ABSTRACT
The coercive force of law, as the threat of violence, presents a challenge to anyone who presumes to maintain a moral and theological commitment to nonviolence. After providing a brief biographical reflection on the importance of René Girard’s theory of sacrificial mimesis for developing a theological critique of law’s violent origins, this chapter presents Girard’s thesis on the origin of law and how it finds parallels in the work of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. Next, Girard’s thesis is related to the theologico-political figure of the katechon as it appears in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians in the New Testament and in some modern interpreters, in particular Roberto Esposito’s treatment of the katechon in his book Immunitas. Finally, this chapter argues that a focus on the principalities and powers, a Pauline concept in the New Testament, may help us to understand how a theological critique of archaic sacrifice may relate to law. By seeking to distance legal practices from various forms of the archaic sacred, it might be possible to loosen the law’s strict reliance upon violence as a mode of coercion.
