In these posts, I want to present, for the benefit of both non-believers, and believers too, a valid account of the Christian faith.
Why should this be necessary? And why would anyone who genuinely wanted to know about Christianity come here – rather than to a person authorized by their position or rank within an ecclesial institution to give such an account?
It is true, of course, that Scripture instructs us to be ready, on an individual basis, ‘to give an account of the hope we have’. Yet, this is generally interpreted – rightly, in my opinion – as meaning that we should be ready to give an account of what our faith means for us, and of its importance in our own lives. It is not a matter of us offering our own version of the Gospel message. In its essentials that message belongs to the Church as a whole, its content determined by Church teaching, and its dissemination a responsibility we undertake collectively.
But, for me, this raises the question where, in the present day and age, and to whom, an enquirer would go if they wanted such an account? I wish us to hold on to this apparently naïve question for a moment – as I believe it will help clarify what I am attempting to do here.
An ‘official account’?
The correct answer is not, I think, ‘Scripture’. All kinds of beliefs have been constructed on the basis of the biblical text. Tell an ‘unchurched’ individual to go away and read a Bible without guidance, and you have no idea what they will come back with. That is presumably why, from its earliest years, the Church itself has offered instruction directed specifically to enquirers – what used to be called catachesis
That word calls to mind catechism – and the role it played in the instruction offered to teenagers in the Anglican church of my youth. For the benefit of readers of a younger generation, this was a summary of Christian doctrine used in preparing candidates for the rite of confirmation, where they would reaffirm the promises made by their parents on their behalf at an infant baptism. It was structured in the form of a series of set questions and answers, which, in a generation still remoter than my own, had to be committed to memory. For us, back in the 1970s, there was no learning by rote; but the catechism formed the basis of a series of classes on the Christian faith conducted by the vicar of the local church. I suppose this offered, for people back then, an official account of the faith, aimed at enquirers who were serious enough to commit to the possibility of confirmation at the end of it.
I have no idea how current this kind of instruction still is in certain denominations. But I had the sense, back then, that it was rapidly giving way, at least in our own branch of Anglicanism, to a competing model of Christian initiation. The latter was being put about largely by youth leaders, who were relatively young themselves, and had often come to faith, so it seemed, at the Billy Graham ‘Crusades’. These were massive evangelistic events featuring the American preacher, at which those whose hearts had been touched were invited to declare their faith by coming to the front at the close of the meeting. Evidently, this new model of Christian initiation was operating on different assumptions regarding the candidate’s prior spiritual status. It was no longer a matter of appropriating for oneself a faith previously possessed, as it were, on one’s behalf; it was about a full conversion – presumably from an earlier condition of non-faith. Accordingly, the initiation into Christian faith took the form, not of instruction in doctrine, but of a sincere response to an evangelical message. The latter, for our Christian youth leaders, was what made you a Christian. ‘Confirmation’ was something that might subsequently ensue, and was formally required for participation in communion. In reality, however, it was merely the rubber-stamping of the crucial event (conversion) which had already taken place. The days of the Billy Graham Crusades have long gone. But many continue to ‘give their lives to Jesus’ at mass evangelistic events of broadly the same style. For them, the message that elicits this response is the ‘account’ the Church offers of the Christian faith.
Nowadays, however, you don’t have to go to a mass meeting to hear it. Even, back in the 1970s, I recall discussions about the difficulty apparently experienced by some of those coming to faith at mass missions with integrating into local church communities. Since the 1990s, the enormously successful ‘Alpha Course’ has repackaged a nuanced version of the evangelical message as a course that local churches can run for themselves. The popularity of this account extends well beyond Evangelical Anglicanism, and seems to have swept all other forms of catachesis before it.
So, it is perhaps to Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha Course we should go for the Church’s account of its faith.
Certainly, I wish it well. I know many who have ‘found faith’ in this way. And, at the end of day, the Christianity being a lived reality, not a set of doctrinal propositions, the important thing is to give faith a go, not to reach a state of intellectual conviction regarding its fundamental propositions.
And where the ‘official account’ fails to convince?
