3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
As in the previous section, we find ourselves between, on the one hand, a traditional answer this question, and, on the other hand, a revisionist answer that claims to owe its insight to an earlier and more authentic version of the Christian faith. And, as in the case of the symbol, I would be less tempted by the revisionist position but for the impressive degree of corroboration that position appears to receive from contemporary accounts of the phenomenon of sacrifice in religious studies and social anthropology. In short, what anthropologists and ethnographers tell us about sacrifice as a transcultural phenomenon demonstrates an unexpected but unmistakable convergence with the way Eucharistic sacrifice seems initially to have been understood by the Christian tradition – at least on the view of that tradition developed by revisionist theology. Moreover, the theologians promoting that view of the tradition, and of Eucharistic sacrifice, are precisely those associated in the previous section of this chapter with recovery of a properly religious understanding of symbol – notably, Gregory Dix, F.C.N. Hicks, Alexander Schmemann, amongst others.
But let us begin by setting out the two positions.
‘Traditional’ vs. ‘revisionist’ understanding Christian sacrifice
The traditional position identifies Christian sacrifice with an atoning death – notably that of the cross of Jesus. Insofar as the Eucharist too is understood sacrificially, it is so in relation to the atoning death. Christians differ as to how that link of cross and Eucharist should be understood (as we have just seen). But there is considerable consensus, I would argue, amongst Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox around the idea that the role of the Eucharist – and its claim to be sacrificial – lie in its capacity to make available to Christians in all ages the benefits of Christ’s unique atoning act.
The revisionist position, on the other hand, sees sacrifice as the act of offering life back to God. Primarily, once again, Christ’s self-offering constitutes the supreme example of this. But, unlike the atoning death (which is, of course, exclusively God’s in Christ), the offering back to God of life in its entirety is something that all Christians are encouraged by Scripture to undertake – through uniting their lives with His. In the words of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is spiritual worship.
Indeed, on the revisionist view, the Eucharist is, of all actions, pre-eminently the one that unites our wills with Christ’s – the action which our multifarious daily acts of ‘spiritual sacrifice’ come to reflect, like so many living mirrors. In other words, for revisionists, the Eucharist becomes our sacrifice. It’s not about experiencing the benign effects of an action that remains exclusively Christ’s; it’s about our sharing Christ’s very agency, so that his sacrificial action becomes ours and ours becomes his.
Any kind of revisionism involves the return to history. It is no surprise, then, that our revisionist theologians develop their understanding of Eucharist through often complex and detailed explorations of historical evidence. The superabundance of detail can be off-putting for the non-historian. But the principal tendencies of the revisionist understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice can be summarized in three points.
First, their theology eschews the traditional tendency to identify sacrifice narrowly with the atoning death of a victim and make the sacrifice of Christ synonymous with that atoning death. Instead, revisionist theology understands sacrifice in more general terms as an offering: that of our lives to our Lord and creator. Accordingly, the sacrifice of Christ begins with his incarnation, and continues with the whole trajectory of his sacrificial life and death, culminating in his eternal mediation on our behalf in Heaven. Moreover, the goal of this more broadly conceived understanding of sacrifice ceases to be simply one of encompassing our forgiveness, and becomes that of offering a fitting act of praise to the Father.
This breadth in the definition of sacrifice is critical to the fundamental issue distinguishing revisionist from traditional Eucharistic theology. For, to the extent that our focus in the Eucharist remains the atoning death alone, we are focussing an aspect of Christ’s sacrifice in which Christ’s agency is exclusive. Where we allow some space to the more general aspect of the offering to God, sacrificial agency becomes the kind of thing we can, in some degree, share with Christ – both collectively and individually.
The second point concerns the Eucharist specifically. Whereas traditional Eucharistic theology has regarded the sacrament as centring on the ritual act of the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood, the revisionist position also places emphasis on the aspect of thanksgiving (the etymological sense of ‘eucharist’) as embodied in the Eucharistic prayer of offering, or anaphora, which the president makes on behalf of the people. In this regard, our revisionist theologians all, to varying degrees, draw attention to the continuity between the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish liturgy of ‘blessing’ (berakah). Jesus’s prayer over the cup at the Last Supper (not given in the New Testament accounts) would probably have taken the form of traditionally structured blessings. These recalled God’s past ‘mighty acts’ with a view to supplicating Him to bring to fulfilment what He had there begun with the restoration of the Kingdom. Of course, to these traditional blessings Jesus gives a radically altered sense through the assimilation of the wine to his own blood. But the Jewish devotions were already ‘sacrificial’ in the broad sense of being divinely instituted means of offering up the worshippers to the purposes of God – even if they did not involve the slaughter of beasts and the apparatus of cult. There is evidence that, for some groups, such worship was, even in Christ’s day, already taking the place of the public worship of the temple.
