
In a compelling exploration, Anthony Bartlett's Virtual Christian, which I summarise here with some personal reflections, offers a fresh take on how the story of Jesus reshapes human identity and history. In many respects, this work is the sequel to an earlier one I will refer to later. In Virtual Christian Bartlett weaves together theology, anthropology, and contemporary culture, articulating a profoundly transformative and deeply relevant vision of Christianity for the modern world.
His starting point and basso continuo is anthropology based on a well-known but rarely explored phenomenon: human desire, distinguished from creaturely appetites, is learned from models in our environment, particularly people. In addition, we are born as imitative creatures with brains insatiable for meaningful information. Thus, the default setting of human desire is acquisitive, based on what others find desirable. It tells us that the dynamic shape of human desire is triangular: the model that signals desirability, the imitating subject and the object of desire. Novelists, poets, and playwrights have exploited this conflict-prone triangle since antiquity. Yet, its value as a supreme anthropological datum remained unrecognised until the French cultural anthropologist René Girard drew attention to it in the 1960s, claiming to have discovered the origin of human culture and religion. Girard goes even further as he sees in his framework of mimetic desire the fountainhead of human violence in the world and the explanation of why we can’t stop it without an incorruptibly nonviolent model.
By borrowing the concept of “mimetic desire,” Bartlett shows that societies have managed this rivalry through what Girard calls the “scapegoat mechanism,” where collective violence is directed at a single individual or group. Casting all blame onto a scapegoat brought a temporary and fragile peace at the cost of justice and truth, for the logic of the scapegoat demands that winners are innocent. At the same time, victims are guilty regardless of the facts.
Against this background, Bartlett shows how the story of Jesus Christ subverts this age-old pattern. Unlike other figures, historical or mystical, who are absorbed into the cycle of violence and sacrifice, Jesus exposes the injustice of victimage. His crucifixion reveals that the victim is innocent, and the scapegoat mechanism is no more than society’s ever-failing hope for stability.
At the same time, Jesus demonstrates in his resurrection that human violence is not the final word. In sum, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection unveil a new way of being human, rooted in forgiveness, nonviolence, and love. Thus, the fulcrum of Bartlett’s argument is the figure of Jesus as a sign of transcendent nonviolence.
Bartlett rests his case for God’s nonviolent response to human violence on his seminal study of the atonement. In a rich historical and theological overview of the evolution of various atonement theories, Bartlett drives home two conclusions: On the one hand the logic of violence and sacrifice that has dominated Western doctrines of atonement invokes “sacred violence” which in church history has sanctioned widespread violence in the name of Christ. On the other, when properly understood, the cross and resurrection of Jesus must be seen as the overcoming of the ancient order by forgiveness and compassion, giving the tradition an entirely new reading.
Thus, the Cross is not, as traditionally taught, the intersection of humanity’s enormous debt toward God and his demand for justice that only the suffering and death of Jesus could satisfy but the intersection of human violence and God’s nonviolent nature, warranted in the resurrection. In other words, by revealing Jesus as the victim of human cruelty and malicious contrariness, God shows himself as a God of abyssal compassion, who drowns the totality of human history in overwhelming grace.
Since Christ has disrupted the destructive cycle of rivalry and scapegoating, the good news is that humanity is no longer bound by it. Instead of seeing rivals and scandalising obstacles in one another, we are invited to imitate Christ, whose self-giving love offers a new model for relationships based on mutual respect and care.
This transformation is more than a matter of personal ethics: it is a profound reorientation of human meaning and social structures, indeed, a “new anthropology.” With the Forgiving Victim as our nonviolent model, primal instincts may be transcended, enabling our imitative nature to embrace a new, reconciled way of living, growing in freedom from resentment and retaliation, which the hurting creation awaits with groaning.
This new understanding of what Jesus came to reveal and undo from within, humanity’s triangular entrapment in mimetic rivalry and conflict, leads Bartlett to reexamine the traditional view of God’s nature. Moving away from the transcendent deity of Greek thought—a distant figure ruling from above—he presents God as the One who arises among us, as Immanuel, in the crises of human desire, where mimetic rivalries threaten to tear communities apart, even destroy life on Earth. In these moments, God’s presence is not detached or otherworldly (like the God of end-time intervention) but deeply involved, offering a way through conflicts toward forgiveness and reconciliation. This decisive change in
perspective grounds Bartlett’s vision of Christianity as a faith of transformative action and relational presence rather than primarily of personal salvation.
The cruciality of this last point must not be overlooked. After all, Bartlett’s book offers nothing less than a compelling reimagining of the Christian God. He challenges the classical metaphysical framework associated with Greek philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas) and its Christian adoption, presenting instead, as we have seen, an anthropological perspective whereby God is deeply entangled with evolutionary history.