Still, in my own case (call me an ‘intellectual’, if you like), I couldn’t help wanting an account of the faith that made sense of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – intellectually as well as emotionally. For me, the official account failed even to be plausible. In fact, the decision to ‘give faith a go’, far from implying intellectual assent to that account, required the shelving of intellectual concerns it raised.
I shall have more to say about the account’s propositional content. For now, suffice it to say, that it is essentially what you would have heard at a Crusade or mass mission event, and, broadly (give or take a bit), what you will get at an Alpha course. It is an account of Christianity that focusses overwhelmingly on God’s response to our individual need for forgiveness of sin through the work of the Cross – in a word, atonement. Now I certainly believe in the need for – and reality of – atonement. But I am also firmly convinced that accounts of the Christian salvation event based solely on atonement don’t make sense.
Fortunately, what drew me back to Christianity had little to do with the intellectual robustness of its doctrine. The real source of my return was a recollection, at a moment of loneliness and dislocation, of the Christian community that I remembered as the wider family for my parents back in the 60s, followed by a personal experience of such community, as an adult, following my return to the fold. This was a ‘social’ thing – but also something more than that. To someone brought up, like me, in the teaching of the Jesus in the Gospels, the present reality of my own experience of community was the hope held out of a yet-to-be-fulfilled ‘Kingdom of God’ that would one day embrace all humankind. If that doesn’t sound particularly ‘religious’, I should also add that, for all my intellectual misgivings, I recognized that the behaviours and attitudes required of such a community – namely, forgiveness and love – reflected the circumstances of its origin in the death and resurrection of a redeemer. I already knew it was no coincidence that the ideal of universal community owed its existence to Jesus Christ.
So, I returned to Christianity (I am not ashamed to say) because I really wanted it to be true. Needless to say, I felt keenly the lack of a compelling account I could offer myself (or others) of Christianity’s central doctrine. Yet, I was convinced that there must be such an account out there somewhere, and I resolved to discover it. The next chapter will recount the story of my search. The really important thing, however, is that, in the end, I found what I was looking for – and it is essentially the account of Christian faith I want to offer you here.
As to where I eventually found it, and why it should have eluded me for so long, the answer to these questions you will also discover below.
An alternative account?
The account of which I speak you will encounter across the range of non-evangelical theology – Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Episcopalian, even Orthodox – especially amongst those more progressive and ecumenical currents associated with C20th movements to recover the sources of faith in the teachings and practices of the early Church and its liturgies. This account is characterized by a focus on sacrifice rather than atonement. Sacrifice is a broader, and more encompassing concept – one which embraces everything that we understand by atonement but also extends beyond that.
However, there is a problem about this re-angling of our account of the Christian faith – desirable as it may be on theological grounds: the term sacrifice seems positively to lend itself to misunderstandings. With atonement, people at least know what you are talking about. The word may not be on everyone’s lips, but its meanings are, by and large, securely rooted in the New Testament. Sacrifice, on the other hand, has multiple meanings whose connection in some cases to Christianity are unclear or problematic. As a popular anthropological concept, sacrifice summons up practices of elsewhere and yesteryear – some of which have come, for ‘secular’ modernity, to epitomize ‘religion’ in its most alien and exotic aspects. (We think of hearts torn from bleeding Aztec victims, and Gauls burnt to death in wicker cages). On the other hand, there is also a mundane everyday sense in which sacrifice refers simply to the act of abandoning or depriving oneself of some good (e.g. ‘She sacrificed her career to look after the children’). Sadly, the latter is scarcely closer to Christian sacrifice than the catalogue of exotic horrors attributed to ‘primitive’ societies. One can understand, therefore, that, for many theologians, to present the Christian salvation event as a response to a universal and fundamental human need for sacrifice (as proposed here) is a path fraught with peril. Instead, they scrupulously purge sacrifice of all but specifically Christian and theological meanings. Don’t start with sacrifice as in a generic, ‘history-of-religions’ concept, they tell us. For a Christian, ‘sacrifice’ means the redemptive action of God in Christ, full stop.