Now to situate the Eucharist on this trajectory of a shift from ritualist acts to the prayers of a table fellowship (chaburah) seems, once again, to push us in the direction of an understanding of sacrifice as something actively participated in, as opposed to the kind of thing undertaken on behalf of a crowd of passive observers. And, of course, it is also consonant with the characterization of sacrifice as offering as well as a propitiation and/or expiation.
Thirdly, and finally, our revisionist theology of sacrifice tends to stress the role of the whole people of God acting in the Holy Spirit – as opposed to ‘Christ alone’ (Christus solus). This goes along with a cosmic enlargement of the sacrificial idea to embrace the interrelations of the persons of the Trinity. In effect, the self-offering of the Son is seen as ultimate expression of the self-emptying (kenotic) generosity of the Father. All the Father’s earlier gifts to humankind culminate in His offering through the Son of the means by which humans themselves can make, in the power of the Holy Spirit which the Son leaves behind, an adequate sacrificial response to His own initial generosity – a response they could not have made unassisted in this way. Not only, then, does the Son himself make this adequate sacrificial response to the Father. He also, with the advent of the Holy Spirit that is consequent on his death, enables his disciples to share his adequate sacrificial response. So, the accomplishment of sacrifice involves a mutual giving between the persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Into this sacrificial process humankind is progressively drawn, first in Christ alone, then in the entire Church, which, through the Holy Spirit, returns to the Father what, in the Son, it has already received from Him.
According to this model, our own Eucharist occupies the third of these three moments – the moment of the Spirit as opposed to that of the Father and the Son. The power of the Holy Spirit that descends at Pentecost gives to the whole people of God the sacrificial agency that had previously belonged to the Son alone. The whole Church is thereby drawn up into the Trinitarian reciprocity, as, through the Church, the Holy Spirit accomplishes the sacrificial action initiated in the relationship between the Father and the Son.
To summarize, then, our revisionist theologians (Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic) would, for all their differences of emphasis, broadly agree – and thereby distinguish themselves from more traditional Eucharistic theology – on the following points. 1. That the sacrifice of Christ involves the entirety of his self-offering in life and death, not just his atoning death. 2. That the ‘sacrifice’ of the Eucharist has to do with the self-offering of the believing community as well as the commemoration of an atoning death. 3. That the relationship into which the Eucharistic sacrifice draws the Church is one that involves genuine reciprocity both between the persons of the Trinity, and between God and humankind.
On all these points the revisionist position is contentious – above all, I would argue, because the possibility of sharing Christ’s sacrificial agency might seem, from a traditional point of view, to undermine our sense of the necessity of his mediation. It suggests the possibility of a direct sacrificial approach to God – the kind of thing we have been taught to associate with the pagan religions; whereas Christianity differs from all this, we have repeatedly been told, by its squaring up to the reality of human sinfulness, and our inability, sinners that we are, to offer up anything of own that could be acceptable to a holy God. This is the kind of thing well encapsulated in Cranmer’s famous prayer:
And although we be unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord …
From the traditional perspective, the pretention to offer up anything to God – anything, that is to say, from our own resources – sounds like blasphemous presumption. If that is our view, then it is hard to see why we would insist, in the case of either Christ or the worshipper, on the broader meaning of sacrifice as a self-offering, or why we would suggest the possibility of any reciprocity in the relationships between God and humankind.
In terms of the Eucharist itself, the disagreement between revisionist and traditionalist theology can be summed up as follows. We would all – revisionists and traditionalists – agree that by taking part in the Eucharist we offer up to God Christ’s sacrifice, his body and blood. But in doing this, are we also offering to God the bread and wine itself – and, under those material symbols, the work of our own hands, and the substance of our own earthly lives? In other words, are we ourselves enabled, through participation in the Eucharist, to offer the act of worship that consists in giving back to God out of what he has given us? Or is it rather that the Church and Christ have complementary roles in the sacrifice, whereby Christ alone gives and the Church receives on the basis of his once-and-for-all gift? Does the manner of our participation stop short of that giving to God which the pagans presume to accomplish? Does it limit us to the more modest role appropriate to our common humanity and confer sacrificial agency on the God-man alone?
To a remarkable extent the issue of our participation in Christ’s sacrificial agency, and of the nature of his mediation, can be characterized liturgically in terms of the place of the offertory in the celebration as a whole. If the offertory is an integral part of the sacrifice, this would indeed suggest that in participating in the Eucharist it is our own offering, as well as Christ’s, that we offer. But perhaps the offertory would more appropriately be regarded as a preface to the sacrifice, rather than a part of the sacrifice itself.
