Abstract
In recent decades, compelling voices have charged that the theological category of "sacrifice" has too long valorized suffering and has fostered a culture of violence, particularly through the notion that Christ's excruciating death on the Cross was a payment demanded by God for human sins. Such an attribution of violence to the godhead itself silences victims while eroding our resistance to victimizers, and a sacrificial understanding of the ideal human relationship to God encourages a pursuit of self-extinction that ends in mere dissipation. Of great influence in this wide-ranging discussion is the work of Rene Girard. Beneath the "sacred" violence of sacrifice, Girard discerns a concealed scapegoat-murder driven by a distortion of human desire that itself must lead to human self-annihilation. This paper has gone beyond Girard into the theological territory that he so humbly avoids, yet I hope that its diagnosis of the Satanic and its antithesis, the theomimetic, will be found a faithful development of what Girard has given.