Sacrifice as I used to understand it
To my younger mind, there were two kinds of religious action: the kind that was God’s exclusively, in which no man could claim to participate – and the religious actions of ordinary Christians like you and me. This was nowhere more apparent than in the case of Redemption.
Who is this that comes from Edom … in garments stained with crimson?
It is I, mighty to save!
Why are your robes red?
I have trodden the wine press alone, and from the peoples no one was with me.
Prophesied in such lines was the victory of God in Christ Jesus, obtained, so it appeared, unassisted by any of us!
The term sacrifice was, it always seemed to me, a marker of this crucial distinction between two kinds of action. In its fullest and most literal sense, it applied, under the conditions of the New Covenant, exclusively to God’s action on the Cross. Its purpose was, like the literal sacrifice of the Old Testament, to atone. Needless to say, atonement was something only God could do.
Yes, our liturgy spoke – no doubt in reference to our Eucharistic worship – of a ‘sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving’; also, of a ‘reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice’ consisting in the offering of ‘ourselves, our souls and bodies’. But this was somehow just sacrifice in a secondary and metaphorical sense – a sense carefully set apart from the primary and literal one. Our action was ‘sacrifice’ by virtue of its grateful echoing of the initial, literal sacrifice. Only the latter was atoning – and that sacrifice was exclusively God’s.
I don’t remember ever hearing things articulated in quite these terms. But the formulation adopted by Cranmer’s prayer following communion was widely held by those of my church to be the perfect expression of the true Christian position on sacrifice:
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 …
‘Duty and service’ here seemed to point to the very thing they fell short of. They were somehow linked to sacrifice by the very act of being so carefully distinguished from it. Sacrifice was thereby evoked while remaining in the sphere of what was fully achievable only by God in Christ.
Does this view of sacrifice distinguish Christianity from other religions?
It was my doctoral studies at Heythrop College, London, that eventually shook up my understanding of sacrifice, and brought a wholesale rejection of the perspective that I have just outlined.
Surprisingly, however, this change of view came about almost incidentally – and certainly not as a result of any intention to challenge the theology of sacrifice I had been brought up with. That theology had always been an integral part of the whole package of Christian faith as I had come to understand it. And it is an indication of just how little I questioned such thinking that I made it the basis of an argument for the uniqueness of the Christian faith which I intended to pursue in a doctoral thesis
Let me explain.
It is a familiar claim that the exclusive attribution of sacrificial agency to God constitutes not only a core principle of Christianity, but also the key difference between Christianity and other faiths. This has been reiterated in countless mission sermons, and driven home in evangelical classics by writers like Philip Yancey and Miroslav Volf. Frankly, it always struck me as highly plausible. But, in my view, it was inadequately supported by empirical evidence from other faiths. After all, the assertion that x or y constitutes an essential difference between Christianity and other religions involves a claim about other religions, as much as one about Christianity. I always believed that the necessary evidence of other faiths would easily be found. But I rather suspected that these preachers and theologians lacked the background in religious studies or social anthropology to back up their claims.
So, I set out in my thesis to remedy the deficiency I had identified.
This turned out to be no easy task.
Sacrifice is hard to define, and disciplinary specialists tend to be shy of cross-cultural generalizations. For all that, I was impressed by the large measure of consensus I did find amongst more recent scholars. Their conclusions were not, on the whole, unsupportive of my general thesis that pagan religious ritual had a more ‘participative’ character than Christian sacrifice as I then understood it. For example, there seemed considerable support for the idea that non-Christian sacrifice (in the broadest sense in which the phenomenon could be defined) involved a ‘return-gift’ to the source of one’s existence – whether perceived as, for example, anthropomorphic deity, tutelary ancestor, a living wife-giver, or a decapitated foe. This was enough, in my view, to allow a contrast between a ‘pagan’ sacrifice where human agency was very actively engaged, and the exceptional case of Christianity in which God alone had furnished the only acceptable sacrificial victim.
