“Words, too, form a crowd; countless, they swirl about the head of the victim, gathering to deliver the coup de grace. The three series of speeches are like volleys of arrows aimed at the enemy of God. The accusations descend on Job like so many adversaries, intent upon the destruction of tyhe some friend. Their …
Barely Disguised
“Violence is the true ‘referent’; barely disguised in the threats of the friends and not disguised at all in Job’s laments. Although our two types of discourse seem so different, each deals, in its own way, with the same. They both refer to the process whereby a hero becomes a scapegoat; they both refer to …
The Uncooperative Victim
“Job is under no illusions. Point-blank, three times in a row, and in the same military order the three friends fire off their sinister and arrogant maledictions. At whom else could they be aimed? Job is not quite yet the enemy of God in question, but he could become God’s enemy and certainly will, if …
As the Crowd Turns
“The mystery of Job is presented in a context that does not explain it but at least allows us to situate it. The scapegoat is a shattered idol. The rise and fall of Job are bound up in one another. The two extremes seems to be connected . . . The one thing in common …
The Victim is Always Ignored
“Job constantly reverts to the community’s role in what has happened to him, but — and this is what is mysterious — he does not succeed in making his commentators, outside the text, understand him any better than those who question him within the text . . . No one takes any notice of what …
Job the Scandalous
“The scapegoat is the innocent party who polarizes a universal hatred, which is precisely the complaint of Job” (Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, pp. 4-5).
Christ Has Broken the Sacrificial Mechanism
“People caught up in the scandals and frenzy of a sacrificial crisis are prone to believe almost anything that will allow them to unleash their scapegoating violence with moral impunity. In Christianized cultures, however, attempts to claim such moral immunity by appealing to Christianity have been increasingly less successful. The moral blindness a sacrificial crisis …
Retailer of Rejuvenating Violence
“When Heidegger laments modernity’s reluctance to exercise the ‘will to mastery,’ it should be remembered that his lament is being expressed in a University of Freiburg lecture hall in 1935, at the height of Germany’s Nazi frenzy. Given that historical setting, how is one to assess Heidegger’s grandiloquence, delivered to those whose ears were ringing …
Longing for a Return to Sacrifice
“It was Nietzsche, after all, who had scoffed at the merely sane among the philosophers and who predicted that these timid remnants of philosophy’s bygone age would soon be shoved aside by the throng of ecstatic Dionysiac revelers with no qualms about delivering a coup de grace to the philosophic tradition. Nietzsche’s influence in this …
Scandalizing Philosophy
“On the rare occasions when the New Testament deigns even to mention philosophy, it treats it as a garrulous Greek exercise that must not be allowed to distract the serious-minded from discovering the truth-telling power of the gospel . . . And now that ‘writing off’ philosophy has become philosophy’s most intellectually stimulating undertaking, perhaps …