Quotes from Scott Cowdell

And what of ourselves? Are we really completely outside this mechanism? The people who come after us, won't they find aspects of sacrificial thinking even in the way we use anti-sacrificial theory?

Attached are pages from Balthasar's book that discuss your book.195 I've started a little dialogue with him on his criticisms of you (natural theology, God's wrath, etc.).196 I know teachers who are starting to take you seriously because Balthasar finds your ideas at least very interesting. So this criticism is beneficial when people engage with your books.

I understand that it takes patience, but there are also positive signs. H. U. von Balthasar, the theologian who probably has the greatest influence in the Catholic world for the moment, has handed down a very positive verdict on my book. Likewise, K. Lehmann, who is the theologian of the German Bishops' Conference. So I think that your thinking will gradually prevail, even if there is resistance and difficulties for the moment.

Among the reactions to your work, there is quite a discussion concerning your concept of "union in love" ["amour fusion"]. In this context, I often think of a text of Richard of St. Victor concerning trinitarian love.153 (Trinitarian love—is it not the final response to triangular desire?) I thank you once again for all that you have given me through your work. I realize more and more that this has had a decisive influence on my life. Sincerely, R. Schwager

Another word on the subject of "the idealism of theology." In fact, traditional theology has not only spoken of the scapegoat, but the texts remain in a certain manner structured by the scapegoat, as you have shown! Will a future theology escape this fate entirely?

As every barrier to the constraint of individualism is removed - as 'I' and 'my' appear in the names of more and more software applications and IT products - nevertheless today's rampant mimeticism ensures that 'I' and 'my' become less and less differentiated from 'you' and 'yours'...We crave differentiation, and deprived of it we blame the failing institutions that once might have delivered it.

From this emerged: Schwager, "Das Mysterium der übernatürlichen Natur-Lehre.

I am completely in agreement with you that Christ is no longer—in the Gospels—an unrevealed scapegoat. It's the opposite: now he is spoken of openly as the scapegoat! Therefore I am completely in agreement with your phrase: "Even if Christ is our scapegoat, he is not that of the Father, and the sacrificial understanding is always relative, while the absolute is that which is beyond all sacrifice."174

A text structured by the scapegoat effect cannot make a theme of this; [and in turn] a text that makes a theme of the scapegoat cannot be structured by this effect. In the gospels, Christ is so obviously the scapegoat of everyone [in the text] that he can no longer be the scapegoat of the text, just as the sixteenth-century witch isn't the scapegoat of the twentieth-century historian.