Many and various are the rocks of offence (cf. 1 Peter 2:8), upon which the innocent lambs of our poor flock stumble into the abyss of loss. For this reason my strength did not suffice for lifting all the rocks together. Thereby, I decided on lifting only one rock of offence in the hope that there will arise other people having love for Christ, who will lift the rest of the rocks. And out of all those rocks I chose the principal one, which is the most harmful for the spiritual flock of Christ. And that rock is the ignorance about the true meaning of the Universal Church.
Gēorg Mxlayim Oğlu of Constantinople (1681/85–1758). Peace-Making Interpretation of the Church.
This study is designed to reveal some theological peculiarities of the most systematic, legally defined pattern of mass violence – the phenomenon of genocide. In this paper ‘the syndrome of Cain’ is considered as a paradigmatic and descriptive model for understanding and interpreting general theological outline of the phenomenon of genocide through the story of Cain and Abel. Famously, this is the story of the first murder, the story of first human violence, and the first narrative in the Bible built around the phenomenon of sacrifice. This research points out the issues of struggling for superiority, enmity, the separation of ‘us’ from ‘the others’, and scapegoating ‘the others’ which are very vividly present in almost all known genocides.