This is certainly the view of Eric Mascall, who, like Dix and Schmemann, is keenly aware of the theological implications of this issue.[5]:
I would not describe (the Eucharist) as an offering of bread and wine, in the strict sense of an offering made to God’.
In this, he claims to be resisting a tendency which ‘runs throughout the (pre-1970 Roman Catholic) Canon’ and is also implied by ‘the extreme prominence given to the offertory procession in many churches that have been affected by the Liturgical Movement’. Mascall’s response is to urge us to consider the four actions of Christ at the Last Supper: ‘he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave’. He points out that ‘the first of these, which corresponds to the offertory of the liturgy, was not an act of offering, but of reception: he took. The ‘offering’, therefore, is properly only a bringing of the elements to the altar for the sacramental rite. It does not, he argues, constitute a part of the rite itself (as it would, apparently, in pagan sacrifice). In other words, for Mascall, aspects of some Catholic Eucharistic celebrations blur an important distinction. They would suggest that we make our own offering whereas in reality what we offer is exclusively Christ’s.
From the revisionist side of the theological divide, Alexander Schmemann argues precisely the opposite. He cites the Eastern tradition of the proskomide or prothesis, in which gifts, including the bread and wine, were brought by the laity before the liturgy. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the connection between this, as it were, “preliminary” sacrifice and the offering that, as we already were saying, constitutes the essence of the Eucharist?’[6] His response? ‘In the consciousness, in the experience and in the practice of the early Church, the eucharistic sacrifice was offered not only on behalf of all and for all, but by all, and therefore the real offering by each of his own gift, his own sacrifice, was a basic condition of it.’[7] Is this a blasphemous presumption to offer directly, and of ourselves, what can be offered only once and for all by the cross of Christ? No, says Schmemann, because the gifts of the laity lying on the offering plate (diskos) are already sanctified by dint of their forward reference to the Eucharistic rite that is to ensue.
When, preparing for the eucharistic mystery, we take the bread into our hands and place it on the diskos, we already know that this bread, like everything in the world, like the world itself, has been sanctified by the incarnation of the Son of God, by his becoming man, and that this sanctification consists in Christ’s restoration of the possibility for the world to become a sacrifice to God and for man to offer this sacrifice. What is destroyed and overcome is its “self-sufficiency”, which constitutes the essence of sin and which made bread only bread – the mortal food of mortal man, a partaking of sin and death. The element of ‘self-sufficiency’, in other words, is already overcome through the intention of the offerer, who avails himself of the possibility of sacrifice opened up by the self-offering of the Son of God.
That a seemingly arcane liturgical issue over the place of the offertory does indeed encapsulate the crux of the theological argument is recognized by theologians on both sides of the question. We have already cited Mascall. On the other side of the theological divide, the awareness of the significance of the offertory is equally keen, if not more so. Gregory Dix even claims to see the place of the offertory as the decisive issue between Eastern and Western strands of Christianity:[8]
The difference between these two ways of receiving the people’s offerings may seem a mere question of convenience, something quite trifling; and so in itself it is. But if any young liturgical student seeking a useful subject for research should undertake to trace the actual process of development of structural differences between the Eastern and Western rites …, he will find that they all hinge upon this different development of the offertory in the two halves of Christendom. And if he should go further and seek to understand the much more sundering differences of ethos between the two types of rite …. He will find himself on point after point being led back by his analysis to this trivial original difference between East and West in their treatment of the people’s offerings …
There may be good evidence of a historical association of the two positions with East and West; but the fundamental theological difference cannot – or can no longer – be characterized in such terms. After all, Dix himself espouses an ‘Eastern’ position – as presumably do also those tendencies of the Liturgical Movement (no doubt partly emanating from Dix himself) berated by Mascall, as well as the revisionist Roman Catholic theology of Robert Daly. Conversely, we have what Schmemann terms the ‘westernization’ of traditional Orthodox ‘school theology’.
However, the difference which Dix characterizes in these terms, remains an important one. Above all, it helps cast a light on positions recently adopted by Protestant Evangelicals. It enables us to see how the welcome tendency among some of the latter towards a more sacramental perspective generally falls far short of a fully revisionist position. In this regard, I would single out two features common to many of these accounts. First, a tendency to broach sacrifice from the perspective of sacramentality, treating the Eucharist from the perspective of its instantiation of the broader category of Christian sacraments. This underplays – where it doesn’t altogether ignore – the distinctively collectivist orientation of the Eucharist as the sacrament of the Church. Second, the interpretation of our Eucharistic participation in terms of a ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ that we ‘inhabit’ or ‘indwell’. The problem with this is that our enjoyment of literary and cinematic fiction accustoms us to a kind of ‘participation’ that falls far short of ritual identification, being little more than a powerful sympathy with the experience of other people.
