Affiliation:
1. Nicholas G. Roumas is an independent researcher, based in Hudson, Massachusetts, United States, specializing in Girardian mimetic theory and theologies of redemption.
Abstract
René Girard’s mimetic theory opens up a possibility of unifying the ethical and objective dimensions of Christ’s redemptive work, harmonizing a problematic tension that arises from the redemptive act. To demonstrate this, I draw on Girard’s writings on the Gospels to show how a Girardian reading of the cross leads to an understanding of the redemptive work of Christ as simultaneously exemplary, didactic, and sacrificial, with no real distance between any of these terms.
Publisher
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Reference56 articles.
1. Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology, Being the Bampton Lectures for 1915 (London: Macmillan, 1919).
2. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, MY: Orbis, 2013).
3. Consider, e.g., Katherine Sonderegger’s nuanced analysis of Cur Deus homo in “Anselm, Defensor Fidei” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 3 (2007): 342–359), or, along Girardian lines, Michel Corbin’s voluminous commentary on Anselm, L’Oeuvre de S. Amselme de Cantorbéry (2 vols.; Paris: Cerf, 1986).
4. J. Patout Burns, in “The Concept of Satisfaction in Medieval Redemption Theory,” Theological Studies 36, no. 2 (1975): 285–304, calls attention to the element of vicarious punishment in Abelard’s theory of redemption (see 289–291).
5. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993).