First Things Last: Sacred Violence and the Household of God
by Tim Rosenberger
I. The Week
In the first days of August, Christendom showed every seam it owns, and something older than Christendom showed through.
Upward of fifty thousand people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta. Many swam around the barriers. At least sixty-seven died in the water. Italy responded, but not to Morocco. Rome suspended Schengen against Madrid, closing air and sea to a fellow Catholic nation for the month of August. Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador. By Sunday most of the migrants had walked back to Morocco. The emergency resolved itself before the diplomacy did.
Five days earlier a young Lebanese-German drove a van into the crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day, the city’s Pride march, killing one woman and injuring twenty-nine. The interior ministry called it Islamist. And across Ukraine, two Orthodox churches went on blessing the armies that kill one another’s faithful.
On Sunday, Leo XIV, who had traveled to Spain in June to address migration, said he followed the situation in Ceuta with concern and asked God, through the intercession of Our Lady of Africa, for peace, stability, and justice. Sixty-seven drowned in the strait. Two Catholic governments turned on each other over the bodies. The successor of Peter had an Angelus intention.
Do not mistake this for a failure of goodwill. It is a failure of order, and beneath it, a return. The old god is back, the god who was never God, whose sacrament is the victim, and he does not care which victim. The frightening thing about the week is not that Europe moved to defend its borders, which it must. The frightening thing is that Christendom, pressed from outside, reached for the knife and turned it on itself.
II. The Root
John Wesley knew what the church holds in common. “As to all opinions which do not strike at the root of Christianity,” he wrote in 1739, “we think and let think.” The line is quoted for its generosity. It should be quoted for its discipline. The root is one thing and opinion is another, and the church lives or dies on the difference.
The root is Christ. The root is the whole of it. True God from true God, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, buried, and risen on the third day. The creeds and no more. But say the creed slowly and notice what it confesses. The world’s justice condemned an innocent man, and God overruled the sentence. The resurrection is heaven’s verdict on the world’s justice, and since that verdict the old trick of purchasing peace with a victim’s blood has never worked cleanly, because the Gospel taught the world to see the face of the one expelled. Girard built a science on that observation. The church had it first, and had it in the creed. Every reflex of conscience the West still congratulates itself on, the dignity of the marginal, the care owed the victim, flows from that verdict and from nowhere else. How Christians treat one another, and the stranger, and the accused, is not an appendix to the confession. It is the confession, walking. A church that rebuilds the scapegoat machine has not defended Christ. It has changed sides at the cross.
Everything else the church has ruled on, however venerable, is discipline built around the root, and the discipline has moved before. The church once baptized slavery. Wesley, six days before his death, wrote to strengthen Wilberforce against it. It once condemned usury as mortal sin and later learned to live with interest. “This has always been held” has been wrong before and will be wrong again. The tradition has a name for the category. Adiaphora. Things indifferent. Not unimportant, but not the root.
Now hold the sexual ethic up to that light. Sexuality is opinion. So is the ordination of women. The serious traditionalist will answer that this is exactly backwards, that the cruel thing is to leave the gay neighbor comfortable in a sin that endangers his soul, and that correction is charity. Take that answer seriously, for it is not a cynical one. But watch what it licenses in practice. A discipline meant as medicine becomes a mark of belonging. The contested ethic hardens into the load-bearing test of orthodoxy, and the congregation discovers that nothing unites it like the lesbian it chooses to exclude. That is the moment conviction becomes idol, and an idol is a hungry thing. It demands what the primitive sacred has always demanded, a victim. The tell is simple. Medicine is administered in grief and hope. The machine runs on relish. When a church needs its sinner more than it wants her return, it is no longer correcting. It is sacrificing. Bonhoeffer named the counterfeit. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. There is also cheap orthodoxy, the rigor we bestow on others. Sexuality does not strike at the root. Sacred violence does. The foundation is known, and his name is Jesus, and he was last seen standing with the accused.
III. Household Quarrels
Hold that light up to the week, and the week convicts itself.
Italy and Spain do not disagree about the root. They share a creed, a Mass, and a Mediterranean. Spain failed in a real duty. A government owes its people a defended frontier, and the nation of the Reconquista could not hold a town it has held since the sixteenth century. Restriction is not a sin requiring apology. It is stewardship. But Rome’s answer was not stewardship. Italy closed the sea against a Catholic neighbor instead of standing with her at the wall, and the closure took effect after the crossing had already reversed. That is not border policy. That is the mechanism in miniature, a rival made into a culprit for a domestic crowd, and it has a long pedigree.
Venetian Crete bled for twenty-one years while Catholic Europe watched, its capital, Candia, enduring the longest siege in European history. France sent one late expedition, withdrew it after losses, and the island fell in 1669, because Louis XIV would not cross his Ottoman alliance for a fellow Catholic republic. Two centuries later the powers kept the dying Ottoman Empire alive for fear an Orthodox Tsar might restore the cross over Hagia Sophia. Britain and France allied with the Muslim sultan against Christian Russia and called it statecraft. Dostoevsky answered that Constantinople must be Russian and meant it as prophecy, though a Tsar in the city would likely have meant Russified Greeks and subordinated Armenians, the same disorder in an Eastern key. When the Armenians were slaughtered in the 1890s and driven into the desert in the war that followed, the powers that had guarded the straits found no interest at stake and defended nothing. The victims were visible. The ledger was louder.
Once it was not so. When the Ottoman army stood before Vienna in 1683, Catholic Poland under Sobieski and Lutheran Saxony under her Elector marched to the same relief. Confessional enemies of a century’s standing fought under a single command, and the gates held. For one season the household knew its own name, which proves that every later failure was a choice.
Ukraine is the failure in its final form. Christian kills Christian. Orthodox kills Orthodox. The Moscow Patriarchate blesses the invasion outright, the altar annexed by the state it exists to judge, sacred violence in its oldest costume. And the West funds Kyiv for the balance of power, the same wager it placed at Candia and the straits, with the Christian question never entering the ledger. This is not East against West, for the West bankrolls one Eastern church against another, and Kyiv’s church is no Protestant novelty. Constantinople recognized it as a self-governing Orthodox church in 2019, and it is Orthodox to the marrow. The deepest wound in Christendom now runs through a single communion, and a house divided against itself, the Gospel says, cannot stand.
IV. The Contest of Victims
Berlin showed the disorder’s other face. The van came from outside Christendom. The revelation came after.
Within hours the dead of the Tiergarten had been conscripted by every faction in Germany. A vigil speaker confessed she had hoped the killer would prove not a foreigner but a white Christian. Hear what that is. Not grief. A preference, sacrificial appetite dressed as mourning. The city’s commissioner for queer affairs conceded the attack was Islamist and blamed the Christian Democrats in the same breath. The right counted the dead as ammunition before it counted them as dead. It was a contest over the correct scapegoat, conducted in the open, by the heirs of the one civilization that was taught to see through exactly this. Every faction reached past the murdered for the persecutor it needed. No one reached for the murdered.
The left’s confusion runs deepest, because it is confusion about an inheritance. A movement founded on the sacred worth of the despised individual could not name the one ideology in Europe that denies that worth root and branch, and so blamed a Christian party for an Islamist’s murders. But the instincts doing the blaming are borrowed. Concern for the victim flowed from a particular hill outside a particular city, so deep now in the groundwater of the West that the heirs mistake it for nature. A Pride parade is an artifact of Christian civilization. It marches only where the verdict of the resurrection still holds, and the van in the Tiergarten is what arrives when a rival verdict does. The marchers owe the churches no gratitude. They owe the truth. The freedom is a bequest, the bequest has enemies, and the enemies are not the Christian Democrats.
V. The Hour
Why does the distinction matter now, more than in Wesley’s century? Because of the hour.
“Little children, it is the last time,” John wrote, “and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists.” The apostle named not a man but a spirit, and Paul told the Thessalonians how to recognize its arrival. Not as chaos. As comfort. “When they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them.” The antichrist does not storm the gates. He administers them. The old question is recently back before serious people: whether the true danger of the age is armageddon or the world order that promises salvation from armageddon at the price of everything else.
Both forms are in view at once. Islamism is the armed form, an anthropology that met the verdict of the resurrection in a Berlin park and answered with a van. The subtler form is being assembled in the server farms, minds without flesh that speak with the tongues of men, before which a generation half-catechized by the algorithm brings its questions and its loneliness. The machines may yet serve the faith. But a total administration of human life, a peace-and-safety machine with no exit, is now buildable for the first time, and what restrains it is not a regulation. Paul had a word for what restrains. The katechon, the withholder, whatever it is that stands in the way of the lawless one and delays his hour. A scattered Christendom restrains nothing. A church running its own scapegoat machine restrains nothing, for it has become a small franchise of the power it was sent to restrain.
A Christendom that meets this hour divided over adiaphora will not survive it, and will deserve its end. The faith that holds the root cannot spend the last of its strength policing opinions. Italian and Spaniard, Catholic and Lutheran, Wittenberg and Constantinople, the marcher under the rainbow flag and the grandmother at the Latin Mass: the household is one household, and the hour does not care which room it burns first.
Wesley’s formula is not a courtesy. It is a survival discipline. Think, and let think, so that the root stands clear of the quarrels, and the quarrels stand down before the enemy at the gate. Sixty-seven bodies came out of the water at Tarajal while two Catholic governments closed ports against each other and a sincere pope prayed a sincere prayer because nothing else was on offer. The faith was not lost in a war. It was bargained away, transaction by transaction, at Candia, at the straits, across the Donbas, always for something that looked at the time like power. Vienna proves the bargain was never necessary. A people becomes what it loves, and a people that loves the old god will get the old god’s peace, the peace of the graveyard with an altar on it. The hour is late. The household is one. The restrainer must be whole to restrain. And the victim God raised is the foundation, and the foundation has a name.
Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.