Rather than taking sacrifice as a previously-established known quantity and then fitting Christ into it, we shall begin with Christ in order to generate an account of sacrifice that conforms to his contours. (Schlesinger, p. 13)
… studies on sacrifice (by anthropologists, presumably) have typically begun by looking first at the various religions of the world. Then, having extracted from them some basic idea of sacrifice, they would then proceed to see how this idea is verified in biblical and Christian practice …. For us, however, such an approach is fatally flawed: flawed in assuming that Christian sacrifice legitimately fits into the general category of sacrifice … Thus, our attempt to expound … the mystery of Christian sacrifice … will begin with the Christ-event itself. (Daly, p.7)
Unfortunately, in their concern not to be ‘shoehorning’ Christian practice into ‘a general category of sacrifice’ these theologians fall into the opposite trap: that of Christian exceptionalism. The latter is all the more undesirable given the abstract and philosophical propensities of theology. With the imposition of too exclusively theological a definition, sacrifice gets drained, not only of popular stereotypes, but of any anthropological basis in universal human instincts and behaviours (such as those presupposed by the sacrifice of the Old Testament). What is left is a term disconnected from all non-theological usage – scarcely more than a label, in fact, for whatever set of Christian doctrines the theologians wish to apply it to. The resulting understanding of ‘sacrifice’ may be theologically unexceptionable. But it is not one that connects at all with the kind of fundamental human experience out of which sacrificial practices – both Christian and non-Christian – actually arise. Understandably, then, general readers fail to see how this purely theological notion could have relevance for their lives.
The way these exclusively theological accounts come across is well illustrated by the first of the studies cited above (Schlesinger’s Giving the Church). The first chapter of this book begins with an account of the relationships of the divine persons within the trinitarian Godhead distilled from the work of the Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. A second proceeds to offer us Augustine’s explanation (in The City of God) of how, through the sacrifice of Christ, human life is caught up into the divine sacrificial relationships of the Trinity, and itself becomes an expression of the divine sacrifice. Finally, a third chapter, reliant on the work of the theologian Henri de Lubac, explains the role of the Eucharist as the means whereby we collectively and individually participate in the sacrifice initiated through the Christ-event.
One wonders what Nicky Gumbel would make of it all.
For my own part, I have no quarrel with Schlesinger’s presentation of the Christian fundamentals. Far from it. HIs account of the Christian faith is essentially the one I mean to offer here, and its theological authorities (Balthasar, de Lubac, Augustine) are all ones I would acknowledge as being personal influences. As a presentation of the Christian faith, though, this account contains little that would engage an everyday enquirer – even a well-educated one. To be fair, the book in question is aimed primarily at seminary students rather than a general readership. But I don’t think the manner of presentation is really the main issue. Nor is it the issue in the case of other books that seek to offer a sacrifice-centred account, and succeed no better than Schlesinger’s. The problem lies rather in these authors’ approach to sacrifice – one that, as we have seen, conscientiously eschews non-theological perspectives. The result is something perfectly intelligible in its own terms, but strangely disengaged from anything an everyday reader is likely to deem relevant to themselves
I have, on occasion, contacted the authors of such books both to express support for their project and to point out the need for a popular version of this account of the Christian faith better adapted to a non-specialist readership. The response I have received is to the effect that the author agrees, but does not consider themselves the person for the task.
To my knowledge, nobody ever has.
The aims of this piece
Here, then, in the following pages, I will try to offer it myself – the account I wish had existed for me all those years ago, when I first began to enquire seriously into the Christian faith.
As to content, it puts sacrifice rather than atonement at the centre of the picture. It seeks to be both trinitarian and eucharistic, and is wholly dependent on insights I have gained from the works of a range of distinguished authors to whom I shall be referring. It is not an account you will have come across in mission sermons or evangelical tracts; but it is, I believe, consistent with the liturgies of mainstream Christianity (Anglicanism and Catholicism, for example), and, I hope (give or take a bit), with what many informed Christian authors from a wide range of denominations actually seem to believe.
In other words, where the content of the account is concerned, my aim is the opposite of originality.
When it comes to the kind of argument I will use in support of the account, that is another matter. I am going to take the forbidden route – the path others have declared ‘fatally flawed’. I mean to approach the Christian salvation event via a ‘generic’, ‘history-of-religions’ understanding of sacrifice. My motive for so doing is to make possible a kind of explanation that speaks to human needs and aspirations. After all, this is what the atonement-centred account does. It is, in fact, what any ‘evangelical’ account of the faith worthy of the name must do, or else fail of its object.
