Kosmos vs. Cosmos: The Dominator System and the Innocent Scapegoat

Jesus as the Innocent Victim

In the Gospels, Jesus appears as the innocent victim who exposes the hidden mechanics of violence. René Girard's mimetic theory reveals how human societies, to contain their own conflicts, have long relied on scapegoating – the identification and sacrifice of a victim to restore order. 

In myth, the scapegoat is portrayed as guilty or even deified after death, masking the community's violence as righteous.The New Testament shatters this pattern: Jesus is falsely accused yet publicly proclaimed innocent – even Pilate finds no fault in him, and the crowd must be primed to demand his death.

For the first time, a founding murder is told from the victim's perspective: the one slain “to reverse social disintegration” is revealed as blameless. 

As one theologian puts it, the Passion narrative is essentially “a traditional lynching with its meaning turned inside out” – a crucifixion recounted from the standpoint of the innocent one.¹

By showing the victim as truly victim and the executioners as unjust, the Gospel story unveils the lie behind sacrificial violence. Christ's crucifixion, freely accepted, “represents a rupture of the anthropological structure” of sacrifice; in offering himself, Jesus “destroys the structure of social control that demands human sacrifice”. His innocent blood exposes that the supposed “necessity” of the victim's death was a violent fraud – “their violence was not a defense of society, but an attack against God."

Kosmos vs. Cosmos

The New Testament authors often use the Greek term Kosmos to denote “the world” in a pejorative sense – not creation as such, but the artificial world-order alienated from God.

Biblical scholars identify this Kosmos with what Walter Wink calls the “Domination System" and what Audre Lorde identified as the "Master's House." 

It is the entrenched complex of political power, social hierarchies, and religious legalism that demands violence for the sake of order.

John's Gospel, for instance, portrays Satan as “the prince of this world (kosmos)” – an accuser-figure who governs the systems of collective sin. 

This Kosmos is the realm of empire: a human order maintained by force, injustice, and untruth. It stands in stark contrast to the living Cosmos, the harmonious creation under God's reign.

Whereas the true Cosmos (the universe as intended) thrives on life-giving love and mutuality, the Kosmos survives by lies and blood. Its order is a false peace built upon what Girard calls the “cycle of slaughter and violence” that perpetually enslaves humanity. 

The Roman Empire of Jesus's time was an embodiment of the Kosmos: a vast dominator system (Pax Romana) that enforced unity through conquest and crucifixion.

The crucifixion of Jesus reveals the kosmos for what it is – an unjust “order” founded on innocent blood. As Wink observes, the mind behind this system is manifest in “principalities and powers” – the spiritual ethos of greed, cruelty, and fear that inhabits empires and institutions. 

This is “the whole world” under the grip of the Evil One, the aggregated “Power of Darkness” that Jesus confronted.

The Kosmos runs on Scapegoating Logic: it secures unity by singling out victims.

Its ruling principle is what Wink calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence – the belief that violence saves, that killing the right people brings peace. Under this myth, the empire's sword claims to uphold order and goodness even as it crushes the innocent.

Against this closed circle of death stands the Cosmos of God – the “Kingdom not of this world” which Jesus preached, a social order not founded on victims.

In Christ, the Cosmos (true creation) invades the Kosmos (fallen system), and their clash exposes a terrible truth: the Kosmos maintains its artificial peace only by making endless scapegoats.

The Scapegoat Revelation

The crucifixion of Jesus is presented in the New Testament as an apocalyptic unveiling (apokalypsis) of the violence hidden at the heart of the Kosmos. What had been veiled in myth is now disclosed in history. 

The cross is thus a moment of truth-revelation as much as a moment of horror.

As the Gospel story unfolds, every step of Jesus' passion serves to unmask the Dominator System's brutality.

“With each stroke of the lash,” Walter Wink writes, “their own illegitimacy was laid open." The torturers dress Jesus in a mock robe and crown, unwittingly revealing the mockery of their authority. 