The following passage from a recent book by John Colewell, a sacramentally-inclined Evangelical, offers a good illustration of both features:[9]
We are buried with him and raised with him; we become part of his story; his story becomes our story. In response to the question posed by the song, Were you there when they crucified my Lord, the answer is ‘Yes: (for me) 2 December 1962 when I was baptised into his death and, subsequently, whenever I share in the bread and wine of Communion.
Now this purports to be an emphatic statement of the author’s sympathies for a strongly sacramental theology. Needless to say, there is absolutely no indication here of any understanding of sacrifice exceeding the traditional focus on the atoning death, or any hint of the idea that the Church could collectively share in Christ’s mediatory and priestly role in regard to the world. In fact, the appearance of a sacramental theology conceals what is, in reality, a strongly traditional and individualist interpretation of the Eucharist. The ‘sharing in the bread and wine of Communion’ is described in terms of its repetition of what was initially accomplished by the author’s ‘being baptised into his (Christ’s) death’, and that latter event is rooted in a moment of his personal life-story. Furthermore, the line from the hymn (Were you there when they crucified my Lord) places us as witnesses in the crowd, and nudges us therefore towards an understanding of participation (‘his story becomes our story’) in terms of empathy rather than ritual identification.
What is at stake in this theological dispute over the right understanding of sacrifice?
Something quite important, I think.
For the likes of Dix and Schmemann, the Eucharist is about more than forgiveness of sins. It is about the whole people of God being caught up in the worship of Christ and the angels (as we described at the end of our previous section on the symbol). This is not just the promise of a divine presence to be experienced at the eschaton (as with Colewell), but the fulfilment of that promise here and now, as on the Mount of Transfiguration at Caesarea Philippi, moulding us individually and collectively in the action of sacrifice that is Christ’s and, by association, ours. In the Eucharistic bread and wine (‘work of human hands’) we offer ourselves – our livelihoods, our projects, all that we are. But we offer them not individually, but collectively as the Church. And we offer them in order that we ourselves (as symbolized by our gifts laid on the altar) may become, in actuality and at this moment within time, what notionally we already are before God: the body of Christ. In this way, the actuality of our individual and collective lives, now no longer held back in rebellious independence from God, but offered up in unity with the sacrifice of Jesus, is transformed into the living body of ascended and glorified Christ. When we then receive this living body back from the altar, and we take it into our physical bodies, we become what we truly are. Dix cites Augustine on this point:
‘If you have received well, you are that which you have received’. ‘Your mystery is laid on the table of the Lord, your mystery you receive. To that which you are you answer “Amen”, and in answering you assent. For you hear the words “the Body of Christ” and you answer “Amen”. Be a member of the Body of Christ that the Amen may be true.’
Traditionalists, like the Evangelicals I have just described would probably reject this vision. Chiefly, I suspect, on the grounds that it encroaches on the role of Christ as sole mediator and arrogates to the collectivity of Christian believers a sacrificial agency that belongs to Christ alone. If we do this, argues John Colewell, the danger is that we will end up with an ‘over-realized eschatology’. The Church will seek ‘to be Christ’ in the here-and-now rather than contenting herself with her proper role as a sign or promise of Christ to come. She will engage in those unwarranted practices of exclusion (‘fencing the altar’) that seem necessitated by this overweening ambition to embody that glorious reality to which, properly, she can only point.
These concerns of Colewell’s are unfounded. It goes without saying that, in the here-and-now, neither our individual actions nor those of our Church will altogether show forth the anticipated glory of the eschaton. Yet surely the one place in which our present life could be said to bring forward that anticipated state is the place of our Eucharistic worship. After all, our worship – or least its blueprint – is instituted by God, not by ourselves. It presents in the here-and-now the ideal pattern of sacrifice to which the whole of our lives (not just our worship) will one day be conformed. Here, surely, in our accomplishment of this divinely-instituted symbol – if nowhere else – we are already participating pre-emptively in the city of the world-to-come. Countless passages of Scripture (not to speak of Eucharistic liturgies) challenge us to see the praise of God’s people on earth as united with the praises of Heaven – the worship of the ‘four living creatures’ and the ‘twenty-four elders’ whose words have rooted themselves in our Eucharistic rites:
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts,
Heaven and earth are full of thy glory,
Hosannah in the highest.
After all, what else could be the goal of our worship here on earth?