As I hope to show, the route to a Christian account through generic sacrifice is not ‘fatally flawed’. The Christ-event IS, I believe, a ‘sacrifice’ – and the Eucharist IS a ‘ritual’. And by ‘sacrifice’ and ‘ritual’ here, I mean, pretty much what social anthropologists mean when using those terms in the context of other cultures and religions. I am not, of course, making light of the differences between Christianity and other religions, or denying that a generic concept of sacrifice is hard to define. But to acknowledge a certain area of common ground between Christianity and other religions is, I believe, far less potentially misleading than to set out from the assumption of some absolute Christian exceptionality. To repeat, Christianity is a religion; Christian sacrifice is sacrifice; the Eucharist is a ritual – just as ‘the chosen people’ (of Israel) is a people and Scripture is a text. ‘The chosen people’ (i.e. Israel) is no less ‘a people’ for being ‘the people of God’; and the Bible is no less ‘a text’ for being ‘the word of God’. Similarly, Christian sacrifice is no less ‘sacrifice’ for being Christian, and the Eucharist no less a ‘ritual’ for being a Christian ritual. That is why theologians do well to defer on some issues to specialists in adjacent disciplines (e.g. literary scholars, and linguists and sociologists). On matters of practice and ritual, it makes sense to take account of the opinions of social anthropologists and specialists in religious studies. It is true, sadly, that theologians in the past (Catholic, in general) have indeed been responsible for forcing their understanding of the sacrifice of the Eucharist into a pre-conceived and mistaken generic frame. But the blame here lies with the inadequacy of the conception of generic sacrifice which theologians were applying, not something fundamentally wrong per se with the methodological approach that views Christian sacrifice as specific instance of something more generic. Nowadays, in the C20th, with the benefit of years of anthropological research, we can do better.
Still, in deference to the concern that preconceived generic concept of sacrifice could deform our understanding of Christian sacrifice, I mean, in the earlier part of this presentation, to explore the generic sense of sacrifice (and the associated understanding of identity and community), not through unfamiliar ethnographic examples drawn from other religions and cultures, but through examples given by the Bible. If I am correct that a religious response to a fundamental human need explains biblical – as other – forms of sacrifice, then the biblical examples will be just as useful in illustrating a generic concept of sacrifice as examples drawn from other religions. And I hope that the use of biblical material will allay the suspicion that I am forcing Christian sacrifice into a framework derived exclusively from pagan religious practice
TOWARDS A SACRIFICE-CENTRED ACCOUNT
An intellectual journey
My own route to an adequate account of my faith was, to say the least, indirect – perhaps unnecessarily so. But it took me into intellectual territory quite unfamiliar, I suspect, to most theologians. More specifically, it introduced me to comparative anthropological treatments of sacrifice as a widespread human behaviour responding to certain universal needs.
As it turned out, the end-point of this journey was an account of the Christian faith I could have accessed much more quickly and easily through wider theological reading, if I had only known where to look. For, to my surprise, the trinitarian and eucharistic sacrifice of the theologians, when I finally discovered it, fitted perfectly with the generic concept of sacrifice I had derived, laboriously, from studies in comparative social anthropology and religious studies. For all that, I was glad to have reached my destination via an alternative, non-theological, route. For a start, it provided powerful independent corroboration of the theologians’ account of Christian sacrifice. More importantly, however, for my present purposes, it opened up a non-theological way to understand the sacrifice of the theologians – a way that engaged with everyday human experience in a way that their theological discourse did not. This offered the hope of an explanation of Christian sacrifice with both intellectual cogency, and the power to speak to everyday concerns.
In this chapter, I propose to retrace my journey step by step. I shall begin with the reasons for my dissatisfaction with the official, atonement-centred, account of the Christian faith. I shall then briefly conduct you along my own, idiosyncratic, and very non-theological journey, to the theologically more cogent, and scripturally-based account of the faith I mean to offer you here. This will allow me to introduce a generic definition of (‘history-of-religions’} sacrifice based on a broad consensus among authors of comparative studies in the field of social anthropology and religious studies – an understanding that will serve as our point of departure for an exploration of the topic of sacrifice in subsequent chapters. I shall conclude this introductory chapter by demonstrating how an account of faith centred on this understanding of sacrifice avoids the pitfalls of the atonement-centred one discussed earlier in the chapter.
