There is a standard account of the Christian faith that is based in penal substitution. I call it standard because it is the kind of presentation of the Gospel you will generally encounter in mission sermons, or those Alpha courses many churches lay on as an introduction to the Christian faith. It is not an account with which I feel satisfied.
To be quite sure what we are talking about, let me give you a brief summary.
Humans through the misuse of their God-given free will, have become sinful creatures entrapped in an eternal separation from a perfectly just God. This tragic situation would be irrevocable but for the intervention of God Himself acting in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The death of Jesus on the cross somehow allows God in Jesus to bear the punishment for our sinfulness. In this way, it is claimed, God’s justice is satisfied (‘justification’) in a manner that does not entail our destruction. A path is thereby opened for us sinful beings to be reconciled with a righteous God (‘justified’)
I don’t believe anything stated here is actually false. The notion of ‘bearing punishment for our sinfulness’ is not incorrect when rightly understood; though it isn’t, I would add, the most helpful way to describe the work of the Cross.
So, what do I take exception to in this presentation of the Gospel?
My problems with it are complex, and perhaps relate more to what it doesn’t say than what it does. Suffice it to say for now that my greatest concern is the impression it gives that, where the work of the Cross is concerned, forgiveness is the beginning and the end of the matter. Unfortunately, where the Cross is seen as serving no further purpose than forgiveness, it seems to follow that the Cross must be necessary to our forgiveness. To explain this, popular theologians go on to introduce the very questionable idea of an objective penalty or debt needing to be paid in order for our forgiveness to be possible. In short, penal substitution.
The truth, in my view, is rather that forgiveness is only where the work of the Cross begins, not where it ends. The Cross may not have been the only conceivable means by which our forgiveness could have been obtained. I don’t know. It was nevertheless the means God appears to have chosen – on account of other, further, purposes to be achieved in addition to our forgiveness. The fundamental defect of the standard presentation is not taking those further purposes into account. Not only does this result in a very incomplete understanding of the Gospel message; it fails even to give an adequate account of forgiveness. For, as I shall shortly explain, until we see forgiveness in the context of those further purposes, it’s not even obvious what it in practice it could mean.
So, what are those further purposes?
My conviction, based on my reading of Scripture and the authors mentioned below(1), is that it’s about restoring us humans, both collectively and individually to a good way of relating to the ultimate source of our being (i.e. to God). In other words, about restoring humans to what I shall controversially term proper religion: proper – as opposed to all the improper and bad kinds practiced currently and in the past. The Bible assigns the latter (the bad kinds) to the catch-all category of idolatry. From a biblical perspective, human behaviour, both individual and collective, arises out of commitment to those religious objects to which we devote ourselves. In respect to this commitment and devotion, Scripture employs the prickly but ultimately indispensable concept of sacrifice (to which I shall shortly return). ‘Idolatry’ in the biblical sense is improper sacrifice.
What the Gospel promises is that, where we submit to the authority of Christ in the matter of religion, God will not hold the mistaken, idolatrous, commitments of our past lives against us – even when those commitments continue to maintain some hold over our current behaviour (as they almost certainly will). That is where forgiveness comes in.
It is hard – if not impossible – to make sense of the notions of sin and forgiveness, let alone justify those notions to others, outside the scriptural context of their relationship to good and bad – proper and improper – religion.
The standard explanation of sin
The account of penal substitution given above sees the Gospel as the divine response to the problem of individual moral failure – i.e. sin and its consequences. The assumption of most evangelical presentations is that the recognition of such failure is widely shared, if not universal, among those prepared to take an honest look at themselves. It is on the basis of that ‘deep down’ recognition that we should embrace the Gospel as God’s response to our moral failure. God’s response is then represented as essentially the offer of forgiveness.
What is problematic here is, of course, the assumption that we all share the same understanding of moral failure. Morality is implied to be something universal that precedes our religious commitments, rather than being itself a consequence of those commitments, and arising chiefly in relation to them.
Consider, for example, the moral obligation so many people feel nowadays to ‘self-actualization’, including in the area of sexual relationships. A perceived failure in regard to such an obligation may reflect, I think, a real moral commitment to a certain notion of self-betterment, and even engender feelings of shame and bad conscience. But it scarcely fits with the Christian notion of ‘sin’. No doubt, some would argue that the obligation such a person feels to ‘make the best of themselves’ is less ‘moral’, and ultimately less of an obligation, than, say the obligation of the Christian to love God and neighbour: in other words, it may be that genuine morality always points to the Christian God. But this begins to sound like a circular argument. The Gospel is true because it responds to our universal moral failure; but, that failure is only genuinely ‘moral’ to the extent it reflects Christian moral standards. A more productive and engaging line of response to a genuine commitment to self-actualization would, I suspect, be, not that the obligation is less real, but that it is arises from genuinely idolatrous commitments which are unlikely to further our individual or collective good. Moral truth may or may not be absolute; but in a world of conflicting belief systems, it is not universally perspicuous – and there seems very little point in proceeding as though it were.
Still, one can understand the temptation for evangelists today. For a start, the very idea of religious practices being proper or improper, better or worse, is likely nowadays to get a frosty reception. Many people – perhaps the majority – would question the need of human beings for any form of religious practice. How much easier, then, for evangelists to present the Gospel message in the familiar way, as a generalized promise of forgiveness for an ill-specified notion of sin.
