Louise Erdrich’s novel LaRose is a Christ story. Erdrich does not say so, but she hints at it. And such a strange story it is. The story begins with a killing. Dusty, the young son of Peter and Nola Ravich jumps down from a tree just as Landreaux, Dusty’s uncle, pulls the trigger to take down a large buck. Instead of the deer, the bullet hits and kills Dusty. 

Landreaux and Emmaline—Emmaline is a half sister to Nola—also have a young son, about the age of Dusty. His name is LaRose. In the aftermath of Dusty’s death, with grief and recrimination lying thick on everyone, Landreaux and Emmaline take LaRose to the Ravichs and give him to them in the place of Dusty. At first they don’t understand, and Landreaux and Emmaline have to tell them again, “Our son will be your son.” When the Ravichs protest, Peter saying, “This can’t be,” Landreaux says, “It is the old way.”

LaRose is set in Objiwe North Dakota, the area where Erdrich, herself Objibwe, sets many of her novels. Landreaux and Emmaline are devout people, devout in both Ojibwe and English, the old ways and the ways of Catholic Christianity. In their deep grief and Landreaux’s deep guilt for what he has done, they set their young son LaRose between their family and Ravichs. And LaRose both in what he does and in who he is holds the two families together in uneasy peace.

It is, as I said, a Christ story. More complicated than my simple summary would suggest. It involves not only an uneasy peace between the Iron family and the Ravich family but between the Ojibwe culture and the surrounding Anglo culture. It’s not biblical. No biblical passage tells the story of Jesus in quite this way, though consider the 2^nd chapter of Ephesians, and especially these words: “He [Christ] is our peace, the one who makes the two one and tears down the wall of division, the fence, the hostility in his flesh” (my translation). It’s this, this reconciliation between people who can no longer stand the sight of each other, that LaRose with knowing innocence effects between the Irons and the Ravichs. 

I was brought to LaRose by Matthew Ichihashi Potts’s brilliant book, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account(Yale, 2022). Following Hannah Arendt, Potts defines forgiveness as the decision not to seek retribution for a wrong. In LaRose, much as the Ravichs wish retribution on Landreaux, the boy LaRose stands firmly in the way, both because they love him and because he wisely takes steps to keep everyone safe. He does so at the expense of being separated from his parents and siblings. He takes up the hostility into his own body. It is, as I said, a Christ story.

I’ve been reflecting on another Christ story. It’s caught up in a single word: “satisfaction.” This story is also not found in the Bible. In the form we have it, it goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4-1109 CE). The story has a medieval cast to it. At the center of it is the idea of honor—God’s honor. Like a noble in medieval society, God requires honor, and if God is not honored, God will require “satisfaction.” This language persists now only in historical movies (“Sir, I demand satisfaction.”) and in theology.

Anselm develops the satisfaction story at considerable length in his Cur Deus Homo (“Why God Became Human,” 1094-98). His argument is somewhat more subtle than I can fully explain here, but in the end, it requires a view of justice based on the idea of moral balance. In this view, represented by Lady Justice with her balance scales, justice requires retribution. Retribution can be restorative—the offender repairs the harm done—or punitive—the offender is punished to balance the scales. But in every case justice requires this sort of balance. In the case of wrongs that cannot be restored the pain on the one side of the scale must made up by an equal amount of pain in the other side of the scale. It’s this sort of retribution that LaRose keeps from happening in Erdich’s story.

Anselm holds that God must maintain this balance of justice or God will cease to be God. God cannot in Anselm’s opinion simply forgive sins. To do so would unbalance the moral universe. So, if God’s honor is impugned by human beings failing to keep God’s commandments, then God must demand retribution. Or, in Anselm terminology, God must demand satisfaction. In the end, that satisfaction is supplied by Jesus dying on the cross.