When they strip and execute this innocent man as a subversive, “all unaware, this very act had stripped them of the last covering that disguised the towering wrongness of the whole way of living that their violence defended."

In crucifying an innocent with pomp and scorn, the Powers “nailed up, for the whole world to see,” the indictment of their own regime. 

The cross became writing on the wall for the empire: mene, tekel, parsin – the judgment that the violent order has been measured and found wanting.

Early Christians understood that something more than an execution had occurred: the scapegoat mechanism itself was exposed and disarmed.

The Apostle Paul tells the Colossians that on the cross Christ “disarmed the principalities and powers” and “made a public spectacle of them."

What does it mean to disgrace the Powers in public? It means their age-old lie – that killing the victim is justified and necessary – was dragged into the light.

The Gospels unmask the ritual of sacred violence as murder, pure and simple. The high priest's rationale, “It is better for one man to die for the people,” is revealed as a convenient falsehood.

Once Jesus is vindicated as righteous, the scapegoat ritual can no longer hide behind piety. As Girard observes, the biblical text “reveals the true nature” of the scapegoat phenomenon by showing an innocent victim.

In Jesus, God unequivocally sides with the victim and not with the mob or the executioner.

The Book of Acts and the epistles drive home this point: “Jesus, whom you crucified,” was innocent, and “God has raised him up”. This is the “revelation of the scapegoat” long hidden “since the foundation of the world."

No longer will the victim's voice be silenced. On Easter morning the victim's voice became the vindicating Word of God.

In sum, the crucifixion-resurrection event is an apocalyptic rupture in history: it tears away the veil of myth and shows, once and for all, that collective murder lies at the foundation of the false peace.

As Girard puts it, Christ's sacrifice “raises the veil” and reveals the perverse structure of control by mimetic violence. Satan – the embodiment of accusation and blame, the “devil-accuser” of the human race – is publicly cast down by the forgiving victim. 

What falls at Golgotha is not Jesus' reputation, but “Satan's false construct." The spell of sacred violence is broken: the circle of vengeance has been unmasked as a tomb.

This is why Christians proclaim the cross not as tragic defeat, but as triumph of truth.

The Book of Revelation symbolically echoes this when it says the Lamb that was slain exposes Babylon and overcomes “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of his testimony”.

The innocent victim's testimony to truth – “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” – is the revelation that shakes the kosmos to its core.

Co-opted by Empire

If the crucifixion was meant to dismantle  Dominator Logic, Empire (Kosmos) did not surrender and instead exercised its signature adaptation.  

History shows the Kosmos to be highly adaptive – capable of inverting and absorbing even the very revelation that challenged it. In the centuries after Calvary, the Roman imperial system (and other Powers that followed) struggled to reclaim the narrative of the cross for itself.

The result was a profound co-optation: the subversive gospel was gradually tamed into a new ideology that served the old empire.

The innocent victim's death, meant to indict the Powers, was reframed as the powers' divine right.

 In a grand irony of history, the Roman Empire eventually adopted the cross as its banner. The persecuted faith of Christ was legalized and weaponized; Constantine marched under the labarum, the sign of the cross, claiming divine sanction “in this sign, conquer.” The kosmos thus rearmed itself in Christian garb. What had begun as a radical critique of violence was institutionalized as a state religion as violent as its predecessors.