‘Grace’ and the distinctiveness of the Christian understanding of sacrificial mediation
There remains, however, the more underlying question of mediation. Above all, that sense so many of us Evangelicals have that the exclusivity of Christ’s sacrificial mediation is essential to the whole notion of Grace, and consequently at the heart of what many of us Protestant Evangelicals (and I suspect not just us Protestant Evangelicals) have been taught to consider the essence of Christianity and its distinctiveness from all other religions. Is the Gospel itself – i.e. the essence of what Christianity has to offer the world – not imperilled by the revisionist understanding of Eucharist with its implication that the Church shares in Christ’s sacrificial agency? We return here to Cranmer’s famous words regarding our unworthiness ‘to offer thee any sacrifice’. Sinful human beings, so we are taught, can do nothing to bring about their salvation, but must look only to what our Lord has achieved on our behalf. Other religions may tell us what we must do to achieve our salvation; Christianity, uniquely, offers us a salvation that is independent of any efforts we might make on our own behalf – a salvation based on what God has done for us in Christ.
The remainder of this section will be concerned with this issue.
However, my approach will be unorthodox. I propose – as in the last section – to take a step back from the theological discussion. Since the disagreement over Christian sacrifice raises the question of what constitutes the basis of Christian distinctiveness, I propose in what follows to consider the Eucharist in the broader context of other (non-Judaeo-Christian) forms of sacrifice. Such reflection will allow us to achieve a more objective grasp of just where the Christian understanding of sacrificial mediation stands on the spectrum of human religious practices.
The first thing we discover on adopting this more comparative perspective, is that the necessity for sacrificial mediation – in other words, some notion of what Christians term grace – is not exclusive to Christianity as so often presupposed. In fact, it is an extremely common feature of many – perhaps most – sacrificial systems. This need not perturb us – or only if, like some would-be apologists, we want, in deference to contemporary secularist and anti-ritualist prejudice, to take the line that Christianity is somehow ‘not a religion’. On the other hand, what a comparative approach such as I propose here most certainly does achieve is to enable reflection on the notion of religious mediation itself. This, I would suggest, offers a very helpful way to investigate, through comparison with other religions, what sacrificial mediation does – and does not – involve in the case of the Christian Gospel-event. More specifically, it will help us grasp what is at issue in the stand-off over mediation between traditional and revisionist theology.
So how does sacrificial mediation tend to work in most religions?
A short ethnographical excursus: 1. Mediation in archaic religions
The basic pattern is as follows. Nine times out of ten, the gods to whom sacrifice is made are ancestors, and are worshipped by their descendants. But – and here is the critical point – not all ancestors, and not all descendants of those ancestors, have the same religious status (or, for that matter, any status at all). In other words, there tend to exist dominant lineages (those with known ancestors) who perform, in religion, a mediatory role in respect to other members of the community. The ancestors of dominant lineages are invoked by their descendants. But those on behalf of whom that ancestral favour and protection are invoked can extend well beyond the descendants of the dominant group to include a wider community in respect to whom the dominant ancestors exercise a tutelary role, and their descendants perform a religious service.
This pattern is most visible at the apex of large-scale politico-religious structures, such as the pre-revolutionary Chinese empire, or African kingdoms like the Ashanti or the Zulu, or the Polynesian chiefdoms (to name just a few instances that happen to be known to me). In these cases, the ancestors of the royal clan are the divine protectors of whole nations, and are approached as such by their royal devotees. But, in strongly hierarchical states (such as those I have just mentioned), this pattern of religious (or politico-religious) representation extends downwards to multiple subordinate levels. So, for example, the mediatory function of the Zulu king in relation to those throughout the kingdom who were not members of the royal clan is (ethnographic present) mirrored at a microcosmic level in the role of the local dominant lineage head (umnumzane). The latter would invoke his dead grand-father or great-grandfather on behalf of those not of his lineage who inhabited the lineage territory. Among the Ashanti, this replication of politico-religious mediation takes place at no less than four subordinate levels: division; sub-division and village. At each level, a dominant lineage head exercises a sacrificially-instituted authority over a territorial unit based on the tutelary role of his ancestral gods with respect to the local community he represents.