There was also the more socio-political dimension of these symbolic rituals. This tended to be the focus of socio-anthropological analysis, and enabled me to flesh out sociologically the bare bones of my contrast between Christian grace and ‘history of religions’ sacrifice. I had been taught to see how the acts of symbolic giving of pagan cultures served as a basis of hierarchical socio-religious distinctions that assign to a particular class of individuals the role of representing the community to its gods. In the words of Maurice Godelier:
The castes and classes of antiquity could not have emerged had not these groups and these men appeared to have advanced further than other men into the space which from the outset separates man from the gods.
In contrast to this, Christian grace seemed to promise a very different social world in which God’s sole agency, as enacted in the cross of Jesus Christ, relegated all humanity to the gloriously equal role of recipients in the face of His absolute monopoly of the gift.
I was beginning to see the broad lines of an argument – when my well-laid plans fell apart!
Encountering an alternative understanding of Christian sacrifice
My discomfiture came not from any flaw in the thesis I had developed around the participative nature of pagan sacrifice, but from another quarter entirely. It was my understanding of Christian sacrifice – the theological ground beneath my feet, so to speak – which began to totter. The source of challenge came from studies of the Eucharistic liturgy. These – along with atonement theology, and material of a more obviously soteriological character – naturally formed part of my basis of evidence for the Christian notion of sacrifice as God’s alone which I had intended to set over and against the ‘works-based’ sacrifice of pagan religion.
My problem was that these liturgiological studies, generally emanating from a Catholic, Anglo-Catholic or Orthodox background, did not supply the evidence I needed. Certainly, the texts of early Eucharistic prayers – as expounded and analysed by Christian scholars like Louis Bouyer, Gregory Dix, Robert Daly, or Alexander Schmemann – had everything to do with Christian sacrifice. But it was not at all the concept of sacrifice familiar to me from Cranmer’s 1662 prayer book or from the kind of popular soteriological writing that had informed my own largely evangelical Christian theology.
For a start, there was the attention it gave, within its notion of Christ’s sacrifice, not just to death as an atoning exchange, but to the idea of self-offering – and the way the self-offering of the Son appeared to open into a cosmological vision of the self-offering of God Himself in creation and redemption. More troubling, however, was the way this concept of sacrifice also expanded, in another direction, to embrace our own action as Church in offering bread and wine – and, through that bread and wine, our ‘souls and bodies’. For these liturgies and their interpreters, there seemed to be no distinction of a primary and secondary sense of Christian sacrifice such as I set out earlier. Rather, the ‘cosmological’ sacrifice of the Son and our own self-offering as Church were all part of the one sacrifice – which began in the self-offering of God as Son and Word, was performed on our behalf, but then, as a culminating act of grace, opened to our participation. On such a view, it seemed, we could share in the Son’s sacrificial agency – join him, that is, in offering back for ourselves, the sacrifice initiated by Him on our own behalf.
Even more significantly, the purpose of this Christian sacrifice seemed to have changed along with our relation to it. Together with the shift in emphasis from mere reception to participation in Christ’s sacrificial agency, the element of atonement seemed – at the very least – to have been rather up-staged by a concept of sacrifice as a transformative act of worship. This was seen as initiated for us by Christ’s own self-offering (to God and to his friends), engaging, as St Paul puts it, ‘our souls and bodies’ and refashioning our human wills according to a Eucharistic pattern established in Jesus’s own self-offering in life and death.
Alarmingly – from the perspective of my own preoccupation with the distinctiveness of the Christian faith – this reorientation from atonement to act of worship seemed to bring Christian and pagan sacrifice closer together, as least in respect to their ultimate goals. On this view, the difference between the Christian and pagan sacrifice could hardly lie in the fundamental aspiration of offering something back to God. That, after all, seemed to be common to all faiths.
At first, then, the view of sacrifice I was now encountering struck me as a sell-out on what my evangelical background had taught me to see as the basis of Christian ‘uniqueness’. I was also disconcerted by the idea, emanating from these Christian sources, that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, while being the cosmic sacrificial self-offering of the Trinitarian Godhead, was an event in which we everyday Christians were actually called on to participate – not just as recipients, but as sharers in Christ’s own sacrificial agency.
Needless to say, as time went on, and my familiarity with these liturgical studies grew, I began to find a cogency in participative explanations of eucharistic sacrifice. Moreover, there seemed little doubt about their rootedness in early Christian tradition. Perhaps, I concluded, the Christian differentia lay not in the distinctiveness of the goal but in the fact that God Himself had, through His Son and Word, initiated the only proper form in which the universal goal could properly be accomplished.
Why this alternative understanding should matter to evangelical Christians
Above and beyond all such considerations, however, this new way of understanding Christian sacrifice struck me as conferring one supreme benefit – at least, for evangelicals like me.
It rendered theologies of atonement – such as penal substitution – largely superfluous.
On the conception of sacrifice that was fast becoming my own, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross didn’t need to be explained solely as the means of funding our forgiveness – something the various models and theories of atonement achieved only very inadequately. Evangelical notions of sacrifice had always seemed to me woefully underdetermined. They left unanswered the fundamental questions: ‘Why the cross?’, ‘Why did Jesus have to die?’ ‘Why can’t God just forgive sinners anyway?’
But, suppose the sacrifice of Christ wasn’t just – or even primarily – about obtaining God’s forgiveness? An implication of what my liturgiologists were saying about sacrifice was something like the following. That, if, in the case of us Christians, God had chosen to forgive through the self-offering of Christ, this was because, in so doing, He was also achieving some further goal: the enabling of our human participation in a worthy act of sacrificial worship – the ultimate aspiration of humanity at every place and time. From this perspective the whole notion of Christian sacrifice could be distanced from substitutionist atonement theory.
This brought into question, most obviously, the traditionalist view of the Christ event which assumed, unjustifiably, it now seemed to me, the coincidence of sacrifice and substitutionist theology. But it also gave me a vantage point, when combined with my understanding of the socio-political implications of ritual sacrifice, from which to engage those dissident evangelical voices that have hitherto constituted the dominant critique of substitutionist theology within evangelicalism. I mean those, like Steve Chalke and Brian McLaren, who seek to replace penal substitution with a focus on the ’Kingdom’, and those who aim to re-balance what they (like Tom Wright) see as the radical individualism of the traditional emphasis on ‘soul rescue’ with a renewed emphasis on ecclesial community. One problem with the latter approach – as many traditionalists point out – is its failure to take full account of the pervasive language of sacrifice in which the meaning of Christian salvation finds itself expressed in the NT.
Yet, suppose we recovered a broader understanding of sacrifice not bound to the idea of a substitutionist transaction? And suppose we opened ourselves to the idea, fundamental to contemporary social anthropology of religion, that sacrifice, in whatever context it is found, accomplishes the production and re-production of socio-religious community? That would surely require us to re-introduce a suitably re-configured notion of sacrifice into the very heart of a ‘Tom Wright’ style of Kingdom theology. After all, from an anthropological perspective, sacrifice need not be a substitutionist transaction, but will always be at the very heart of the institution of human societies. If all ‘kingdoms’ begin in communal actions of ritual cult, why wouldn’t God’s? On this basis one would expect sacrifice – that is to say, in the Christian case, eucharistic sacrifice – to be at the heart of any ‘Kingdom’ theology’. By recognizing the necessarily ritual (in Christian terms, ‘sacramental’) dimension of such a theology, we recover a more anthropologically credible understanding of ecclesial community as well as a more biblical one!
In short, I propose that a proper understanding of sacrifice could be the key, not only to an adequate, intellectually and morally sustainable, account of our Christian faith, but the means to resolving the kind of soteriological disputes that have recently torn evangelicalism apart. Yes, penal substitution is a theological error; but the answer is not to throw the sacrificial baby out with the substitutionary bath-water. The understanding of ‘Kingdom community’ detached from its sacrificial basis entails a watered-down, de-institutionalized concept of the Church. Instead, the rejection of the individualist understanding of sacrifice as penal substitution needs to be replaced by a more communal and Eucharistic emphasis on its role in the reproduction of the body of Christ.