Bartlett critiques the integration of Greek metaphysics into Christian theology, which has shaped much of the traditional understanding of God. In this framework, God is often conceptualised as a distant, immutable, and transcendent being, residing in heaven, an “otherworldly” realm. This view reflects Plato's world of forms and Aristotle's unmoved mover, further refined by Aquinas's scholastic synthesis. The focus on divine perfection, immutability, and impassibility creates a God who seems detached from the messy realities of human existence. In other words, Bartlett sees an urgent need for an uncoupling of our conception of God from Greek Philosophy, arguing that its metaphysical categories distort the biblical revelation of God, reducing God to a philosophical abstraction rather than seeing God as a dynamic participant in human history. Not only that, but they reinforce a hierarchical “sacred order” based on “sacred violence” separating God from creation and perpetuating a dualistic worldview that prioritises spiritual transcendence over earthly transformation.
In a brilliant interpretation of Girard’s mimetic anthropology and its cultural progeny of scapegoating, Bartlett shows how traditional notions of God have been complicit in justifying sacrificial violence and exclusion in the death of Jesus as satisfying the just wrath of God. Instead, Bartlett suggests that the true biblical revelation of God disrupts these mechanisms, unveiling a God who sides with victims and participates in human suffering rather than endorsing power structures or metaphysical hierarchies. Instead of residing in an “otherworldly realm,” he sees God as labouring within human history to bring about transformation and renewal. This labour is not abstract but is embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus reveals a God of radical immanence that hides his transcendence, sharing in human suffering and working toward the healing of creation. Bartlett’s insights extend beyond individual transformation to encompass all of creation. He envisions history as moving toward a reconciled humanity, where oppressive systems, violence, and exploitation are dismantled. In this sense, the gospel is not just a personal message but a cosmic one. It speaks to the renewal of all things, calling humanity to participate in God’s work toward justice, peace, and ecological harmony.
If I understand Bartlett correctly, Jesus came to reveal not a God of sovereign top-down power, but as another hypostasis of desire altogether. Its transcendent interior radiates self-giving love, creative beauty and truth in countless facets touching the smallest volume of spacetime: neurons, molecules and subatomic particles, for in Christ all things cohere. Suggesting a more familiar metaphor for what I am alluding to here, I would mention gravity whose invisible presence reaches all levels of creation from the largest intergalactic structures to the particles that emerge from the creative energy-pregnant quantum vacuum.
Central to Bartlett’s vision is the role of the Holy Spirit, the transformative presence that enables individuals and communities to live out this new anthropology. Christ’s influence becomes “virtual” through the Spirit—not in the sense of being unreal, but as a dynamic, relational force that reshapes human hearts and histories. In a wide-ranging exposition, Bartlett then shows how this virtuality speaks to the ongoing, unfolding nature of Christ’s impact in the world through film, art, poetry, music, and literature, even as a majority in the West no longer takes Christianity seriously.
For Bartlett, living as “virtually Christian” means embracing this transformative vision in practical ways. It is a call to action—to pursue forgiveness in the face of conflict, advocate for the marginalized, and heal a fractured world. This is not about adhering to a rigid set of doctrines but about embodying the values of the Kingdom of God in everyday life.
Bartlett’s Christianity is vibrant, relational, and deeply attuned to the challenges of contemporary society.
What makes Bartlett’s work especially compelling is its resonance with the concerns of a postmodern audience. In a world marked by globalisation, cultural pluralism, and ecological crisis, Virtually Christian offers a hopeful vision of how humanity can move forward. This vision reframes Christianity as a living, breathing process of universal transformation. Bartlett’s narrative addresses believers and non-believers alike to consider how the story of Christ might continue to shape human meaning and make creation new.
He underscores this conclusion in his final chapter by presenting a biblical exposition of “the sign of Christ” as the culmination of the biblical narrative and a paradigm for humanity's ongoing spiritual and existential journey: Christ as the ultimate sign that brings coherence to all of Scripture. This sign, “greater than the sign Solomon and Jonah,” reveals God’s self-giving love, which subverts human violence and the murderous sacrificial systems that have underpinned human culture. In other words, the sign of Christ is revealed as a radical alternative to the prevailing narratives of power, competition, and consumerism.
In sum, Bartlett’s work is both a challenge and an invitation. It challenges us to recognise how mimetic rivalry and scapegoating still operate in our lives, families, organisations, church communities and societies. At the same time, it invites us to imagine a world transformed by Christ’s self-giving love to move from violence to nonviolence, from retribution to forgiveness, from competition to compassion, from acquisition to giving—a world where humanity’s deepest conflicts give way to reconciliation and renewal.
You can view and order the book here.
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