This theological inversion is evident in the way many later Christians interpreted Jesus' death. Instead of seeing the cross as the exposure of unjust violence, it was taught as a necessary sacrifice required by God. The language of the New Testament itself was re-read through sacrificial myth: Jesus “died for our sins” became, in effect, Jesus died to satisfy God's demand. In this shift, the blame for the crucifixion subtly moved from human sinners onto God's plan. The cross was turned from an indictment of the empire into a pillar supporting empire – a stamp of cosmic approval on sanctioned violence. The very mechanism meant to be unmasked was thus re-mythologized. As Girardian theologians note, we find it easier to imagine God desired the Crucifixion than to admit that we, humanity, carried it outchristiancentury.org. We made God into the author of our violence, sacralizing our scapegoat once more. Walter Wink highlights this tragic reversal: whereas the early church saw the cross as “a sacrifice to end all sacrifices” that exposed the scapegoat mechanismmelwild.wordpress.com, later theology presented the cross as God's required sacrifice, reinstituting the very logic Jesus overcame. Wink flatly rejects the notion that “Jesus was sent by God to be the last scapegoat” to appease divine wrathdeforestlondon.wordpress.com. That idea, he argues, is a regression to the pagan myth of redemptive violence – the idea that someone must die to keep the world in order. Yet this interpretation took hold in Christendom: the empire's theologians effectively absorbed the Gospel's explosive message and made it harmless to the status quo. The cross, which had judged Rome's violence, was now touted as Rome's validation. By the Middle Ages, kings and popes carried the cross into battle; the very injustice the cross revealed (holy victimization) was repeated in crusades, inquisitions, and trials of heretics – all justified by twisted theology. As one observer notes, the fallen “world” quickly reasserts itself: “When the Domination System catches the merest whiff of God's new order, it mobilizes all its might to suppress that order”melwild.wordpress.com. The kosmos learned to speak Christianese, turning the cross from revelation back into ritual. In sum, the dominator system managed to nullify the scandal of the Gospel by interpreting it upside-down. The result has been a long historical ambiguity: Christianity's scriptures reveal the innocence of victims, yet many Christian institutions became agents of persecution. The message that “the victim didn't stay buried” was muted by the claim that God wanted the victim buriedmelwild.wordpress.com. To this day, the cross is often preached as if it were a transaction in the heavens rather than a brutal lynching exposed on earth. This is the great inversion: the empire that the cross was meant to overthrow co-opted the cross for its own dominator ideology. The Gospel's promise remains, but its social force was domesticated, subsumed into a “Christianized” kosmos.

Contemporary Manifestations

The scapegoating mechanism laid bare at Calvary still operates in today's dominator systems – often in subtler guises, cloaked in moral or ideological justifications. The pattern of the kosmos re-emerges wherever power seeks to protect itself by channeling violence onto a targeted other. Modern institutions repeatedly replicate the same mechanism, even as they invoke righteous causes. Some key examples include:

• Patriarchy: In patriarchal social orders (a long-standing form of the Domination System), women have often been the designated scapegoats. As patriarchal norms took hold, “wife-beating and child-beating” came to be seen as a male right, and “evil is blamed on women” for society's illslausanne.org. The age-old trope of Eve as the source of sin exemplifies how female figures were scapegoated to uphold male-dominated “order.” Violence against women was excused as necessary discipline to maintain family and moral stability. This system turns victims into culprits, disguising oppression as defense of virtue. Even today, appeals to “family values” or religious purity can mask the marginalization of women and blame cast upon them for societal problems – a modern echo of the scapegoat mechanism operating under a moral guise.

• State Power: Nations and states continue to employ scapegoating to solidify unity and neutralize threats. Leaders, especially in times of fear or crisis, find convenient enemies to blame: minorities, immigrants, dissidents, or foreign adversaries are painted as dangers to the homeland's peace. By rallying the majority against a scapegoated group, the state deflects internal tensions outward. As Wink observes, the Powers collectively form a Domination System that “oppresses, marginalizes, and scapegoats all those who might threaten their Power,” fueled by the myth that violent force will save the daydeforestlondon.wordpress.com. Modern political rhetoric is rife with this pattern. During economic hardship or social change, how often do we hear that “those people” – whether a racial minority, a political faction, or a neighboring nation – are the cause of all disorder? By casting certain populations as the embodiments of chaos or evil, dominator governments justify harsh measures against them (from discriminatory laws to ethnic cleansing), all while claiming to uphold law, order, and the common good. This scapegoating mechanism in statecraft is invariably draped in noble slogans (security, patriotism, justice), which obscure the underlying violence. The result is what Girard calls “unanimous victimage”: a community unites by casting out a subset as the menace. The peace that follows is tense and temporary, for it rests on injustice – yet the kosmos knows no other way to peace.