This Christ story, constructed by Anselm to explain, as he puts it in Cur Deus Homo, “how the death of the Son can be proved reasonable and necessary,” spread widely in European Christian theology. It found its way into the Reformation confessions. The Heidelberg Catechism, for example, says that “God requires that his justice be satisfied” (Q&A 12). Similarly, the Belgic Confession, teaches that Jesus “presented himself in our name before his Father to appease his wrath with full satisfaction by offering himself. . . (Article 21). The Canons of Dort add, “We cannot escape these [temporal and eternal] punishments unless satisfaction is given to God’s justice.”

What can we do with this? As I have already said, this story is not really biblical. The biblical idea of justice—better, righteousness—is not based on the idea of moral balance. Righteousness, whether God’s or ours in the Bible, is doing right by others. Think about the vocabulary of righteousness (justice) in the Old Testament. Key words include mišpaṭ, “judgments,” as in the idea of judicial precedent; ʾemet and ʾĕmûnâ, “truth, faithfulness”; ḥesed, “covenant love”; and, of course, ṣedeq and ṣĕdāqâ, “doing what is right.” None of these words mean “justice” in the abstract Anselmian sense. They are the justice of a Father who loves us, a Mother who holds us, the parent who in the end, despite being spurned over and over again, reaches out to her child one more time. This biblical idea of justice is more the audacity of LaRose than the steely justice of Anselm.

But what’s more problematic for the satisfaction story is that it seriously underestimates the problem. If evil is only giving offense to a sovereign, a violation of an honor code, then evil is not the powerful chaotic and destructive force we know it to be. The view of evil in Anselm is small town, grade school even. But in the scriptures evil is the raging dragon. Evil is principalities and powers. Evil insinuates us into it, and we are powerless in its grip.

Think about climate change: the way human civilization has imperiled the planet. Climate change has all the marks of biblical evil: it is global, visits injustice on the poor, damages creation, results from small and large decisions alike, involves idolatrous worship of our own comfort and power, includes us all together, and is mostly met with denial. Read the prophets, and these characteristics of evil arise time and again. In this view, evil is an implacable foe, not a choice we make but the air we breathe. We are immersed in evil.

Compared to actual evil, the Anselmian notion that evil is a violation of God’s honor has a cartoonish quality about it. Is God really like that? Like a nobleman of long ago, offended because someone didn’t give him the proper honor? And does God like that long-ago nobleman in response demand satisfaction? This seems wholly unworthy of God.

For these and other reasons the satisfaction story no longer works for us. Perhaps it worked when there were actual kings and other nobility in the land and giving offense to them was fraught with consequence. But even then it did scant justice the character of God and to the nature of evil. There are better ways to tell the story.

So, again, what should we do with this? Here’s where the confessional theology I was taught long ago falls short. The confessions were presented—still are presented, near as I can tell—as a collection of timeless truths. “If the Belgic Confession says it, that settles it” sort of thing. But the confessions, if they are to continue to speak to us and instruct us, can only speak clearly if we take them in their historical settings, if we appreciate that the stories they tell are stories taken from their own age. And then we must do two things. We must try to understand as best we can the truth of the story they tell, and we must at the same time tell new stories that speak to our own time.

What can be retrieved from the satisfaction story? Perhaps its emphasis on the glory of God. Not that God demands satisfaction, but that God wishes us to come to a proper appreciation of that which is beautiful and awesome and holy. Not satisfaction but the sublime, where the sublime inspires in us joy and fear and longing and the desire to live forever in its presence. To see this requires us to read the satisfaction story both appreciatively and critically. Not an easy thing to do.

And we do this best when we tell our own stories from our own time, exploring accounts that evoke in us new understandings of the meaning of incarnation and of the cross. Stories like  LaRose do just that, always understanding that our stories are also inadequate, as all stories of Christ must be. But it will be in these stories, in the telling of them, that the Spirit will speak, and we will join with those who wrote the confessions in saying to each other: see, it’s like this. And hearing back: no, better to think of it in this way. And in our dialogue with each other and with the confessions come to realize that none of us has anything like the final truth.

Clay