The religious status of the mediator role generally goes along with socio-political, and economic, perquisites. Indeed, the case has frequently been made – not implausibly – that differences of religious status (i.e. religious hierarchies) lie at the origin of the socio-political and socio-economic inequalities that are the invariable characteristic of more complex human societies. At all events, without the economic perquisites of religious status, sacrificial mediation of this kind could hardly be maintained. In effect, the structure of religious mediation generates an upward flow of resources from the community to those representatives who exercise a mediatory role through their sacrifices on the community’s behalf. This is what anthropologists have sometimes termed pooling. In practice, it can take very different forms in different societies: the expectation of prerogatives owed to seniority, an entitlement to embargo certain productive resources of the community for religious purposes, a claim to the first fruits of the harvest, the receipt of what is effectively a regular tribute, or even the right to corvée labour. The degree to which religious hierarchy hardens into political power, and a more-or-less obligatory offering becomes a tax, varies. But underlying such ‘gifts’ is a system of shared ideational belief which renders them in some sense ‘consensual’, though not voluntary. This is the faith in the tutelary role of the ancestors of the dominant group.
Corresponding to this upward movement of gifts and sacrifice is a downward movement of resources which anthropologists call redistribution. It is this element of reciprocity between the community and its representatives (and those representatives and the gods) that mitigates somewhat the sense of a tributary imposition. The principle invariably manifested by this downward phase of vertical exchange is that the humans who through their mediation channel the benevolence of the gods to their communities come to share in the aura of their sanctity. This, for all intents and purposes, is a fundamental ‘law’ of human society. Anyone exercising the power of the sacrificial giver is automatically divinized through this giving. In practice, such sanctity is materialized in the largesse that the mediator – the divinized giver – then returns to the community through feasting and patronage. As with the upward arm of this vertical circuit, it is, in practice, hard, if not impossible, to distinguish human agency from divine, and religious gift from sacrifice.
A perfect illustration of the circuit of sacrificial reciprocity is to be found in an account by an eminent anthropologist of a small everyday ritual – the tsodrano – practised by the Merina of Madagascar, and apparently still current today. A senior person (i.e. equivalent to our religious ‘representative’) such as the senior member of a household positions his juniors in front of him. Placing a coin which they have offered him in a saucer of water, he raises the saucer to his lips and blows across the surface of the water, so as to sprinkle his juniors in an act of blessing. (Water is associated with the gods in various Merina rituals). He subsequently pockets the coin. Here, on a small scale, is the upward movement of material resource, balanced by the downward movement of divine blessing. The superiority of the gods manifested in sacrifice is reflected in the reciprocal but asymmetric relationships of the religious gift between represented and the mediator. At both levels, divine and human, the piety of the junior party is met by the benevolence of the senior. This is the fundamental sacrificial schema.
A short ethnographic excursus: 2. Mediation in confessional religions
If what I have said so far about sacrificial mediation is not familiar, this may be because it does not altogether apply – or applies only in part – to the pattern of socio-religious relationships we find in the communities in which much of the human race have lived over the last two thousand years. I am referring here to what, for want of a better term, I shall call ‘confessional religions’ (i.e. Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and others). These show certain important modifications to this basic structure of sacrificial mediation, mostly tending in the same general direction.
The changing nature of mediation arises above all as a result of a new emphasis on intention – what the Bible calls the heart. There continues to be giving to the gods, but the motivation of the offering comes to matter more than the material content of the sacrifice, or its conformity to ritual protocol. Thus, in the case of Buddhism, for example, pious giving matters because it manifests, on the part of the donor, an intentional disposition associated with the overcoming of attachment to the world – in short with good kamma. Good kammatic states tend to engender good kammatic states in the future, drawing the giver into a virtuous circle. This is personal spiritual progress, and in Buddhism it comes to matter more than the gift itself, or the effect of the gift on anything outside the giver themselves (e.g. propitiation of the gods or the alleviation of poverty).
What we see here in Buddhism (and other faiths) has been described as an internalization of the gift. It involves a sharp demarcation between the spiritual and the worldly value of the gift – and, corresponding to this, a demarcation of its spiritual and worldly beneficiaries. Foremost for the donor (as we have just seen) is the spiritual value, consisting in the spiritual progress of which he/she is the primary beneficiary. Needless to say, there is also a worldly level at which the gift benefits those to whom it is given: for example, ‘virtuous recluses’ (i.e. monks) and other needy recipients. The separation of these two levels divorces the gift from any expectation of reciprocity and material return on the part of the religious giver. To confuse these levels by seeking a material return from a spiritual gift is seen as effectively nullifying the spiritual nature of the gift.
So much for the inner meaning of the religious gift. And what we have said in the case of Buddhism applies also to the other confessional faiths. From the outward, socio-political perspective, internalization generally has as its corollary (and I’m about to suggest that the Judaeo-Christian tradition may be untypical in this respect) an individualization of religious agency. Essentially, if it’s the dispositional intention of the religious giver that matters, wealth in absolute comes to matter less. One no longer needs to be wealthy in order to participate in religious giving. Sacrifice of this kind lies within the capacities of every individual, and pooling is no longer required.