Difficulties with the official account
There are differences of emphasis between versions of the official account. Even the Gumbel’s Alpha Course has changed over the years.
Let us begin with a formulation which would pass muster with most of its proponents:
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 consequences of 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’)
There are two sets of problems that beset such atonement-centred accounts. The first is that they leave Jesus’ death on the Cross under-motivated. If we understand the benefit we derive from the Christ-event essentially as divine forgiveness, then it seems to follow that the work of the Cross is necessary to our forgiveness. To explain this necessity, popular theologians often introduce the very questionable idea of an objective penalty or debt that the Cross must pay in order for our forgiveness to be possible. This is the explanation of atonement termed penal substitution. It is highly problematic, and widely criticized for a variety of reasons.[i] Most obviously, ‘punishment’ can hardly be undertaken on someone else’s behalf without ceasing to be ‘punishment’ in any meaningful sense. Unfortunately, however, penal substitution has become so deeply embedded in the mindset of many of my fellow-believers that it is hard to imagine they could read the above paragraph without automatically interpreting it in the light of that doctrine.
Watch Nicky Gumbel’s video presentation on ‘Why Jesus had to die’, and you will hear that Christ died to show us ‘how much God loves us’, and ‘the value each individual human has in His eyes’. All that is quite true. But it is the right answer to the wrong question. It answers the question ‘why the Son of God became a human being’, not ‘why Jesus had to die’. Now it is, of course, true that Jesus’ dying is part – perhaps the most essential part – of his being human, and the ultimate, and most awesome, expression of God’s being ‘made one’ with us. It certainly shows God’s love, and imbues human life with incalculable value. But there is evidently more to Jesus’ death, as Christians see it, than the ultimate expression of the Son’s union with the human condition. Its full significance is not exhausted in being the final stage in his incarnation, and Jesus’ death isn’t just a death like any other. The fact that ‘God loves us so much’, though wondrously true – tells us nothing about that surplus of significance that belongs more particularly to the event of Jesus’ death.
The meaning of that event becomes clearer when we turn to the biblical passages that speak of Jesus’ Cross and Passion. There, we find the meaning of those events explained in the language of sacrifice.[ii] The New Testament speaks of a lamb that is slain, of blood that is shed, in a manner that instantly evokes the sacrificial practices of the Temple cult, referred to throughout the scriptural record.
If Gumbel doesn’t foreground this language, it may be because he fears that it will sound arcane to his viewers. However, I strongly suspect he is also skirting round the whole issue of sacrifice, for the reason that sacrifice is an idea inseparably linked for much of his audience with that of penal substitution – and he doesn’t wish to commit itself on penal substitution. I also suspect Gumbel’s prevarications will have served no useful purpose. The theological background of the local church leaders actually delivering the Alpha course will no doubt guarantee any discussion of the video will quickly fall back into the familiar groove of penal substitution doctrine. That is why I wouldn’t feel able personally to recommend anyone to attend an Alpha course.
There is also a second set of issues around the official account. These concern what we mean by sin when we make it the fundamental problem to which Jesus’ atoning action delivers the remedy. The assumption of the official account is that we would all, if we were honest, share its perception of human moral bankruptcy, and of the consequent need for forgiveness. It is on the basis of such a ‘deep down’ recognition that we are encouraged to embrace the Gospel as God’s response to our state of moral need. All this presupposes that morality transcends society and culture, and therefore precedes any properly religious commitments we might have.
I do not find this idea of a socially and culturally transcendent morality particularly compelling. It makes little sense even within the context of our own place and time.
