts to ensure the identity of the corpses left behind by the 2004 tsunami convinced Coetzee that the only thing that does matters to the state ‘is whether the citizen is alive or dead’.

It is in fact the Christmas story all over again: those responsible for the state organize a census even if this uproots the lives of the ‘everyone’ who ‘went to register himself’ according to the Gospel of Luke. But it is among these uprooted people that the true history is located; not among those ordering and organizing the uprooting, but among those for whom there is no place in the inn (Luke 2: 7), but who find favor with God (Luke 1: 30). Or so the Gospel claims.

3.

Scattered through the essayistic fragments of Coetzee’s Dairy of a Bad Year, there are small pieces presenting a story in which an elderly, somewhat trampy-looking writer gets into contact with a young woman who lives in his apartment building. It is clear that the writer fancies, and in a sense even desires the woman with her tomato-red shift he finds, in Coetzee’s words, ‘so startling in its brevity’, but this desire is ‘of a metaphysical, or at least post-physical kind’. He first meets her in the laundry room where she however hardly notices him, but he finds out who she is and where she lives – and with whom; it pains him to think about the two of them ‘side by side in bed, since that is what counts, finally’ – and finally he manages to speak to her in the park. The fact that she is between jobs and that she says she does some secretarial work for her ‘partner’ Alan makes him say that he, too, is in need of a secretary:

            Yes? she said.

Yes, I said, I happen to be a writer by profession, and I have a major deadline to meet, as a consequence of which I need someone to type a manuscript for me and perhaps do a little editing as well and generally make the whole thing shipshape.

At first she suggests that he hire someone from a bureau, but he replies:

I don't need someone from a bureau, I said. I need someone who can pick up installments and get them back to me speedily. That person should also have a feel, an intuitive feel, for what I am trying to do. Can I perhaps interest you in the work, since we are near neighbors and since you are, as you say, between jobs?

He does not need her really in the practical sense, for, as the nameless writer admits, the women in question ‘has never done a stitch of editing in her life and… Bruno Geistler of Mittwoch Verlag GmbH has people on his staff perfectly capable of turning dictaphone tapes in English into a shipshape manuscript in German’. But the trick works and he gets her interested. When he suggests that he is leaving she makes him stop: ‘Don't go yet, she said. Tell me first, what sort of book is this going to be?’ With this sentince the fragment of Coetzee’s new novel published in the New York Review of Books ends.

            I think Coetzee purposely has his writer act as a politician representing the state, in the way he described his attitude in the essayistic fragments of his text. Where the woman is living her own life and is perfectly happy with that, having no problem whatsoever with the fact that she does not have a job, the writer i.e. the politician seduces her to become interested in a plot, a project that goes somewhere, a history that is supposed to have a point and a goal. She is promised influence, a voice that matters; in principle she has the possibility to change things – we are talking democratic politics here. But it subjects her to his ideas and what is more, it grants him his desire: someone awaiting what he thinks up, an eager listener and reader. Is not this what all writers and speakers dream of: someone who asks to tell them about the texts that is being produced? Is not this what all politicians and civil servants dream of: someone who entrust her life in their hands, whose life depends on the plot they think up.

On the other hand, in these fragments about the writer and the woman Coetzee presents the lives of its subjects that does not interest the state, but which is according to him the only thing that really is of interest. This is what history really is made of: the desire of human beings for intimacy, the desire to make a difference, the desire to be heard by someone who is interested and the desire to be spoken to as if one’s judgment matters. All this adds up to – Coetzee does not explain to us but shows us – the real necessità, that what really makes life human and makes human life good. When this necesssità becomes the reference point of politics, a real democracy could emerge.

I think the Gospels and the rest of the Christian traditions do something similar, that the story about Jesus does us something similar: showing where what really matters is happening in order to enable people to be there, to be part of it, and to be aware that they are part of it, instead of being subject and subjecting to a supposed necessity. The salvific truth of the Christian tradition is that it is not necessary ‘to have one man die for the people’ in order not having the whole nation destroyed. And that were people are sacrificed life is not reborn from the sacrifice, but from the live that is unexpectedly and graciously granted to those sacrificed.

Here we have to turn to Girard’s exegesis of the fragments in the Gospels of Marc and Matthew, in which Jesus is confronted with the accusation that he casts out demons with demons, and even that he casts them out by the prince of demons.[11] I think Girard has seen something profound when he points to the fact that what is revered to here is the way of the world. A minor evil is attacked and destroyed, this makes that people trust the one who thus proves to be able to conquer evil, but once they are seduced to submit to his will, he shows to be an even greater evil: the ‘prince of demons’. That is what people are afraid of in Jesus, Girard suggests, and possibly even in God. This is, I would add, what is denied when the Bible repeats over and over again: fear not, be not afraid – the God of the Bible is not powerful in a way that would make him a ‘prince of demons’. In Girard’s reading however Jesus in fact breaks fundamentally with this logic of casting out demons with demons, evil with evil, power with power. In the Gospel of Luke Jesus says: ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven’ and gives his disciples the authority to ‘overcome all the power of the Enemy’ that is de devil, the personification of all evil, ‘and nothing will hurt you’ (Lc. 10, 19). Another logic is installed, a logic that is indicated by Jesus’ warning to his disciples not to rejoice in this new power of them, but to rejoice that their names are written in heaven. For them the kingdom of God has become a reality, and of this unprecedented closeness of God Jesus’ and their casting out of demons are signs.

            Sacramental signs, I would argue. That is: signs and instruments of the close relation between people and human history, and God.[12] Their acts show that God is near and they bring God near. Breaking the power of demons like illness and possession and powerlessness and being submitted to violence not just reveals, but also enhances the nearness of Gods saving presence. Jesus is the savior, the one bringing liberation and redemption, by concretely saving and liberating and redeeming people. In other words: the logion about Satan falling like lightning from heaven, has to be understood in the same way as the vision at the end of the book Revelation:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven of God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev. 20, 1-2).

The descending of the new Jerusalem is the mystery that is taking place, the revelation of the secret meaning of the history that is in the process of happening. What is happening is there for everybody to see. What is the significance of it, that is de hidden secret, that what unavoidably has to remain a secret and a mystery and about which we can only speak ‘in parables’, as the expression in the Gospel of Marc is. This is a different approach from René Girard’s, I believe. In Girard’s reading of the Gospels not just the significance of what happens, but also what really happens remains hidden for those who have eyes but do not see and have ears but do not hear. The question discussed in the Gospels between Jesus and his opponent is not – and I believe this is very important – whether or not he really caste out demons. That he does, that is obvious, and people are healed and rescued and saved because of it. The question is: what is the significance of this casting out of demons? Does it really signify liberation, or is it the preamble of a new subjection, the simple change from a strong one being in charge to an even stronger one now taking charge, more difficult to defeat than the first one was?

I interpret Jesus’ next words rather different from the way Girard interprets them. Jesus says, according to Luke’s Gospel:

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. A house divided against itself falls. If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebub. But if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore will they be your judges. But if I by the finger of God cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come to you (Lk. 11, 17-20).

I read these words as saying that we should leave the perspective of two empires fighting against one another, and of the necessity –Machiavelli’s necessità as discussed by Coetzee – to defend the good against the evil. We should see the good that is obviously happening – the discussion of Jesus with his opponents in the Gospel of Luke refers back to him casting out a demon that was mute, ‘and it happened when the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke’ (Lk. 11, 14) – and interpret these as signs and instruments of the finger of God, and therefore of the arrival of the kingdom of God.

            ‘A house divided against itself falls’: we should not be divided among ourselves on whether the good belongs to the kingdom of the evil one, but rather trust the obvious goodness of the good. ‘If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your children cast them out?; therefore will they be your judges.’ The suggestion is clearly that they also cast out demons by the finger of God, that their casting out of demons anticipates the coming of the kingdom of God, and that they know that intuitively. For everyone living it is self-evident that to be liberated from what enslaves is good. The secret, the mystery is that it is the sign and anticipation of the unavoidable ultimate breakthrough of the good.[13]

4.

