Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God’s honor, God’s justice, even God’s anger, must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they don’t seriously looking the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.
-Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lighting, p.150
I, like many other folks, have been troubled by the seemingly “unjust” God that seems to show up sometimes when the sovereignty of God is explained in some quarters. I think Girard is on to something here in explaining why that is. It’s in line with Robert Webber’s focus on the Christus Victor theory to also soften up Calvinism a bit through selective emphasis. If your theology talks about God a lot and rarely mentions Satan or man, then you don’t sound much like the Bible, which brings these other characters up quite regularly.
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January 5th, 2010 at 9:22 PM
I once got into an argument with some Calvinists who told me straight out that “the devil had nothing to do with the crucifixion”. Perhaps if they had spent more time reading the Bible rather than Present Truth, they might have seen more clearly.