Consider, for example, the moral obligation that so many people feel nowadays to ‘self-actualization’ – including in the field of sexual relationships. A perceived failure respecting this obligation (that we have ‘not fulfilled our potential’ or have somehow ‘missed our destiny’) reflects a commitment to a certain widely-shared value-system (which some social analysts have termed ‘expressivist individualism’).[iii] Like any failure to meet a moral standard, it can engender feelings of shame – and even bad conscience. However, the value-system in question is not a recognizably Christian one. Hence, failure in respect to the obligations it imposes scarcely fits the notion of ‘sin’ as Christians have traditionally understood it. Are we therefore, as Christians, to insist that the obligation such a person feels to ‘be their best self’ or to ‘find fulfilment’ constitutes something less ‘moral’, and less of a genuine obligation, than, say, that of Christians to love God and their neighbour? And does morality – to the extent it is genuine morality – always point to the Christian God? If this were so, it would, of course, be very convenient for Christian apologetic. But for a Christian to argue that such is actually the case sounds to me like a circular argument: the Gospel is validated by the way it answers to a universal human moral need; but moral need is only properly ‘moral’ to the extent it reflects Christian values. This is not very convincing. A more productive strategy, where Christians engage with expressivist individualists, would be to acknowledge the obligation to be equally ‘moral’ in both cases; but to argue that, in the case of ‘self-actualization’, the obligation arises out of a commitment is to an idolatrous value inconsistent with human flourishing. Morality may or may not be absolute. But, in a world of conflicting value systems, moral truth is evidently not universally perspicuous. So it makes little to sense to carry on as though it were.
So much then for the official account. Where then to go for something more intellectually convincing?
Girard’s mimetic theory – the gateway to sacrifice?
One relatively popular alternative for ‘intellectual’ people wishing to hold onto their faith but unconvinced by the official account (and penal substitution in particular) has been an account of the Christian faith constructed on the basis of the mimetic theory of the French theorist and literary scholar – Renέ Girard.[iv]
For me, Girard’s understanding of the Christian salvation-event was just a stage on the journey to something else. So I don’t intend to say a lot about it here. A full account of the theory, for those who are interested, is given in the appendix to this series of posts. But it is worth briefly mentioning the features that made this option attractive to me at the time; for, I’d argue, these are the features any account needs to exhibit, if it is to make much impression on a general enquirer – especially one from a non-theological background.
First, Girard-based accounts of the Christian faith explain the Christian salvation event through its relation to sacrifice (not atonement). Second, Girard’s ‘sacrifice’ (i.e. the understanding of sacrifice that forms the basis of such accounts) is defined by mimetic theory in a way that relates it to universal human instincts and behaviours such as desire (always imitative, according to Girard), rivalry, scapegoating, and the need to maintain the social order. Curiously, for Girard, the Christian salvation-event is not itself sacrifice, but the negation of sacrifice. But, for our purposes, this is neither here nor there. The important thing for us is that sacrifice is, one way or another, what Christianity is all about; and, given the universality of the instincts and behaviours to which sacrifice is a response, the Christian faith is seen as being of universal relevance.
Also an attraction, from an apologetic perspective, was the seriousness with which the theory seemed to be taken by academics otherwise sceptical of religious claims. Girard’s theory begins with a seemingly penetrating analysis of core texts of the Western literary canon, and subsequently expands to include interpretations of Greek tragedy and the Bible. My earliest encounters with his work took place in the lecture-room, when I was an undergraduate student of Foreign Languages in England and France. All of a sudden, a bunch of students, brought together in order to study great literature, found themselves thrown into a discussion about the Christian revelation – make of it what they would! As at the time myself both a student of literature and an enquirer into the Christian faith, I was impressed. Here, in the work of Girard, the Christian faith seemed to have acquired a bridgehead into the otherwise secular-leaning world of academe!
Yet, for me, as I said, Girard was chiefly the gateway to other things.
It was a gateway, first, to the ethnographic literature on sacrifice in non-theological.academic disciplines (social anthropology, religious studies, ancient history). Impressed by Girard’s ideas, I had decided to investigate whether his understanding of the social function of sacrifice in pre-modern societies was in line with the conclusions of social anthropologists and the evidence of the ethnographic record.
Such an investigation presented certain obvious difficulties. For a start, on a strict understanding of Girard’s theory, religious practice and belief function through a socially beneficial misrepresentation of their true origin and purpose. It follows that the theory cannot actually be refuted by interrogating those practices and beliefs. But, this, rather technical, consideration did not trouble me unduly. Though at the very beginning allowing the ethnographic references of Girard’s texts to direct my reading, I had no reason to limit myself to these sources, or to exclude the possibility that the phenomena described there might be better explained in other ways. Girard’s explanation might not be verifiable; but that hardly mattered if there existed an alternative that was verifiable – as, indeed, proved to be the case.
