If you have followed me to this point, will, I suspect, have been pressing upon you with growing and exasperated insistence – especially if you are acquainted with the extensive existing literature on the Atonement.
Do I not realize, you will be asking, that I am not the only Christian out there out with ‘issues’ over penal substitution? And do I not realize that there already exist certain well-rehearsed responses and well-trodden paths of argument, widely accepted by Christian apologists outside the sphere of die-hard Evangelicalism, some of them with impact even on Evangelical mainstreamers such as Nicki Gumbel? And why, if I am indeed aware of such responses, does my own alternative account not more closely resemble those others ?
So, let me begin by reassuring you that, yes, I do indeed ‘realize’. And that, if I have waited this long to respond to the views of other people, it has not been ignorance or intellectual arrogance on my part. My priority in this piece, reflected in my order of presentation, has been to offer something I personally see as positive and useful to puzzled non-believers and hard-pressed apologists: not, in other words, to undermine explanations that others have found largely convincing in a manner that might unsettle the faith of sincere believers.
But now is perhaps the moment to say something more about other popular alternatives, and how the alternative proposed here relates to them.
As you will see, I am not altogether satisfied with the kind of exposition of Christian fundamentals that has emerged out of critiques of penal substitution in the Atonement literature. I shall be explaining the reasons for this dissatisfaction in this and the three following chapters.
Needless to say, the approach advocated here is not my own invention. It exists, and has always existed, even if it hasn’t been the approach most frequently adopted by the (largely Protestant) Atonement literature over recent years. You will find this approach exemplified in the following books: F.C.N. Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930); Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Purpose (1988); John Moses, The Sacrifice of God (1992); Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus (1992); Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (1995); John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (2013).
Outside the Atonement literature you will also find the same approach in studies of liturgy and the Eucharist. Given the role of the Eucharist in a correct understanding of Christian sacrifice, it is no surprise that the implications of what these studies have to say about the Eucharist often extend into the area of theology. To the extent such studies consider the meaning as well as the form of Christian ritual, they develop these theological implications quite explicitly and at considerable length. So, to the list of works already cited, I would add the following as just as relevant for our purposes: Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (1939); Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945); Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (1966); Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (1987); Edward Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West (1988); Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled (2009); Eugene Schlesinger, Sacrificing the Church (2019).
The Catholic bias of this second list of studies no doubt reflects the greater importance sometimes attributed to the ‘mass’ in Roman Catholicism. I believe it also points to an inherent advantage Catholic theologians enjoy over many of the Protestant Evangelical counterparts when it comes to correct theology. Penal substitution is not, of course, a doctrine exclusive to Protestantism. But Catholic theologians who are dissatisfied with that doctrine yet retain a proper understanding of Eucharist – as a sacrifice – have at their disposal at least the basis of an alternative, and better, theological doctrine. The particularly vehement nature of the Atonement debate in Protestant Evangelical circles may reflect the absence from their theology of any comparable liturgical reference. I have suggested that penal substitution doctrine is the substitute for a proper understanding of the eucharistic sacrifice. If that is the case, then we may have an explanation both for the impassioned adherence to that doctrine among conservatives with no decent eucharistic theology to fall back on, and the inadequacy of the main alternatives proposed by their Protestant Evangelical opponents.
Common, but inadequate, alternatives to penal substitution: 1. plurality of models approach
It is now time to turn to those alternatives to penal substitution most commonly proposed in the Atonement literature – alternatives which I have suggested have sometimes impacted popular evangelistic presentations of the Christian fundamentals.
Broadly, these fall into two overall categories. The first I term the multi-models approach, and encompasses the range of alternatives to be found in the greater part (though by no means all) of that literature.(14) The second, or non-sacrificial approach, which I shall be discussing in subsequent chapters, is harder to identify with a particular area of the theological literature.
Of these two approaches, let me say from the start that the first (multi-models) is a complete theological blind-alley. The second (non-sacrificial) could be seen, at least in certain formulations, as a step in the direction of the approach proposed here, and my views about it are more complicated.
Authors espousing multi-models do not, in general, reject the doctrine of penal substitution outright. Rather, they present penal substitution as just one among a number of possible understandings of the Gospel-event developed over the Church’s history. In effect, they demote penal substitution from its former status as the explanation of the Christ-event to that of being just one among a number of equally valid ‘metaphors’, ‘models’ or ‘theories’. Most ‘Atonement’ studies take the form of a succession of chapters, each devoted to one of these metaphors/models. Versions of this strategy have found their way into Evangelical presentations of the Christian faith (e.g. Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha Course). I suspect, much Evangelical teaching makes some concession to it. One can easily enough allude to the possibility of other explanations, while focussing on penal substitution in a way that implies – without actually asserting or justifying – its apparently dominant status. However, a strong, ‘post-modern,’ version of the strategy makes a virtue of the plurality of explanations by arguing that a multi-faceted approach is appropriate to the nature of what is being described. The Gospel event, it is claimed, is a religious mystery that outstrips the communicative capacity of non-metaphorical speech, and requires theologians to resort to the same means of literary expression as poets and creatives. Uniting the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms of the argument, however, is the refusal to grant any single metaphor or model the kind of absolute (i.e. unique and comprehensive) truth status formerly accorded to penal substitution.
Comment on this approach
I have a number of fundamental objections to any form of the multi-models strategy, strong or weak.
The first is pragmatic. Where the presentation of our faith is concerned, I seriously doubt the persuasive power of any strategy based on a multiplicity of ‘metaphors’, ‘models’ or ‘theories’. The point is frequently made that theology is not alone in the use it makes of these in communicating understanding of things that are otherwise hard to grasp. The parallel often cited is that of nuclear physics, or cosmology. We are told, for example, to think of the expanding space-time universe as like the surface of a balloon as it is being inflated. It is sometimes claimed that models may even have a role, not only in communicating, but in advancing the frontiers of scientific understanding – in quantum physics, for instance.
However, there is an important difference between physics and apologetics here. In the former case, there is unlikely to be any question in the mind of the enquirer as to actuality of the scientific findings for which an explanation is being sought. But when it comes to explaining to non-believers a reality in which they are disinclined to believe, all this talk of models simply won’t wash. The apologist’s insistence on the partial (or, at least, less than absolute) truth value of religious language will not impress non-believers with the ineffable mysteries they fail to describe; it will simply cast further doubt on the actuality of what they are talking about!
The fumblings of apologetic based on multi-models may help explain the continued popularity that the traditional presentation seems to enjoy for all its deficiencies. How much more convincing it sounds when apologists try to tell people what the Gospel event actually is, rather than equivocating about what it is like.
I suspect much of the Atonement theology mentioned above is actually more about smoothing over theological discrepancies within the community of faith than supplying the needs of enquirers and evangelists seeking a more intelligible understanding of the Atonement than penal substitution. For Christian insiders, one can certainly appreciate the appeal of a theological strategy aiming to keep die-hard traditionalists on board (‘yes, we do ascribe some value to penal substitution’), while not alienating everyone else (‘but there are plenty of other ways to think about the Christ-event if you prefer’).
Multi-models approach: the inconsistencies of the metaphors and models
However, my problems with multi-models go beyond concerns over its persuasiveness.
There is also the fundamental assumption of multi-models that there can be no one unique and comprehensive explanation of the Christ-event. There may exist some plausible justification for this claim; but I have been unable to discover it. My suspicion is the assumption owes much to the fashionable post-modern distaste for ‘literalist’ discourses, and the cultural prestige of metaphor as literary and poetic.
I am not, of course, denying a place for mystery in the Christian faith. But the challenge of genuine mysteries – the trinitarian nature of the Godhead, for example – seems to me sufficient without us inventing mysteries that aren’t really there. Given the perfectly adequate account of Christian sacrifice offered by theologians, I am disinclined to believe it constitutes one of those mysterious things.
We also need to be careful how we are using the term mystery. There is a sense in which the full significance of certain things, like the love of God, or the sufferings of Christ, will always exceed human understanding. But that is not say they are ungraspable at a notional or conceptual level, or that an at least partial sense of their significance lies altogether beyond our comprehension. The Catholic theologian, Urs von Balthasar, movingly comments:
For who would want to understand the love of God in its folly and weakness? Or who would wish to lay claim to any other course of action than hanging on the lips of God, whose word remains inseparably connected with his historic Cross and Resurrection, and keeping silence. (Balthasar, pp.82-3)
For all that, Balthasar does not ‘keep silence’. In fact, the book from which these lines come exemplifies what can be both cogently and usefully said – without recourse to metaphors and models – about these ultimately unfathomable things.
The most serious charge against multi-models, however, is that it misrepresents the models and metaphors in which it deals.
Let us begin by making a distinction between the claims that the Scriptural record itself makes about the Gospel event and those subsequently made by the models and metaphors. So far as Scripture itself is concerned, it would be hard to argue its claims are inconsistent; but Scripture does not provide us with the comprehensive explanation of the Gospel event that we are seeking. That is why – at least from the time of St Anselm – Christians in need of an adequate account of their faith for the purposes of evangelism have felt compelled to supply the deficiencies of the biblical record by developing doctrines in a manner that may be based on Scripture, but goes well beyond anything it asserts explicitly. Much the same occurs in the case of the development by the early church of a trinitarian theology. The difference is that, where its soteriology is concerned, the church never arrived at the kind of happy synthesis that we find in the Nicaean and Athanasian creeds. So it is that we are left with, on the one hand, statements of the NT, which, though arguably not irreconcilable with each other, do not add up to a comprehensive account of the Gospel event, on the other, accounts of the Gospel event that Christians have developed on the basis of those statements, which, while, in many cases satisfyingly comprehensive, are not mutually consistent.
This becomes evident, when we examine with real attention the contents of the ragbag of Atonement theory.
For a start, most adherents of satisfaction doctrines, such as penal substitution, have never regarded their account of the Gospel event as just one among a number of models. This becomes obvious when we read contemporary defences of penal substitution by its genuine advocates. (See, for example, Jeffrey, Ovey & Sachs, Pierced for our Transgressions.)
The same can be said of serious expositions of the moral influence theology in its various guises. For its serious proponents, the whole point of moral influence – and its difference from penal substitution – lies in the fact that the transformation God works through Christ is a transformation in our hearts, not a transformation in the outward conditions of our relationship with God, such as the payment of a moral debt. On this view, moral debt has no existence outside our subjectivity – which is why no outward sacrifice is needed in order to remedy it. The crucial issue here concerns the epistemological status of the transformation – on whether it is wholly subjective (moral influence) or necessarily objective (penal substitution). Given that it cannot consistently be both, the views of moral influence and penal substitution are incompatible.
Now, of course, proponents of penal substitution will generally also believe that in the phenomenon (as opposed to the theory) of moral influence. They do not generally deny that the Gospel event works on a subjective level; they merely insist that it also works on an objective level (something that moral influence theory denies). So, they will find a place for scriptural texts such as Christ’s injunction ‘to take up our cross and follow me’, which are, from their perspective, perfectly compatible with other scriptural texts that speak of Christ ‘bearing the penalty of our sins’. However, the proponents of moral influence are not just claiming that the Gospel event works through moral influence; they are claiming that it works only through moral influence, and rejecting penal substitution on that basis. So, it is pure obfuscation to argue that just because the two theories claim some of the same things, and respect the same biblical texts, they are, in any degree, mutually compatible!
The other main category of theory I shall consider here is the one on which my alternative presentation is based. A list of authors and works was given in the previous chapter. For want of a better description, let us call it the sacrificial approach.
From what true advocates of this approach have themselves said of its relation to other approaches it is evident such an understanding of the Gospel-event is unlikely to be reconcilable with that of penal substitution (or moral influence, for that matter). For, according to proponents of the sacrificial view, those other theories (including penal substitution and moral influence) only came into existence at all because Christians, living in an age far removed from biblical times when the cultic practice of sacrifice had become obsolete, no longer retained much sense of what sacrifice originally meant for the writers of the NT, and consequently misunderstood it.(15) If, as the sacrificial approach claims, such recent models as penal substitution and moral influence are indeed a misunderstanding, it follows that the sacrificial approachwill not be consistent with them. Yes, the NT language of cultic sacrifice on which sacrificial theology is based can, without inconsistency, be combined with the language of vicarious punishment or ‘taking up our cross’. But the sacrificial theories based on that language maintain an understanding of sacrifice fundamentally at odds with what these models presuppose.
In view of these incompatibilities, should we just stick to the Scriptural language, and avoid, as one recent theologian has put it, ‘pressing metaphors by making them “walk on all fours”’?(16)
That is, of course, an option. Indeed, there would be much to recommend this minimalist strategy of interpretation, if it were possible to deduce an adequate theology of the Gospel-event from the ipsissima verba of the New Testament. Given, however, that this cannot be done, the practice of theological extrapolation we find in Atonement theology is not the expression of something unjustifiably wayward (as talk of ‘pressing’ of metaphors tends to suggest). It’s something more akin to the motivation that drove Christians of the earliest centuries to develop a trinitarian theology – an urgent and entirely comprehensible need on the part of Christian orthodoxy to give an account of itself to the world. The scandal – if scandal there is – lies not in the impulse to develop a comprehensive model, but in the failure of contemporary theology, with the Spirit’s leading, to arrive at an enduring consensus – even to the extent of what was achieved by the creedal formulations of earlier centuries in trinitarian doctrine.
Sadly, as we have already pointed out, the failure to agree a sense leads inevitably to the suspicion on the part of Christianity’s interlocutors that there is ultimately no sense to be made. It is no condemnation of Christian apologetic itself to say that it should play to its strengths; the intellectual muddle of multi-models is a theological blind alley any evangelist would do well to avoid.
How Wright opens the way to the non-sacrificial alternative to penal substitution.
The other influential alternative to the standard penal substitution comes out of the work of N.T. (Tom) Wright. As with multi-models, I shall begin by giving a summary, then offer my own observations as to its pluses and minuses.
To be strictly fair, the account given below reflects a type of presentation of Christian faith that draws heavily on Wright’s work, rather than Wright’s own position (for reason to be discussed in the next chapter). Therefore, I shall refer to it, not as ‘Wright’s’ presentation, but as the non-sacrificial presentation, of the Christian faith.
Here it is :
As in PS (penal substitution), sin and justification lie at the core of the Christian faith, as, respectively, the problem of human life, and the Christian solution to that problem. But those words no longer have quite the same meaning.
Let us begin with sin. According to the non-sacrificial account, ‘sin’ includes, not only our personal mess-ups, but the structural failings of our social and political communities – the injustice, materialism, loneliness and ugliness that threaten to overwhelm any impulse we might feel towards spiritual progress. This is reflected at a terminological level by the definition of sin as brokenness – a term that can apply equally to individual and collective failures.
The key to this less individualistic understanding of sin is the appreciation of the role of demonic forces which transcend the individual. The standard presentation often equates sin with selfishness – by which is meant the prioritization of personal desires over what we know to be right. The non-sacrificial presentation attributes our unrighteous desires, not just to our individual spiritual weakness, but to wider forces at work in culture and society. The cults which posed such a temptation for the Israelites of the Old Testament (Baal, Chemosh et al.) were inseparable from institutional and political structures serving the interests of regional elites. Similarly, such temptations of our own day as consumerism or pornography ultimately reflect the sollicitations of political or economic interests that are demonic, as much as they do the frailty and dependence of human individuals. To give free rein to such desires is, in reality, not to serve ourselves but to give sustenance to forces that seek to dominate us. Conversely, to resist them, is to resist demonic forces and starve them of their libations. Either way, we act not simply for ourselves, but as participants – simultaneously agents and victims – in a spiritual struggle that transcends the bounds of our own individual moral experience.
The sense we have of the brokenness of our human experience derives ultimately from our individual and collective acquiescence in an idolatrous and demonic order of values. Ultimately, this explains the injustice, materialism, loneliness and ugliness that we perceive in modern life. We are all of us, as individuals, complicit in this brokenness to the extent we do not submit our desires to the authority of God’s Kingdom, and thus collude with the demonic ideologies of our age.
So much then for the problem. What sort of solution does the Gospel offer? For the non-sacrificial as for the standard presentation, the answer is justification. But, justification – like sin – has changed its meaning. It no longer refers, as in the standard presentation, to the mere imputation to Christians of a moral righteousness they have not earned.
For the non-sacrificial approach, God acts to remedy our human brokenness by inaugurating a people – a ‘Kingdom community’. This community bears God’s name and serves as a bastion against demonic forces. Its human members are those collectively referred to by St Paul as ‘the just’ (in Greek, dikaioi).
The history of this Kingdom community is a story of victory snatched out of the jaws of defeat. Its first manifestation was the nation which, according to the book of Exodus, God had rescued from Egypt and called to be His: the Israel of the Old Testament. This Kingdom appears to fall: first (in the OT) through the weakness of its unfaithful subjects; then (in the New Testament) through the apparent defeat and death of its sole faithful representative and messiah-king – Jesus Christ. Yet, a turning-point is reached with the Resurrection. This brings about something entirely unforeseen by people at the time: the reconstitution of God’s Kingdom, now no longer defined by ethnicity and circumcision, but solely by its submission to the Messiah-King himself – a Kingdom which is, for the first time, open to the Gentiles. By raising the Messiah-King from the grave, God the Father vindicates him, and allows Jesus’ followers the opportunity to respond to their master with a spiritual understanding that comes, through the Holy Spirit, only after his death.
The New Testament recounts this rebirth of God’s Kingdom as the Church. The subjects of the reconstituted Kingdom are ‘the just’; but the basis of their ‘justice’ is submission to the resurrected messiah-king. ‘Justification’ here means simply the process of their integration into this Kingdom. Since submission to the messiah-king is sole criterion of membership, every subject of that Kingdom will have been ‘justified’, or brought into the Kingdom of ‘the just’, whether or not they were formerly subjects of ethnic Israel. In the fully realized manifestation of the Kingdom as the Church, they are ‘just’ and ‘justified’, not by ethnicity or religious practice, but only by faith in their messiah-king.
‘Justification’, therefore, is a matter of politico-religious identity, not some legal status of quasi-innocence in the eyes of God. This identity overrides the claims of any existing obligations to the demonic powers of this world. It involves the transfer from a condition of subservience to those demonic forces which shape our desires without regard to our interests, to one of loving service within the community of those whom the Holy Spirit has also ‘justified’. Of course, the acceptance of a new politico-religious identity does not, of itself, ensure the elimination of all sollicitation on the part of the demonic forces of the world – any more than the imputation of righteousness in the standard presentation. But the ‘hope of glory’ – of full participation in the ‘new heaven and new heaven’ one day to come – becomes an ever stronger counter-weight to those forces to the extent our identity comes to be grounded in the here-and-now of the Kingdom community of believers.
Comment on the non-sacrificial approach
To repeat, the above account of the Gospel event, though drawn from Wright’s work, does not altogether represent Wright’s own theological position – though it could, I believe, be fairly attributed to some influential Christian writers who have attempted to extract a cogent account of the Gospel event from his work.(17) Its most conspicuous feature is an absence of dependence upon penal substitution. Actually, Wright himself does not abandon penal substitution, despite developing a consistent basis for an account of the Gospel that would allow us to take that step (as many of his followers do). In his apologetic writing Wright prefers to run penal substitution in tandem with the above account. It is perfectly possible to do this without logical inconsistency. In fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, to do so helps to remedy what might otherwise be considered a significant deficiency of the presentation given above.
But let us conclude this chapter by summarizing the points on which the above non-sacrificial presentation represents a significant advance over the standard one.
First, it gets us away from the individualism of the traditionalist focus on salvation as ‘soul rescue’ (Wright), and the emptiness and implausibility of its understanding of heaven as disembodied post mortem existence. Instead, we find an emphasis on the Church as the ongoing fulfilment of God’s plan for a Kingdom community, offering humanity a place of freedom and refuge from its idolatrous and demonic propensities.
Second, it avoids the legalistic notion of justification as the ‘imputation’ to sinful individuals of a righteousness not their own. This is replaced by an intellectually and morally more intelligible – and more scripturally grounded – definition of the concept as integration into the Kingdom community of Christ. Evidently, this does, in practice, require God to relate to us collectively as though we were already the righteous community that we have yet to become. However, it gives no basis for the questionable notion of a divine judge declaring the guilty innocent on the basis of the punishment of a third party.
Where does Wright stand on sacrifice?
The chief deficiency of the non-sacrificial account frequently derived from Wright, in my view, is its failure to take adequate account of the language of the texts of NT itself, which is – certainly in many cases – sacrificial. What are we to make, for example, of such indisputably cultic language as Hebrews 9.22 (‘there is no atonement without the shedding of blood’)?
The standard account of penal substitution understands this sacrificial language as implying an atoning transaction whereby a penalty is paid by the Son to the Father. The non-sacrificial account, of which we speak, rejects the idea. But because the non-sacrificial account makes the same equation of sacrifice and transactionality we find in the standard account, it has to skirt around the Bible’s sacrificial language, and ignore NT references to the cultic rituals of the OT.
For all that, the non-sacrificial account is capable of offering a version of the Gospel message that is valid as far as it goes. Jesus’ suffering and death can be explained – so it would seem – without resort to sacrificial language. We have only to see Christ’s death as the simple consequence of his determination to persevere in his Kingdom message against all resistance – to the point where the politico-religious authorities are provoked into making an end of him. His Kingdom message is subsequently vindicated, along with the status of Christ himself, and against all human opposition, through God’s direct action in raising him from the dead. Such faithfulness ‘unto death’ – both to God and his God-given vocation – could be considered sacrifice in the current common language understanding of the term, that is, as a loss freely conceded. But its correspondence to sacrifice in the religious sense is problematic.
My first reaction to the emergence of this kind of account in authors who are evidently heavily influenced by Wright (like Bell, McLaren or Chalke) is one of surprise. How could any presentation of the Gospel drawing heavily on so literarily sensitive and historically informed a reader of texts as NT Wright fail to do justice to an important aspect of the New Testament language in which the meanings of the Cross are expressed – namely, sacrifice ? I think there are a number of explanations.
First, on Wright’s own admission, the sacrificial meanings on which New Testament draws in order to speak of the Cross belong to a substrate of widely-held cultural assumptions around the notion and practice of sacrifice. Familiar as these meanings were to both Jewish and pagan readers, the New Testament authors evidently felt no need to justify or explain them. And – to the frustration of modern readers who do not share this religious background – they do not do so.
Second, as I said in my last post, Wright himself does not reject penal substitution. True, he is too scholarly an explicator of St Paul’s thinking to interpret his use of the term justification as a state of imputed innocence in the traditional Protestant manner, and has too much respect for the text of his letters to treat them as though they were treatises on that idea. But, this doesn’t mean the penal substitution idea ceases to be available theologically; indeed, Wright finds it already fully formed in the ‘servant-song’ passages of Isaiah, which he holds to have been hugely influential on the early Christians.
While Wright himself doesn’t break with penal substitution, there is much in his exegesis to appeal to those anxious to do just that. The letters of St Paul – Romans particularly – have always been absolutely central to the standard formulation of penal substitution. So, Wright’s alternative exegesis of these texts is easily mistaken for an all-out assault on penal substitution – and has been so taken, by both sides of the penal substitution debate. Not so, says Wright. The texts of Isaiah suffice to anchor the notion of penal exchange securely in our understanding of the Cross, without the need for a contorted construal of the Pauline Epistles.
Theologically, then, Wright’s influence can draw us in one of two opposing directions. If we want an alternative to penal substitution (option 1), we obtain an entirely cogent account of the Gospel event – its only downside being a failure to do justice to the scriptural language of sacrifice. In short, we will have something that hangs well together and makes admirable sense, but leaves quite a lot out of the picture (both in Scripture and the Christian tradition). On the other hand, if we go all the way with Wright (option 2), we end up with a highly cogent presentation of the Gospel that can claim, at least nominally, to respect the biblical language of sacrifice, but is not altogether unencumbered by penal substitution. On the positive side, however, both in Wright and the non-sacrificial account properly so-called, we avoid the excessive individualism of the classic presentation and replace the old dependence on proof texts with an intelligent reading of the Bible.
Non-sacrificial vs. sacrificial presentations
Penal substitution is an essentially individualist interpretation of sacrifice. It can serve as a way of making some (rather bad) sense of the sacrificial language of the NT, averting the charge so easily levelled against some disciples of Wright that they are ignoring the sacrifice language in which biblical accounts of the Cross are so often couched.
How much better, though, if this sacrificial language could be shown to be integral to the theology of the Kingdom itself rather than supporting a kind of supplementary theology of penal exchange.
As it happens, there is indeed a widely unrecognized link between the concept of a Kingdom of God required by the theology of McLaren, Bell et al. and sacrificial language of the kind applied by the biblical texts to the Christ-event. This is a link which emerges as soon as we allow ourselves to view the Christ-event with eyes informed by the insights on symbolic ritual furnished by religious studies and social anthropology. The symbolic ritual we are concerned with in the case of Christianity is, of course, the Eucharist.
As we saw in earlier chapters, the evidence of social anthropology and ‘history of religions’ would lead us to anticipate the role of sacrificial symbolism in the production and reproduction of any socio-religious institution such as kingship. So why would we expect what is true of any other kingdom not also to be true of the Christian Kingdom of God? The very concept of kingship – prior, at least, to the modern age – presupposes socially reproductive symbolism actualized in religion and sacrifice. Does it not then follow that a Kingdom theology, such as we find adumbrated in Wright and his disciples, far from being a context from which we could expect to see sacrifice excluded (McLaren, Chalke, Bell et al.) or marginalized (Wright), is precisely the context where we would expect to find sacrifice front and centre? Needless to say, the concept of sacrifice to which we refer, is not that strange monstrosity of the Protestant imagination, penal substitution – but sacrifice as we find it practised across the world’s societies and religions.
To claim this is, in no way, to equate the Eucharist with every other symbolic ritual. It is simply to acknowledge that in respect to the formation of identity it plays an analogous role with what goes on elsewhere, and can, on that basis, be characterized broadly as an instance of a more widespread – indeed universal – phenomenon. The fact remains that socio-political entities differ, along with socio-symbolic practices that uphold them. The Eucharist, for example, is no more ‘the same thing’ as the Muslim Eid sacrifice than Church is ‘the same thing’ as the ummah (Muslim) commonwealth of all believers). Different symbolic practices reproduce different forms of community.
Secondly, Wright et al. want to identify the Kingdom of the New Testament with the Church as we know it. That is the whole point of a Kingdom theology. Putting the eucharistic sacrifice back at the heart of the Gospel event (as we proposed earlier) gives some substance to that identification. It’s one thing to proclaim the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as the birth of our Church. But what is it in reality that links the assembly of the Acts of the Apostles with the occasion of our Sunday devotions? What is it that guarantees the claim of our own little congregation in 2024 to be a manifestation of the same ‘Kingdom of God’? Apostolic succession? Personal experiences of the Holy Spirit?
Yet, place the Eucharist back at the heart of the Kingdom of God, and we have not just a once-and-for-all birth-moment, occurring in history, but a constantly re-actualized birth moment occurring at every eucharistic celebration. In the words of the Catholic liturgiologist, Henri de Lubac: ‘The Church gives the Eucharist and the Eucharist gives the Church.’
We will be further examining this genuinely sacrificial understanding of the Christ-event in subsequent chapters.
(14) Green & Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (2000); Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross (2006); Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement (1999); Finlan, Options on the Atonement (2007); Colin Gunton, The Actuality of the Atonement (2003); Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation, 1989; Gerald Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer (2007)(15) FCN Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Purpose (1988); Frances M. Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975)
(16) Gordon Fee, ‘Paul and the Metaphors for Salvation’, in Stephen Davis et al., The Redemption (2006) p.65
(17) I have in mind the presentation of the Gospel-event to be found in such books as: Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy; Steve Chalke, The Lost Message of Jesus; Rob Bell, Love Wins