On the other hand, to attempt to explain the Christian faith in the way proposed here, in terms of our need for proper – as opposed to improper – religion and sacrifice, requires us to consider the nature of religion and sacrifice and the nature of our need for them. On such questions, Scripture, the obvious first recourse for Christians, does not at first appear to offer any ready answers. The Bible has plenty to say about the good – as opposed to the bad – forms of these things, less about why they should exist in the for first place. Historically, this is hardly surprising, as these phenomena would naturally have been taken for granted by the first readers of these texts. All the nations known to the Bible recognized divine beings, and engaged in religious practices of a broadly sacrificial nature – as, indeed, have most societies and cultures prior to the modern era.
So, what is the Christian evangelist supposed to do ? How should they respond to a world in which – frankly – the very notions of religion, gods or sacrifice (which we have claimed to be necessary for a proper account of Christianity) have ceased to be current in our ways of conceptualizing and describing our own value systems?
Another way of thinking?
One possible strategy – one that I shall be advocating strongly in this essay – is that we take advantage of findings, often quite recent, in the human sciences, especially in the areas of social anthropology, history of religions, sociology. Is there a measure of consensus in what such disciplines have to say about the nature of religious phenomena and how they relate, if at all, to contemporary social practice? After all, the reluctance of our contemporary culture to speak of things such as religion and gods, can hardly be held to invalidate the existence of the areas of human behaviour to which those have in the past been taken to refer. If we could somehow reach an objective understanding of the meaning and relevance of religion and sacrifice in general, then would we not be in a better position to appreciate the distinctiveness and importance of the specifically Christian form of those things, and their relevance to people today?
At all events, it was some such reasoning that propelled my own exertions during the ten years or so of my own life I devoted to reading ethnographies from the widest possible range of societies and cultures by social anthropologists and academics in religious and historical studies. I extended my investigations to any studies I could find that promised to enhance my understanding of sacrifice and symbolic ritual practices in general. I was particularly interested by writers who engaged in broad comparative treatments and theories of religious practice.
So, what did I find, and how did it affect by religious views?
On the whole, I was impressed – as well as surprised – by the degree of consensus that seemed to exist amongst subject specialists on the nature and meaning of religious phenomena – including sacrificial ritual. My findings are reported more fully in a thesis I produced some years afterwards as a doctoral student at London University.(2)
I began to read the Bible with the awareness that my ethnographic studies had brought me. I found myself able to contextualize the Bible’s understanding of proper religion and proper sacrifice against the background of the religion and sacrifice as practised elsewhere.
Yet the big shock came when I subsequently returned to Christian theology. This time I extended my reading to a far wider range of studies than I had previously thought to be relevant, including those emanating from non-Evangelical backgrounds. There I found most of my own arduously won conclusions as to the nature of religion and sacrifice confirmed – at least in principle – by works of Christian theologians from a wide range of denominational backgrounds. It would appear these things had always in some measure been known by some Christian theologians …. if I had only known where to look.
So let me conclude this chapter with the most significant – and, for our purposes, most relevant – point of inter-disciplinary consensus to which I will be drawing your attention in subsequent chapters.
What is religious sacrifice?
Ethnographic studies of other cultures and societies teach that religion/sacrifice at the most fundamental level – the level at which it could be considered a universal phenomenon – is a giving back, or a counter-gift, that we collectively make in response to the gift of life itself – a return made to the (often divine) beings we consider as our source of life.(3) We have a sense that life comes to us from outside ourselves, that it is something ‘given’ us; and seek to acknowledge that gift, as people acknowledge any other gift, through making a return. Given all we have comes to us in that most fundamental of gifts (the gift of life itself), we give back out of what we have received.
Our stereotype of sacrifice – maybe influenced by the practices of the Romans, or of the sacrifices prescribed for the Jews in the book of Leviticus – is of the blood offering, usually conceived of as an act of institutional violence. Yet, it is important to insist that sacrifice is far from always taking such a form. Killing or destruction are not necessarily involved. Even where they are, such killing or destruction is not necessarily violent (as so often supposed), but just the inevitable corollary of the fact that what is offered, where it is the life of a beast, must be consumed.(4)
There are many sacrifices that have a more specific motivation – such as the desire to make amends (atonement), or, by ritual means, to extend kinship to a group. (Both types are evidenced in the Bible). But underlying these and other specific forms of sacrifice, is the more general and fundamental sense of an offering up of something to which I have just alluded.(5) Who or what it is to whom people feel they owe this gift has varied widely at different times and places. But the aspiration to offer back something seems widely, if not universally, shared – even, perhaps, by our own, supposedly post-religious, culture.
- (1) Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945); Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (1987); Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (1939); Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale (1970); Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (1966)
- (2) Leslie Goode, Re-evaluating the relationship between Christian salvation event and ‘history of religions’ sacrifice, (2018)
- (3) Charles Malamoud, ‘Cuire le Monde’, in Purusartha, Recherches de Science Sociale de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (1975); Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa (1985); Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (1996)
- (4) Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence (2008)
- (5) Lawrence Feingold, The Eucharist (2018), p.329: ‘In contemporary society most people have no awareness that the offering of sacrifice to God is a central act of the virtue of religion and thus a good and morally obligatory thing. Even Catholics who attend Mass are generally unaware that they are participating in an infinite offering to God or that that is the principal reason why there is a Sunday Mass obligation. The more society becomes secularized, the more the notion of sacrifice and its obligation becomes foreign and difficult to grasp. Clearly there is a great need for catechesis about the meaning, glory and obligation of offering sacrifice to God.’