A second, more serious, issue was the problem of defining my object of investigation. I thought it best to assume the broadest conceivable definition of sacrifice, and extend my reading, at least at an initial stage, to any ethnographic studies by social anthropologists and ancient historians that promised to be of some relevance to my project. This turned out to be a good strategy, given my willingness to be led up the occasional blind alley. Anthropologists of today are, on the whole, less explicitly interested in religion than their forebears; yet religious concerns do not disappear from the ethnographic record, they are just less likely to figure in titles and indices. For enquirers like myself, interested in religion, the relevant material becomes harder to locate. Thankfully, however, there have been occasional studies by eminent scholars in the anthropology and the history of religion that have engaged in broad comparative analysis of gift-giving and sacrifice.[v]
I spent about ten years on this project. As I progressed, my interest in Girard dwindled in favour of a project to place Christian sacrifice in the broader context of other forms of religious practice. I became increasingly sceptical of Girard’s theory of sacrifice. But I was impressed – as well as surprised – by the degree of consensus that existed amongst anthropologists and specialists in religion as to the nature and function of ritual sacrifice. I had hit upon a generic understanding of the practice which owed nothing to Girard, and everything to a reassuring convergence of views amongst specialists in a range of theologically adjacent disciplines.
But that was not all.
As things turned out, Girard was not only a gateway into the world of social anthropology and religious studies. He also became the gateway to something else, when at the end of my ten years of informal study, I resolved to undertake a formal programme of research. My project, I had decided, was to be an appraisal of existing accounts of the Christian salvation event in the light of the findings of theologically adjacent disciplines on the nature and function of sacrifice. But where would I find an academic setting to host such a project?
On the whole, there is little engagement between theology and social anthropology or religious studies – certainly on the question of sacrifice. We have already noted the suspicion of certain theologians regarding any attempt to frame an account of Christian sacrifice that doesn’t adopt the Christ-event itself as its sole point of reference. Girardian theory was, to my knowledge, the sole existing locus for such engagement.
No surprise then, that it was Girard who gave me my point of entry into the theological debate. I was taken on as a research student by a professor of religion and a proponent of Girard’s theory – the author of the best introduction I know to Girard’s work. By that time, my scepticism about Girard’s theory was fully formed. I certainly believed in engaging anthropology for the purposes of theological argument. But it was time to set about freeing that engagement from its fixation with Girard.
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 being itself – a return made to whatever it is we consider to be our source.[vi] We humans have a sense that ‘what we are’ 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 being 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 that of the blood offering, usually imagined, despite the absence of any evidence of the fact in classical or biblical sources, as an act of institutional violence. In the face of these assumptions, it is important to insist that sacrifice does not always involve killing or destruction; where it does, violence may not necessarily be involved – any more than we would expect it to be in the case of the slaughter of an animal for domestic consumption.[vii]
There are many sacrifices that have a more specific motivation – such as the desire to make amends (atonement), or to extend kinship through ritual means to an individual or a group. (Both types are evidenced in the Bible). But underlying these and other specific forms of sacrifice, is the more general and fundamental motive of the counter-gift to the source of one’s being to which I have just alluded.[viii] 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’ seems widely, if not universally, shared – even, as we shall see, by our own, supposedly post-religious, culture.
A sacrifice-centred account of the Christian faith
Christ’s sacrifice and ours begins and ends with the Christ-event – Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascent into glory. But it involves more than just the forgiveness of our sins. Though forgiveness is the prerequisite for everything else, it is only the entry-point. What is ultimately achieved by the Christian sacrifice is the aspiration of all sacrifice, such as we have just described it: namely, to make a return to the source of our being. The aspiration is common to every religious sacrifice. But it is no more achievable through the unaided exertions of mere human beings than the forgiveness of our sins. Which is why, for Christians, there is a good form of sacrifice and there are bad forms, just as there are good and bad forms of religion.
The point of the Christ-event is to restore humans, both individually and collectively, to a good way of relating to the source of our being (i.e. good religion): ‘good’, that is, 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 the religious objects that constitute our life goals. It is in respect to this commitment that the Bible employs the prickly but ultimately indispensable concept of sacrifice. ‘Idolatry’ in the biblical sense is improper or bad 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.
I am aware that what I have said will leaves a number of questions hanging in the air:
- Why humans need the kind of sacrifice we have just described;
- How the death and resurrection of Christ could be considered a sacrifice in this sense;
- How, supposing the Christ-event to be a sacrifice, it can be, not just Jesus’ sacrifice, but also our own.
All of these are questions I shall answer in the following posts – where I shall attempt a concise, sacrifice-centred, account of the Christian faith.
For now, let us briefly consider how a sacrifice-centred account on these lines would avoid the pitfalls that beset the official account.
My first issue with the official account, you will remember, was the inadequacy of its explanation of the death and resurrection of Christ, and the resulting tendency it had to slip back into the doctrine of penal substitution. Understand the Christ-event exclusively as the means of our forgiveness, and it is not at all clear why it had to take the form of the death of Jesus. But understand it as the means of restoring humanity to proper religion, and we can begin to understand why, as the action making that restoration of proper religion possible, the Christ-event should itself take the form of a sacrifice. The cross was not, I suspect, the only means by which our forgiveness could have been obtained. If it was the means God chose for us, this will, I suggest, be on account of the other things He thereby obtained for us in addition to forgiveness, and for which the cross was the only means. What other things? Above all, no doubt, the reformation of a humanity deformed by false and idolatrous religion – through the restoration of good religion. The indispensability of Christ’s sacrificial self-offering to the latter goal is far more self-evident than it is to the procurement of divine forgiveness.
My second issue was the assumption, on the part of the official account, 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. I have already given my reasons for questioning such an assumption – even in the case of our own post-Christian culture. If, on the other hand, we see the Christian salvation event as offering, not a generalized promise of forgiveness for an ill-specified notion of sin, but as the restoration of humanity from idolatrous religion to proper religion, then, at one stroke, we do away with the need to argue for a religiously-neutral ‘morality’ that precedes our religious commitments. In the case of the devotee of self-actualization, evoked earlier, we do not need to make light of the obligation it imposes ‘to follow one’s heart’, or to argue that, as an obligation, it is less ‘moral’ than our own obligations. We can simply respond that it comes out of an idolatrous worldview (expressivist individualism) that does not conduce to human flourishing.
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.
To attempt to explain the Christian faith 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 to do? How should they respond to a world in which – frankly – the very notions of religion, gods or sacrifice (necessary, as it would seem, for a proper account of Christianity) have ceased to be current in our ways of conceptualizing and describing our own value systems?
The following post is an attempt to answer this challenge.
[i] The literature is vast. See Stephen Finaln, Problems with Atonement, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 1999; J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, Eerdmans, 2001, pp.99-178; Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, T&T Clarke, 2009, pp.99-168
[ii] For example: Hebrews 9.22; Romans 3.25, 5.9; Ephesians 1.7, 2.13; Colossians 1.20
[iii] For analysis of ‘expressivist individualism’: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1989; Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, University of California Press, 1985. For an amusing demonstration of its prevalence, James Miller, A Better Ten Commandments, Enigmaticinvestments LLC, 2017, p.64: ‘As a species, we have a distinct opportunity to engage with and pursue a goal beyond that of mere survival. That goal is also quite obvious, and it is the goal of attaining fulfilment.’
[iv] An excellent introduction to the mimetic theory of Girard is: Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006
[v] Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge, 1990 [1922]; Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott, Polity Press, 1999 [1996]; Marcel Hέnaff, The Price of Truth, trans. Jean-Louis Morhange, Stanford University Press, 2010 [2002]; Pamela J. Stewart & Andrew Strathern, Exchange and Sacrifice, Carolina Academic Press, 2008
[vi] Charles Malamoud, ‘Cuire le Monde’ in Purusartha, 1975, pp.91-135; Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, Manchester University Press, 1985; Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott, Polity Press, 1999 [1996]; Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter, Cambridge University Press, 1991
[vii] Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
[viii] Lawrence Feingold, The Eucharist, Emmaus Academic, 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.’