How Wright opens the way to the non-sacrificial approach.
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.
(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