• Institutional Religion: Tragically, religious institutions themselves have often mirrored the very violence the Gospel unmasked. When the church became intertwined with empire, it frequently rearmed the scapegoat mechanism under theological pretexts. History bears the bloodstains of these holy persecutions: the heretic who must be burned for the faith's purity, the witch who must be executed to purge evil, the outsider (Jew, Muslim, “infidel”) who must be cast out or converted by force to protect Christendom. Each time, the pattern is the same – collective violence justified in the name of divine order. The vocabulary of faith (holiness, orthodoxy, righteousness) became a cloak for atrocities that mimicked the very crowd that yelled “Crucify him!” Even in recent times, institutional religion can target scapegoats: blaming gay or transgender people for societal decay, or expelling members who challenge abuse to “protect the church.” All of it invokes a higher morality while repeating the ancient mechanism of exclusion and persecution. As Girardian analysis warns, even the Bible can be “misused as one more stone to cast” if read through the lens of fearchristianscholars.com. The Gospel's message of mercy is distorted into an excuse for judgment. In these cases, a church or sect turns the cross into a sword, arming itself with a sense of holy mission to strike down those it deems threats. This is the kosmos in ecclesiastical dress – the dominator logic taking refuge in religion.

Across each of these realms, the scapegoat dynamic persists. It often hides beneath respectable ideals: defending the family, protecting the nation, upholding God's law. As James Alison observes, such violence usually “underlies our ‘goodness' and our ‘order',” growing more destructive precisely because we refuse to see our complicitychristiancentury.org. We convince ourselves that we are doing what is right – punishing sin, securing peace – while unconsciously repeating the mechanism of collective blame and expulsion. This moral disguise is what makes the kosmos so insidious. Scapegoating cloaks itself in virtue, rendering us blind to the victims we create. We “do not know what we are doing.” In modern societies, high-tech media and bureaucratic language can further mask the scapegoat mechanism, but it remains the same ancient dance: unity at the expense of a singled-out other, order maintained by unacknowledged cruelty.

Two millennia after Golgotha, the revelation of the scapegoat still struggles to penetrate hardened hearts and institutions. The innocent victim has spoken truth to power, yet the powers constantly seek to suppress that truth. The task of regeneration – whether in law, culture, or spirit – is to reclaim the Gospel's uncovering of violence and refuse to be captivated by the old lie. The kosmos would lull us back into the logic of sacrifice, making us believe that exclusion and destruction are necessary for life. But the living cosmos, aligned with God's dominion, whispers a different way: mercy, solidarity, and the recognition of every victim's innocence. The cross of Christ forever signals the end of righteous scapegoating – if only we have eyes to see. Each time we unmask a scapegoat mechanism in our midst, the dominator system shudders, its spell weakened. This lexicon entry itself stands as part of a larger constellation of ideas calling out the Dominator Logic. By naming the pattern – Kosmos vs. Cosmos, violence vs. truth – we participate in the ongoing unveiling. In the shadow of the kosmos, the innocent victim still pleads: remember the revelation. Jesus as the scapegoat exposed the false order once and for allmelwild.wordpress.com; our calling now is to live in that light, to renounce the lies of sacred violence, and to join in the “new order” of the genuine cosmos where victims are no longer required.

Sources: Girard's mimetic theory and scapegoat mechanismrlo.acton.orgrlo.acton.org; Walter Wink on the Domination System and the myth of redemptive violencemelwild.wordpress.comregenerativelaw.com; Gil Bailie's insights into the Gospel's unique revelation of violence; James Alison's theological reflection on Jesus the forgiving victimchristiancentury.orgchristiancentury.org; and broader political-theological analyses of empire and scapegoating in historydeforestlondon.wordpress.comchristianscholars.com. These voices collectively illuminate the lexicon of dominator logic, helping us discern the difference between the murderous kosmos and the life-giving cosmos, between the false peace of the scapegoat and the true peace of the Lamb.

1. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2006-09/violence-undone#:~:text=What%20evidence%20do%20you%20find,in%20scripture%20for%20this%20view
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