The implications of this are particularly obvious in the case of Islam. (Though this is not to say they aren’t equally present in the case of Buddhism.) The most important sacrificial offerings of Muslims, it is said, are those of prayer and charitable giving (sadaka). In these, each and every believer takes religious action on his own behalf – albeit around a common spiritual axis, materialized in prayer by the orientation towards Mecca (qiblah). However, sacrifice in its more stereotypical form of the animal offering also takes place every year at Eid, both in Mecca and in Muslim households. What is most striking about the animal offering, when compared with the forms of archaic sacrifice described above, is its tendency towards individualization. Domestic animals do not lend themselves to individual consumption, and the minimal unit is often that of the household. Nevertheless, offerings are associated with a named donor, and tend to conform to a relatively uniform prescription. What is systematically excluded by all Muslim religious practices is the possibility of the agency of one person on behalf of another. In fact, the whole notion of religious mediation is associated in the Qur’an with shirk, or the principle of the violation of God’s unity.
This makes perfect sense in the light of my own analysis of archaic reciprocity. As we have argued, the priestly mediators of the community come to share in the sacrality of the divinity whose blessings they channel. From the Muslim perspective, this participation in divine agency is absolutely excluded. It would involve blasphemous confusion of the divine and human level of the gift – our devotional intention, on the one hand, and the material content of the gift, on the other. For Muslims, the devotion belongs to God, while the material content goes, as a rule, to the poor and needy.
So much for our brief survey of the ethnographical background. Where, then, do Judaeo-Christians notions of mediation sit in relation to all this?
What is the nature of mediation in the Judaeo-Christian tradition
Certainly, we see the internalization of sacrifice. This tendency may have been present in Judaism from the outset, but it becomes strongly marked in prophetic texts that attack the presumption that the accomplishment of the outward forms of cultic ritual can be pleasing to God where these are not accompanied by a disposition of the heart towards obedience and justice. Strangely, however, this internalization is not, as in Buddhism or Islam, accompanied by individualization of religious agency. Consequently, the role of the mediator remains central. The relationship between God and humankind manifested in the covenants recounted in the Old Testament is always one that binds the deity to a ‘people’ – albeit, in the case of the patriarchs, with the people still, as it were, within the loins of the ancestor. This is equally true of the new covenant. The sacrifice whereby Christ wins a people places him in the role of the ultimate religious mediator in respect to those he has redeemed – a role expressed by Scripture in terms of both kingship and priesthood. In fact, there is no question of any proper relationship to God outside the collectivity constituted by this mediation. This strikes me as a fundamental difference between the Judaeo-Christian tradition and confessional religions that devolve agency on the individual.
On the other hand, as regards the archaic societies with which we began, there seems to be a difference in the nature of mediation, though the fact of mediation still remains. And this naturally has an impact on the nature of the community with which the act of mediation is associated. For, in the case of Christianity, the mediator is no longer the current, mortal bearer of a religious agency passed down the ancestral line, but the dead and resurrected Christ. This precludes – or, at any rate, ought to preclude – the kind of priestly mediation condemned by the Qur’an whereby a differential status is secured for religious mediators through their role of religious representation. The kind of ‘sacral’ kingship characteristic of archaic hierarchical societies is no longer a possibility where religious agency is monopolized as it is in Christianity.
However, the contrast we have already observed, as regards mediation, between Christianity and other confessional religions discourages us from concluding that this monopolization of religious agency by God in Christ necessarily involves the elimination of mediation from the field of human relations. That is certainly one possible understanding of Christian mediation. But there is an alternative: namely, that Christ’s mediation – his sacrificial agency – is shared by the Church as a whole where she acts in the Holy Spirit. ‘Agency’ implies, as we have seen, the role of the donor, not just recipient – and, along with it, the priestly and kingly role of sacrifice and religious mediation. We might say, in other words, that the kind of participation in sacred agency that we have described in the case of those pagan religious mediators who act as the channel of divine blessing to their communities does not disappear in the case of Christianity. Rather, it belongs to the risen Christ himself, and, hence, to all those disciples who constitute his ‘body’. This would imply a collective divinization of all who share that agency (expressed in St Paul’s reference to the Church in its entirety as ‘the saints’). However, this religious agency is shared only to the extent that people are incorporated into Christ, and act in the Holy Spirit. And, of course, it is not an agency that would enhance the status of certain members of the body through its differential exercise by some on behalf of others.
It will be evident to you by now that these two understandings of mediation in Christianity – namely, it’s elimination from the field of human relations and restriction to the God-man, on the one hand, and its sharing by the whole body of the Church in the Holy Spirit, on the other – correspond to the two understandings of the Gospel-event to be found, respectively, in traditional and revisionist Eucharistic theology.
