On Romans 2:1: In an earlier post, I pointed to the “exchange” that Paul describes in Rom 2:1, namely, that the one who judges another seeks to place the other under the judgment of God and thereby to escape God’s judgment on himself. Paul says that this in fact has the opposite effect. The one who judges the other and practices the same things is self-condemned by trying to place the other under God’s judgment. A comment from a friend in my Sunday School class suggests an additional dimension to that: What Paul is describing is precisely the phenomenon of scapegoating, in this case specifically the effort to be freed from sin by projecting our sins onto a victim. You could unpack Rom 2:1 using the categories of Rene Girard.
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