Always be ready to make a defence when you are called to give an account of the faith that is in you. (1 Peter 3.15)
What does Scripture mean here when it speaks of ‘an account’ of the faith ?
A comprehensive theological explanation? Presumably not.
Our Christian leaders generally advise that we focus on what our Christian faith has meant ‘for us’. We should consider the words of the man blind from birth in the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel when called to account by the Pharisees following his healing by Jesus: ‘One thing I know: that, though I was blind, now I see!’ In other words, concentrate on the difference it has made in your life!
Our leaders are surely right about this. Nevertheless, in my own (admittedly very limited) experience, the point in my conversations is quickly reached where I am challenged on the question of what I suppose to have happened all those years ago, and how and why Christians like me want to claim it is relevant to our lives today.
So this here is what I say – and it is a form of presentation I would recommend to everyone else:
All religions – including Christianity – are essentially about the sacrificial worship through which we humans relate to whatever we perceive as the source of our being. This means a ‘giving back’ out of what we have received to the sacred source from which we received it – however that is understood. Sacrificial worship involves, not only what is done in religious settings, but every department of human life. Through this sacrificial ‘giving back’ our human lives achieve purpose and we institute bonds of communal living. In other words, religion, is, in a very real sense, the basis, not only of individual fulfilment, but of community itself.
From the Christian perspective, such sacrificial worship – performed both in church, and with our whole lives – is owed to the one God of Christian monotheism, the Father of Jesus Christ, for his initial gift, not only in creating, but also (as we shall see below) ‘restoring’ us. It is the one God of Jesus Christ who is the initial giver, and to whom our own response is a due expression of love. Such love binds us into a right relationship, not only with the one who is the origin of our being, but also with those humans who share that common origin. It gives God glory, and our lives purpose, through sustaining social relationships that give our lives meaning.
The implications of this invite serious consideration. On the one hand, it follows that sacrificial worship is at some level a deep-seated human need – and even a necessity, since humans cannot live outside some kind of community. On the other, humanity, for much of its history, would appear – when seen from a Christian perspective – somehow to have lost the knowledge of the true source of its being, and, along with that knowledge, the wherewithal to offer its sacrificial worship worthily. At any rate, we see that the diverse objects of worship, and the broken and divisive forms of community instituted by such apparently mis-directed devotion, litter the course of history.
This curious situation poses the question: if humanity really was so constituted as to find its goal and its unity in the worship of the one God, why it would not, over time, have somehow found its way to that conclusion – as it has so conspicuously failed to do?
Rightly understood, the story of the Gospel offers an answer to that question. Not only does it recount how the one whom Christian believers call the Messiah (or ‘Christ’) makes for the first time, in his own self-offering, a worthy sacrificial return to the source of his and our being. It also makes clear why, in the present conditions of humanity, the task of offering such a sacrificial return would far exceed the capacities of any other than Christ himself. Correspondingly, it claims for the one who finally makes that offering the status of God himself, become a human being and acting on our behalf.
But all this would have a merely historical interest but for a further, all-important, aspect of Christ’s self-offering – something only comprehensible in the light of the Gospel understanding of Christ’s sacrifice as an act on the part of God himself. In so doing, Christ offers his sacrifice on OUR behalf. And the implication of this ‘on our behalf’ is that he simultaneously offers US the possibility of participating in his perfect self-offering. By this, I mean nothing less than that he allows US to share in his sacrificial agency, so establishing, for the first time, the possibility of a universal human community – a community in his sacrificial offering.
How do we know? Because this is what Christ claimed to be doing, above all, at the Last Supper, when he offered up bread and wine symbolizing his sacrifice, and instructed his followers to carry on doing what he was doing after his death. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost marks symbolically the moment, following the Resurrection, when his followers came to understand what Christ had done, and at last assume his sacrificial agency for themselves. This was the moment when the Church was born. It was also the moment when humanity was restored to the possibility of right sacrificial worship and universal human community.
The essence of the Christian Gospel-event, then, is an act of sacrificial self-offering that is properly both Christ’s, but also, potentially, ours. In practice, we participate in Christ’s sacrificial return: perfectly at the level of what we do in church – in the divinely-instituted Eucharistic worship that molds our hearts and desires; rather less perfectly, at an everyday level, in our lives to the extent that these are brought into line with the pattern set by what we do in Church. It is this lived conformity to the Eucharistic paradigm is that St Paul refers to as ‘living sacrifice’ and ‘spiritual worship’. And it is this sacrificial worship that constitutes ultimate goal of human life.
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH