- 3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
- 4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
- 5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
- 6.1 DIFFICULT ISSUES – QUESTION 1: HOW IS OUR EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE UNITED WITH THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST?
- 6.2 DIFFICULT ISSUES – QUESTION 2: WHAT IS IT FOR THE EUCHARIST TO BE A SACRIFICE? DO WE GIVE, OR MERELY RECEIVE?
- 6.3 DIFFICULT ISSUES – QUESTION 3: WHAT HAS RELIGIOUS WORSHIP TO DO WITH THE PRODUCTION OF HUMAN COMMUNITY?
- 7. SPEAKING TO THE WORLD
The chances are the presentation of the Christian faith differs somewhat from the kind of thing you may have heard if you have ever spent time in an Evangelical congregation, or attended a mission-orientated sermon.
A full version of the classic presentation is given below. But its main points are as follows:
Humans through the misuse of their God-given free will, have become sinful creatures entrapped in an eternal separation from a perfectly just God. This tragic situation would be irrevocable but for the intervention of God Himself acting in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The death of Jesus on the cross somehow allows God in Jesus to bear the punishment for our sinfulness. In this way of, it is claimed, God’s justice is satisfied 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.
The classic presentation is by no means devoid of theological truth. But it is inadequate as an expression of the doctrinal basis of the Christian faith. It is also unlikely – if our non-believing friends are educated Western adults – to make any very positive impression on them.
I explain below the difficulties of the classic presentation, and why I think it falls short of the Gospel.
But I shall begin with a fuller version of the alternative I want to offer you here. So here it is:
A PRESENTATION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
The primary aim of the Gospel event is not simply to enable the forgiveness of sin. Rather, it is to give our lives purpose by opening to us the path of right sacrifice. To the extent that we embark upon that path, past errors are forgiven, so the Bible assures us. But the ultimate aim of the Gospel event is the right worship, not just the forgiveness of our sins.
So, let me begin by explaining what I mean here by ‘sacrifice’.
What is sacrifice?
Sacrifice, in the Christian context, means the same as it does elsewhere. At the most fundamental level, it is not necessarily a blood offering, still less a destruction of anything. Rather, it is an act of worship deriving from the sense we have as human beings that life is something ‘given’, and the desire to respond, by giving back from what we have received. Who or what it is to whom we feel we owe this gift has varied widely in different times and places.(1) But the aspiration to offer back something seems universally shared, and it is what gives our lives purpose.
As to why human beings need to respond in this way, it is hard to give an answer. We seem to be up against a fundamental fact of the human condition. We all know that life comes to us from outside ourselves, and we all fashion gods to whom we can address our pious response to that gift. The human being is, by very nature, ‘homo religiosus’. Religious offerings are (and always have been) the natural destination for our riches. The Biblical story of the Exodus points to this truth when it tells us, in anticipation of the establishment by Moses of the cult of the tabernacle, how the gold ornaments which the newly liberated Israelites had ‘borrowed’ from the Egyptians, somehow found their way, as if by a spontaneously instinctual movement, into an idol – the golden calf. It is as if the Israelites needed a legitimate outlet for this natural religious impulse – a need which Moses was, of course, about to meet in the shape of the new cult. As the future priest, Aaron, responds to the indignant Moses: ‘I said to them, “Whoever has gold, take it off”; so, they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!’
Sacrifice is not just an existential need at the level of our personal experience. It also has very concrete implications at the social and political level. The religious sense we have of owing our life to something, or someone, beyond ourselves, is closely linked to our sense of where we belong in the world – of social and political identity and attachment to community. As has been increasingly recognized by scholars and historians over recent years, the practices that arise ultimately out of a religious, and sacrificial, motivation lie at the very core of shared identity and community.(2) Societies develop around cultic centres. In fact, the Old Testament itself is largely occupied with the history of a ‘people’ – one that owes its whole identity to the fact of being ‘the people of God’ (though, perhaps uniquely among human societies, this ‘God’ is not a tutelary ancestor, but the God who has chosen them – the God of the Covenant).
One worthy sacrifice
Social anthropology and the history of religions teaches us that the Christian sacrifice of the Gospel event – whatever else it may be – is at least no less a sacrifice than any other: that it responds to the same motivations as sacrifice everywhere else, and produces and reproduces community in much the same way.
But the revelation of the Gospel event, embodied in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church, introduces a dimension into our thinking that is altogether absent from the work of social anthropologists. According to the biblical and Christian perspective, there is a right and a wrong sacrifice. To those that God chooses for his own, He reveals the right form of sacrificial worship, in relation to which other forms can only be considered misdirected – in biblical terms, ‘idolatrous’. In the case of God’s ‘chosen people’ (and it is no doubt precisely in the light of this dispensation that they are a ‘chosen people’), the universal human propensity for human wealth and effort to lavish itself on some ‘golden calf’ finds at last an appropriate outlet in the shape of the blueprint for sacrifice given to Moses on Mt Sinai. This blueprint includes a whole way of life explicated in the Law, with, at its centre, the cultic and symbolic worship of the tabernacle.
This pattern of right sacrificial living was doomed to remain largely an ideal – honoured largely in the breach. To take the part of God’s religion in the world was always going to be a tough call, and Israel did not live up to that vocation – or only very inconsistently. Perhaps – the thought begins to surface in later OT texts – even a righteous Israel would be called to play its role through suffering. Such an interpretation of those texts would seem to be corroborated, at least for Christians, by the light retrospectively cast over Israel’s previous history by the experience of the one whom Christians have come to see as the one true representative of a ’righteous Israel’. Christ alone, the incarnate Word of God, so Christians believe, fulfilled the requirements of this sacrificial life of worship. And the destination and fulfilment of that life when lived out, faithfully this time, in the real world of sacrificial disobedience and idolatry, turned out to be nothing short of the cross. Hardly a surprise, then, that such a mission and such a sacrifice would have had to await the intervention of God Himself.
What this means for us
When we describe this self-offering of Christ as ‘a sacrifice’, something more, of course, is meant than that it is a life led ‘sacrificially’. The claim is being made that it is a sacrifice in the sense of being a public, even a communal, religious act – no less than the cultic sacrifices of the Jerusalem temple cult. Indeed, the NT even claims that the ‘cross’ is the ‘fulfilment’ of the ancient kind of sacrifice – the reality of sacrifice in relation to which the ancient cult was just a prefiguring ‘shadow’. A sacrifice in this religious sense has, like any form of worship, a divine addressee, and expresses a communal intention in respect to that addressee. To be a religious sacrifice, the action must be accepted and recognized as such. How could the self-offering of Christ come to be the ultimate sacrifice in this sense?
Partly it’s a question, as we have already suggested, of what Jesus himself claimed – throughout his life, but especially at just before his death at the Last Supper. But ultimately, this claim is corroborated at the Resurrection (by God) and at Pentecost (by the Holy Spirit through the institution of the Church). In the case of the Resurrection, it is God the Father who raises Jesus, and thus confirms the divine recognition of his sacrifice. With Pentecost, Jesus’s own ‘spirit’ – the ‘Holy Spirit’ – passes to his disciples after his death, enlightening their understanding – so that they now recognize the sacrificial significance of Jesus’s action for the first time. Both events presuppose Jesus’s death, and the recognition of the sacrificial status of that death as claimed by the words of Jesus himself at the Last Supper: in the first place, by the Father Himself, and in the second by the Holy Spirit in the Church. There is, in either case, a strong sense, of a hiatus and a transition – of Jesus’s death having had to occur, so that the age of Jesus’ earthly ministry could give way to the age of the Spirit’s ministry in the Church. Now Christ and his sacrifice would be recognized in a new and fuller way and by those many living beyond the reach of his earthly mission.
A rather surprising thing follows: that the seal is finally set on the sacrificial status of Jesus’ action – and, I would argue, the first proper Eucharist celebrated – at the point where Jesus’ disciples repeated what Jesus had said and done before his crucifixion, but now with the necessary understanding brought by the Holy Spirit. If, as we have argued, a sacrificial action must be recognized to be sacrifice in order properly to be what it is, then Jesus’ self-offering becomes fully a sacrifice at this point.(3) But there is an even more surprising outcome: the sacrificial action which the disciples, and ourselves along with them, now fully participate in is one in which they, and all of us, must act as agents in Jesus’ name. In other words, by initiating the sacrificial action and then leaving its full realization to his disciples and to us, Jesus effectively brings about the sharing of his sacrificial agency.
So it is that we, Jesus’ followers, now offer Jesus’ sacrifice as he has offered ours! Symbolized in bread and wine is our whole lives along with Jesus’s, not held back in rebellious independence as ‘our own’, but consecrated along with Jesus’ self-offering and the self-offering of his whole Church.
How is this Christian form of religious sacrifice similar and/or different from other forms?
Certainly, there is something here like a common aspiration. Symbolized by the bread and wine offered up is indeed our whole lives, our projects and our very selves. Apparently, in the Orthodox church, the bread brought to the sacristy is bread baked by local households, which is then placed on the offering plate with their ‘alms’. This, for me, is the aspect of Christian sacrifice common to every form of religious sacrifice. That said, the Christian offering is made collectively, as the offering not of individuals, but of the Church as a whole acting as the body of Christ. Moreover, when consecrated, it becomes that body and blood – and it is as that body and blood that it is offered at the altar, and then consumed by the communicants. In other words, what Christians offer in sacrifice is, properly speaking, Christ’s sacrifice – not simply our own, but our own as transformed and made perfect by the Holy Spirit. This is like a foretaste of the eschaton (the end of the world) – indeed, it is a promise of that event – where we will one day offer up the lives that God has begun to sanctify here and now, not as we know them today, but transformed and made perfect in Christ for His (and our) glory.
The relationship between Jesus’s role and our own comes to be understood in the Christian Tradition in terms of the Holy Spirit, who is God acting in the collective hearts of believers on the basis of what Jesus has done. This gives the notion of sacrifice the Trinitarian character that we find in the Church’s Eucharistic prayers, in which the president at the Eucharist articulates the meaning of the sacrifice that is Christ’s and that of her Church.
In brief, the self-offering of the Son (the second person of the Trinity) is seen as ultimate response to the self-emptying (kenotic) generosity of the Father (the first person). 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 (the third person), an adequate sacrificial response to His own initial generosity. This is, of course, 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. Sacrifice, then, is a reciprocal gift of love and self-offering between the persons of the Godhead, which engages humankind through the ecclesial community instituted through the self-offering of Christ.(4)
Summary of this Presentation
I am aware that the above is too long and complex for everyday use – not exactly a ‘soundbite’ alternative to the classic presentation. So, here is the shortened summary version that figured in my front page:
The Gospel-event itself consists in an act of sacrificial worship in which a worthy return is made to God and an ideal human community instituted. This worthy return is a response to God the Father’s initial kenotic (self-emptying) offering of Himself in creation and redemption. People of all places and times have always aspired to make this kind of return to God; but they have not done so worthily, and the communities instituted by these imperfect sacrifices litter the course of history. The perfect sacrificial return to the source of our being was at last successfully accomplished by the Son in his offering-up of himself to the Father in the course of the life and death of Jesus. The result was the institution of an ideal community in this self-offering, available to all humankind, not just, as in previous sacrifices just to a closed group. What I call the Gospel-event includes both the initial act of sacrificial return made by the Son, and the institution of a community in that sacrifice by the Holy Spirit. In practice our community in Christ’s sacrificial return is manifested perfectly at the level of the divinely-instituted Eucharistic worship that moulds our hearts and desires, rather less perfectly, at an everyday level, in our lives to the extent that these are brought into line with this pattern. This lived conformity to the Eucharistic paradigm is what St Paul refers to as the ‘living sacrifice’ and ‘spiritual worship’. The Christ-event itself, the Eucharist, and our own ‘spiritual worship’ are all sacrifice – in fact they are all manifestations of the same sacrifice, which is first of all Christ’s, but is capable, through our Eucharistic worship, of also becoming ours.
Comment on this Presentation
Comparison with the classic presentation
Both presentations focus on sacrifice – but it is a very different understanding of sacrifice in each case. The classic presentation rests on an understanding of sacrifice commonly known as ‘penal substitution’. The term encapsulates the idea of a ‘punishment’ (hence ‘penal’), borne vicariously (hence ‘substitution’). (A fuller account is given in the next section). The ‘alternative presentation’ given above presupposes a very different understanding, based on a range of theological approaches, not all of them from Atonement studies. For the ease of this and subsequent discussion – where it will frequently be important to contrast that ‘different understanding’ with the dominant one of penal substitution – I shall describe it as the sacrificial revisionist notion of sacrifice.
Given its importance for my ‘alternative presentation’, I will take a moment to expand here on what I mean by the term.
Broadly, sacrificial revisionist understandings envisage the operation of Christ’s sacrifice as properly directed, not – or at least not exclusively – to the funding of God’s forgiveness of sin. Rather, its proponents stress wider range of meanings of sacrifice, including that of an act of offering praise and glory to the God – like, for example, the whole offerings and burnt offerings of the OT cult. Such approaches include some Atonement studies from Protestant theologians,(5) but also studies of the liturgy that admit a non-Protestant view of the Eucharist as itself a sacrifice (in the broader sense) through which God’s people join their praises to the self-offering of Christ on our behalf. The latter group would include some well-known Anglo-Catholic, Catholic, and even Orthodox studies of the Eucharist.
This brings us to another respect in which the anchoring of our alternative presentation in sacrificial revisionism causes it to differ from the classic presentation: notably, in the central role it assigns to the Eucharist and its characterization as an offering that we make to God. The proponents of penal substitution have always applied the term sacrifice to the cross of Jesus, as they have also, in a derivative sense, to the offering Christians make of their own lives as a sacrifice (a ‘sacrifice of praise’). But they have failed to recognize that our Eucharistic worship is also a sacrifice. According to the sacrificial revisionist perspective of our alternative presentation, the Eucharist is not a commemoration of a once-and-for-all event, or an appropriation of its fruits, but an offering of our own lives to God which we make in unity with the offering of Christ.(6) Not to recognize this, is to lose the crucial link between the sacrifice of Christ and our own daily lives.
When we allow sacrifice to take its place at the core of the Gospel event, however, things fall into place. What is accomplished in the cross and resurrection is no longer the end of the story: that would be to turn the Gospel event into a ‘Jesus’ event. It is the end of one thing – Christ’s earthly mission – and the beginning of another – the realization of that sacrificial mission in the Church. Something IS definitively accomplished in the sacrificial life and death of the Saviour – but that thing has still to be actualized historically in the response of the community of his body. The latter happens, as the Church, acting in the Holy Spirit, offers back the sacrifice that Father initiates through the Son. Thus, our Eucharist as the Church becomes an integral moment of the sacrifice of Christ, and the Gospel event comes to subsume our own spiritual ‘now’.
The association of a sacrificial revisionist view with the Eucharistic liturgy tends to anchor it – at least in the eyes of the liturgiologists – in the early tradition of the Church, well before Atonement ‘theories’. The latter come to assume enormous importance with Luther and the Protestant Reformation, though an important antecedent of penal substitution goes back to St Anselm in the C11th. In response to the question of why such earlier notions of sacrifice would have given way at a certain point to the dominance of penal substitution, the explanation most frequently proposed by sacrificial revisionists is that sacrifice was once so familiar a phenomenon as not to require any explanation, but that its meaning came to be lost when the practice of cultic sacrifice itself became obsolete.(7) The result (according to the sacrificial revisionist, Godfrey Ashby): ‘the rise of models and theories, a very thin doctrine of the Atonement, a concentration on the ransom paid to the devil, and a legacy of unsettled Eucharistic controversies’.(8)
What, then, is the place of the notion of atonement in our alternative presentation?
That depends what you mean by atonement. The kind of sacrifice envisaged here will ultimately straighten out the world, wresting it from its subservience to the deforming effects of the world, flesh and devil. At the inception of this process, where, at Baptism, new believers commit themselves to following Jesus, there is, the Bible says, a guarantee of forgiveness, an amnesty, whereby God promises to overlook all the wickedness of their past lives. But the struggle and suffering of Jesus, the messiah king, is required for the purposes of bringing glory to the Father (and drawing us into that act of worship), not just in order to procure God’s forgiveness. Given the divine mercy, forgiveness can be depended on where humans set out seriously to follow the right path (as the OT repeatedly shows). The difficult problem was always how to straighten out a world deformed by demonic influence, not how to pay for, or fund, forgiveness of past misdeeds. This, however, is by no means, to diminish the mind-blowing immensity of that struggle the Son of God had to engage in order to bring that about!
