How Wright opens the way to the non-sacrificial approach.
The other influential alternative to the official account 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 accurate, the account given below reflects a type of account of Christian faith that draws heavily on Wright’s work, rather than Wright’s own position (for reason to be discussed later in the chapter). Therefore, I shall refer to it, not as ‘Wright’s’ account, but as the non-sacrificial account.
Here it is:
Like in the official account, 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 have a different 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 official account 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 solicitations 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 official, account, the answer is justification. But, justification – like sin – has changed its meaning. It no longer refers, as in the official account, 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 solicitation on the part of the demonic forces of the world – any more than the imputation of righteousness in the official account. 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 drawn heavily on his work.[i] The most conspicuous feature of the above account is its lack of dependence upon penal substitution. Surprisingly, however, Wright himself does not abandon penal substitution, despite developing a consistent basis for an account of the Gospel that has allowed some of his followers to take that step. In his apologetic writing Wright prefers to run penal substitution alongside the above account. It is perfectly possible to do this without logical inconsistency. Indeed, it helps – as we shall see – to remedy what might otherwise be perceived as a significant deficiency of the non-sacrificial account.
But let us begin by summarizing the points on which the non-sacrificial account, as we have given it, presents significant benefits over the official 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 nonsense of justification as the ‘imputation’ to sinful individuals of a righteousness not their own. This is replaced by an intellectually and morally more credible – and more scripturally grounded – definition of the concept as integration into the Kingdom community of Christ. Of course, in practice, this too requires God to relate to us pre-emptively as already the righteous community that we have yet to become. But it gives no basis for the 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 is its failure to take adequate account of the language of the texts of NT itself. That language is, whether we like it or not, sacrificial. What, on this view, 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 official 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 rejects that idea. But because the non-sacrificial theologians share their opponents’ understanding of sacrifice as penal substitution, that account has to ignore – or at least skirt around – the sacrificial language of the New Testament, and its references to the cultic rituals of the Old.
For all that, the non-sacrificial account offers a version of the Gospel message that makes sense as far as it goes. Jesus’ suffering and death can be adequately explained without resort to sacrificial language. We can simply see them as coming about through our Lord’s determination to persevere in his Kingdom message against all resistance – to the point, indeed, where the politico-religious authorities are provoked into making an end of him. The message is vindicated, along with the status of Christ himself, against all human opposition, through God’s direct intervention in raising him from the dead. Such faithfulness ‘unto death’, both to God and one’s God-given vocation, qualifies as ‘sacrifice’ in the current everyday sense: of a loss freely conceded – though what relationship it may have to cultic sacrifice, remains unclear.
On the face of it, one might be surprised that this account, based as it is on so historically and critically informed a reader of texts as Wright should fail to do justice to a vital aspect of the language the New Testament uses to express the meanings of the Cross.
Actually, though, Wright himself – as we have already said – does not reject penal substitution. True, he is too scholarly an explicator of St Paul’s thinking to interpret the Pauline understanding of justification as a state of imputed innocence in the traditional Protestant manner, and too respectful of the New Testament text to treat Paul’s letters as treatises on that idea. He nevertheless continues to hold on to penal substitution as an explanation of the salvation-event. Penal substitution may not be implied by Paul’s idea of ‘righteousness’; yet, it remains an important notion in the New Testament, having previously arisen in Scriptures known to have been influential on early Christianity, such as the ‘servant-song’ passages of Isaiah. So, Wright has no need to ignore sacrificial language.
Still, even if Wright himself doesn’t break with penal substitution, there is much in his exegesis to appeal to those keen to do just that. The letters of St Paul – Romans in particular – have always been a quarry for proof-texts fundamental to the demonstration of penal substitution doctrine. No surprise, then, that Wright’s alternative exegesis of these texts has often been mistaken for an all-out assault on the doctrine itself – by both sides of the penal substitution debate. ‘Not so’, claims Wright. The prophetic texts of the Old Testament suffice to give penal substitution its place at the heart of biblical tradition, without the need for a contorted construal of the Pauline Epistles.
Wright’s contribution, then, can draw us in one of two opposing directions. If we want an alternative to penal substitution (option 1), we can derive from it an entirely cogent account of the Gospel event – whose only downside is a failure to do justice to the scriptural language of sacrifice. In short, we will have something that makes admirable sense, but leaves a certain amount out of the picture. On the other hand, if we go all the way with Wright (option 2), we end up with a cogent account of the faith that can claim, at least nominally, to respect the biblical language of sacrifice, but remains encumbered by penal substitution. Either way, we avoid the benighted individualism of the official account, and replace the old dependence on proof texts with an intelligent reading of the Bible.
Non-sacrificial vs. sacrificial presentations
One option then is to run penal substitution in tandem with a non-sacrificial account – as Wright himself does. This allows us to take some account of sacrificial language, but without being dependent on it for our account of the salvation-event.
Yet, we have only to view things with eyes informed by the insights on symbolic ritual furnished by religious studies and social anthropology, for the total absurdity of this approach instantly to dawn on us. We stated earlier as a universal principle that those humans who act in the role of sacrificial mediators come to share in the divinity of the beings whose blessings they channel. Amongst those who have, through history, exercised this sacrificial and mediatory function, pre-eminent are kings and princes. One has only to dip into the ethnographic record (largely dating from an age prior to modern social anthropology) to begin to appreciate the perversity of attempting to conceive of kingship without sacrifice or vice versa.[ii] Only a Christian theologian would suppose that something so demonstrably true of every other ‘kingdom’ on God’s earth should not also be true of the ‘kingdom of God’. Yet even Scripture represents the messianic role as bringing together the vocations of priesthood and kingship – as we see from the language of the messianic psalms such as the following:
‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’
I will tell of the decree of the Lord:
‘He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.’
Moreover, if Jesus is really the ‘messiah’ foretold in such prophecies, then the Eucharist is surely his enthronement ritual. After all, the ritual that ‘gives the Church’ can hardly not also be the ritual that gives the Kingdom of God – and the ritual that gives us the Kingdom of God will also give us the kingship of God’s messiah, reproducing it at each successive celebration. It follows that no ‘kingdom theology’ worthy of the name will seek to marginalize sacrifice. The very fact of its being a theology of ‘the kingdom’ requires that sacrifice be front and centre. Only, of course, the ‘sacrifice’ in question will not be that strange monstrosity of the Protestant imagination, penal substitution – but sacrifice as we find it practised across the world’s societies and religions.
Furthermore, the theology of Chalke, Bell et al. urgently needs to be eucharistic if it is to justify the claims of its ‘Church’ to be the Kingdom of God. Like N.T. Wright himself, these writers want to identify the Kingdom proclaimed in the New Testament with the Church as we know it. In fact, this equation of a theological idea (the Kingdom) and an ongoing social and political institution (the Church) is fundamental to their project. Of course, like Wright they proclaim the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as the birth of the Church. But this purely historical justification of the Church’s Kingdom status is scarcely adequate. The historical thread linking the modern reality to the biblical event is tenuous indeed! Reflect for a moment on the historical, religious and social changes that separate the realities of now and then – and one cannot help questioning what it is in practice that links the occasion of our Sunday devotions with the assembly of the Acts of the Apostles. What is it that guarantees the claim of our own little congregation in 2026 to be a manifestation of the same ‘Kingdom of God’? Apostolic succession? Personal encounters with 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 – i.e. the historical descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost – but a ritual birth-moment constantly re-actualized at each and every eucharistic celebration.
Three things then. Abandon penal substitution entirely; adopt, instead, an understanding of sacrifice based on real-world sacrificial practice; restore the eucharist to the heart of the faith, as the perfected Christian enactment of sacrifice. Those are the three adjustments any ‘kingdom theology’ worthy of the name needs to make. Make those adjustments, though, and any non-sacrificial account drawn from Wright will no longer be non-sacrificial. It will have been become the sacrifice-centred account we have been advocating in these pages.
[i] I have in mind the account of the Gospel-event found in such books as: Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, Zondervan, 2006; Alan Mann & Steve Chalke, The Lost Message of Jesus, Zondervan, 2004; Rob Bell, Love Wins, Collins, 2011
[ii] See David Cannadine & Simon Price (ed.), Rituals of Royalty, Cambridge University Press, 1992