We are not debating subtleties of Gospel exegesis here; even if I wanted to, I could not do that, because I am not at all a New Testament scholar. What is at stake here is central to the Christian tradition, and if I am right Christianity delivers us from evil not by revealing that the world is in the power of evil and by what mechanism, offering an escape from this mechanism by bringing it into the open. Christianity is revealing concretely and in detail that the power of evil is not uncontested and unchallenged, that evil is again and again fragmentary defeated. What it asks from us is not to believe that Jesus is the revealer of the mechanisms of evil, and thus the one who redeems us from it, and to believe that this is an absolute truth because otherwise we will be lost in the mechanisms of evil again. What is asked from us is to live in the world knowing that the redemption has already taken place. The foundation of our redemption is not our faith in it, but that what has happened in and through Jesus – in traditional language, what is fundamental is the objective redemption, not the subjective redemption –, as it is expressed by the apostle Paul: ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ’; we can only build upon this foundation either with gold, silver or costly stones, wood, hay, or straw (1 Cor. 3: 11-12). If Jesus Christ is the foundation of a new world, a new mode of existence, the kingdom of God present among us, a tabernacle and a dwelling place of God with human beings, then our ongoing struggle against evil and its demons is not in vain. It is not a case of casting out demons with demons, although as long history goes on that too will be happening, and it will bring good to some people and evil and exclusion to others. But ultimately it is a sign and an instrument of the victory of Gods purpose with his creation: ‘and, behold, it was very good’ (Gen. 1, 31). Or to use the bold expression invented by my theological mentor, Edward Schillebeeckx: Christology, speaking and thinking about Jesus as the Christ of God and our redeemer, is ‘concentrated creation’, reflection on the whole of creation and living in the midst of it, from the story of his life, death and resurrection.[14]

            This implies that we are redeemed, this is: we are freed from our estrangement from God, because God has, as Zacharias puts it in the Gospel of Luke, ‘visited and worked redemption for his people’ by granting us that we can serve him without fear, being part of God’s project to have Satan falling from heaven and to establish his kingdom. This history of salvation however is not yet finished. Ultimately there is nothing left to fear, but in the meantime there will be persecution and threats, and there is and will be death and guilt, and there are and will be demons still in charge of parts of our individual and collective lives. But they are divided amongst themselves and this indicates that their empire is falling. Satan is in the process of falling from heaven.

This brings us – briefly – to the question of the redemptive power of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. It is clear that Jesus’ death as the ultimate saving and atoning sacrifice plays an important role in the Christian traditions. Jesus’ crucifixion also plays a central role in Girard’s theory, as the sacrifice revealing the mechanisms of sacrificing and scapegoating by changing roles, and voluntarily becoming the scapegoat, the one who is excluded, the one who is sacrificed on behalf of the people. By becoming excluded he ends exclusion, to paraphrase the words of the apostle Paul. God is not the one excluding, God is with those excluded, that is the ultimate claim of the Christian tradition. But the point of being a Christian is not believing with an absolute faith that this is absolutely true, but that what is truly absolute is found with what is excluded. Against the cynicism that supposedly sacrifices one human being for the good of the people, the Christian tradition believes that every human being sacrificed is absolutely wrong, and that redemption can only mean that no-one will be excluded and everybody is part of the good life. This already has started, Christians believe, with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and continues in every life-giving act since then. It is however never unambivalently present and never unambivalently clear.[15]

* * * * *

Satan did not fall from heaven once and for all when Jesus died on the cross, and does not have to be kept from but falls every time an excluded person is included again, a silenced voice is speaking and being heard, a victimized person is erected and regaining dignity, a killed person resurrected and coming to life again. If resisting a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ means resisting the tendency not to see the absolute importance of what is happening there, I think this resistance is a Christian duty. But if it means that we forget that all traditions are relative to the true fullness of life that is still in the process of developing, and that the Christian tradition is relative to the truth God reveals in those restored to speech, dignity and life, I am sorry, but then I have to dispute the view of my colleague Joseph Ratzinger. Even if he is now pope Benedict XVI.[16]