Is this ‘ritualistic’?
I can imagine how Protestant Evangelicals could get this impression, because of the focus on Eucharist. What I would say in response is that, in both the case of Christ and ourselves, the meal is not itself the whole of the sacrifice. Rather, it is the communication of the sacrifice, and so, in some sense, its actualization. What Jesus offers at the Last Supper is not just bread and wine, but his whole life. He had, of course, been offering that life from the moment it began; but the Last Supper is the moment where his past and present sacrifice is communicated to his followers. Similarly, in our Eucharist, we offer, not just the bread and wine, nor just Christ’s offering, but our own lives, united with his, and those of our Christian brothers and sisters. It symbolically enacts a daily self-offering in Jesus’ name, which we, as members of our Christian community, will have – and will continue to be – making in the practice of our community on a day-to-day basis; but the Eucharist is the moment where that collective self-offering finds expression. Crucially, it does so only in unity with the self-offering of Christ, and his whole body, the Church. As such, it is the offering of something ‘no longer held back in rebellious independence from God’. It is this ‘being united with the offering of Christ’, which is the necessary template of Christian sacrifice as ordained by God Himself. And it is this ‘being united with the offering of Christ’, which distinguishes our sacrifice from the offerings of the pagans. As the Anglican theologian, Gregory Dix, puts it:
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 the 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. ‘If you have received well,’ says Augustine, ‘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.’(3)
Difficult issues
Let us admit that there are things in the above presentation that many people – Christians and non-Christians may have difficulty getting their heads around, notably:
- What has religious worship to do with the production of human community?
- How can twenty-first century Christians participate in a two thousand year old event?
- Do we ourselves offer anything in our Eucharistic worship, or do we just receive what Christ has already offered?
I attempt to offer a more ‘in depth’ answer to these questions below (see section 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3)
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
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1.Charles Malamoud, ‘Cuire le monde’, in Purusartha, Recherches de Science Sociale de l’Inde et de L’Asie du Sud (1975), pp. 91-135; Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa (1985); Maurcie Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (1996). Even studies that adopt a narrower definition of sacrifice as blood ritual admit the existence of a more underlying motivation in the act of giving to the gods: see, for example, Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (1991), p.30.
2.A good example is given in the adjoining blog: Neil MacGregor, Living with the Gods (1918)
3.See Dix, pp. 87 ff.
4.This summary is indebted to Robert Daly’s helpful study, Sacrifice Unveiled (2009). Daly’s account is entirely in line with that of the Eucharistic studies cited below.
5.This is, broadly, the emphasis of the ‘sacrificial revisionist’ approach to the Gospel event given by: F.C.N. Hicks, The Fulness of Sacrifice (1930); John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (2013); Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: its Nature and Purpose (1988); John Moses, The Sacrifice of God (1992); Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (1995). Also of with the fundamental theology of the Eucharist studies, listed below.
6.The focus on Eucharistic sacrifice as crucially a gift to God is characteristic of a range of revisionist studies of Eucharist from across the denominational spectrum – above all: Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945); F.C.N. Hicks, The Fulness of Sacrifice (1930); Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (1987); Edward Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West (1998); Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled (2009); Louis Bouyer, Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer (1989). Curiously enough these studies contain to the answer to our questions about the meaning of the Gospel event itself.
7.The classic account of this development is given by Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (1944)
8.Ashby (op.cit.), p.55
9.This multi-tiered approach has recently been promoted by theological adherents of a movement describing itself as ‘Deep Church’: Andrew Walker and Robin Parry, Deep Church Rising (2014); Jim Belcher, Deep Church: a Third Way between Emerging and Traditional (2010). In many respects, this is a contemporary restatement of the ‘orthodox Evangelical’ position of Robert Webber’s ‘Chicago Call’ back in the late 1970s. With its emphasis on ‘historical roots’ and ‘continuity’, the latter foreshadows the attention given to the definition of the Christian Tradition (with a capital ‘T’) by D.H. Williams (Retrieving the Tradition, a Primer for Suspicious Protestants) and Thomas Oden (The Rebirth of Orthodoxy) around the turn of the millennium.