What we have just demonstrated, I hope, is that to adopt a revisionist theology of mediation, such as we find in Dix and Schmemann, is by no means to compromise the distinctiveness of the Christian religion. Far from it. It is the understanding of mediation as something shared which differentiates Christianity from other confessional religions; whereas the elimination of religious mediation from the field of human relations is a tendency of confessional religions like Islam and Buddhism.
The more important question, however, is which of these alternatives better corresponds to the understanding of Church’s role we find developed in the New Testament and foreshadowed in the Old. I will briefly focus on two groups of passages that, in addition to supporting the idea of a collective agency, relate more particularly to the two points of emphasis I have just outlined. The first group includes various potentially ‘difficult’ sayings of Christ, in which he appears to assure his disciples that he himself will be present, and their prayers answered as though they were Christ’s own, when prayed collectively, ‘with faith’, or ‘in his Name’. Christ really does seem to see the future Church as assuming his sacrificial agency, when he promises: ‘Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven’. This view of things is, of course, entirely consistent with the place assigned to the Eucharist by the early Church in the economy of salvation – at least, as we find that view expounded by Dix, Schmemann, Hicks, Bouyer and others.
The second group are the passages in Paul’s letters that relate to the role within the community of ‘spiritual gifts’. What is remarkable here is the idea of the dissemination of these throughout the Christian community. It is important to remember that these ‘charismata’, even taken individually, are the kind of religious phenomena that in non-Christian communities typically mark religious and hence socio-political leadership: they are the appurtenances of socio-religious power. Consider, for example, the dependence of forms of such authority – from the authority wielded by Sufi saints to the influence of Siberian shamans or the charisma of prophetic leaders among the Nilotic peoples – on miraculous powers, healings, prophetic utterance or the discernment of spirits. It seems utterly remarkable that, far from restricted to the roles of Christian leadership, these are claimed by St Paul to be ‘allotted to each one individually as the Spirit chooses’. On the one hand, this is to render all believers possessed of a sacred authority; on the other, the potential discriminatory social effect of such attributions is effectively neutralized by their dissemination to the entirety of the community. In view of this, Paul’s subsequent words about the unity of the one body make perfect sense. It is only in relation to the service of the whole body that such gifts find any role (they are not given, for example, to command authority outside that body). Their complementarity in respect to each other give each member a significant role in relation to the rest. In short, the authority that such charismata lend belongs ultimately to the community as a whole, and only to the community as a whole. Not, that is to say, to the individual who exercises them on the common behalf. I suspect that there is no other example among the world’s religions of such collectivization of religious agency, and, from an anthropological point of view, I find it remarkable.
Elimination vs. generalization of sacrificial agency
Let us return to the initial formulation of the issue that we find in Mascall:
I would not describe it (the Offertory) as an offering of bread and wine, in the strict sense of an offering made to God. If we go back to the last Supper and consider the four actions of our Lord – he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave – we see that the first of these which corresponds to the Offertory of the liturgy, was not an act of offering, but of reception: he took.
I am convinced that Mascall is wrong about this, and that there is nothing inappropriate about the ‘extreme prominence’ given to offertory processions by the Liturgical Movement – or for that matter the interpretation of sacrifice implied by elements of the pre-1970 Roman Canon. What strikes me about the above passage in the light of our discussion of non-Christian forms of sacrifice, is how far Mascall’s two-stage analysis of the sacrificial offering (i.e. bread and wine simply brought to the altar, then offered to God as Christ’s body and blood) resembles the archaic ritual pattern according to which resources are first pooled in an initial act of giving in order subsequently to be sacrificed on the community’s behalf. The danger here is the properly hierarchical role that this assigns to the priest, and the way it tends to obscure the sense in which the Eucharist is the collective sacrifice of the whole Church acting collectively in the Spirit, not just the minister representing, as it were, Christus solus in relation to the laity. If the crucial distinguishing feature of Christian sacrifice is not, as we have just seen, the delegation – still less the exclusion – of sacrificial agency, but the collective form of that agency as the action of the whole Church in the Spirit, then let us, by all means, have more prominence given to offertory processions. Personally, I love the moment, preceding the Eucharist proper, when the minister gives thanks as he raises up the collection plate in full view of the congregation; it makes what follows our sacrifice. This, of course, is by no means to deny that our sacrifice must take the divinely instituted form according to which our bread and wine, the offering up of our daily lives, participates in the one and only sacrifice acceptable to God which is that of Christ’s body and blood.
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH