Imaging Sin and the Passage to Holiness: René Girard, Ecclesial Vision, and the Spiritual Reshaping of Desires

Abstract

In his 2018 book, Stumbling in Holiness, Brian Flanagan presents the knotty ecclesiological dialogue over the purity of the Church-body. There is a continuing inducement to evade acknowledgment of a sinful dimension in the body of the Church. Sometimes Christians forswear that gravely sinful people are actually members. The converse, cynical perspective turns up as well. This present article advances Girardian theological anthropology and the ecclesiology of the Halfway House as a pathway forward. The Church and church members have a situatedness in sinful culture, generating desires and cultivating conflict. The Cross exposes the destructiveness of such desires; Jesus calls for Christians to imitate his renunciation of worldly aspiration. James Alison’s vision of the Church as Halfway House fosters the notion of Christians as people undergoing forgiveness. Girardian ecclesial vision results in the spirituality of the reshaping of desires, inspired by Jesus’ bestowal of friendship and love in John 15.