Why is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ at the heart of our individual and collective Christian experience?
The ability to give a coherent answer to that question may not be essential to our own Christian faith. After all, we can know that something is true without being able to say why. Yet it is surely important to our witness – I mean, our personal outreach to family and friends. Evangelicals need to be able to give an account of the relevance that the sacrifice of Jesus has in our own lives!
My problem has always been that the ‘official’ explanation – the account of the propositional basis of our faith offered by our preachers and teachers – made little sense to me.
For, be under no misapprehension, there is – atleast for many of us evangelicals – an official explanation. I speak of the traditional doctrine of penal substitution. This explains the centrality of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in terms of the way that God restores us to right relationship with Him by allowing the substitution of his Son as the bearer of the penalty of our sins.
There are problems I have with this as an account of the relevance of the sacrifice of Christ to our lives. In the light of the copious literature on the Atonement I will here merely say two things. First, that no one has ever satisfactorily explained to me the bizarre moral logic of this ‘blessed exchange’ whereby the punishment of one serves the justification of another. Second, that the exclusive preoccupation with individual salvation sells disastrously short our collective experience as church – as though the latter were a mere by-product of the salvation of individual souls.
I want to be clear that, in making these remarks, I do not at all mean to impugn the authentically ‘Christian’ nature of the communities to which I, as a Christian, have belonged. Nor, for that matter the authenticity of their witness. However, living your faith is one thing, being able to offer an intellectually persuasive account of it, quite another. The total failure of our evangelicalism in the latter department has effectively forced a disengagement between my individual attempts to share my faith from the official outreach of our church community. Why would I expose anyone I wanted to convince of the truth of the Christian faith to a presentation of the Gospel which I personally found wholly unconvincing?
That is my evangelical problem. I can’t believe it isn’t widely shared.
The unofficial alternative – abandoning sacrifice
Fortunately, there is an ‘unofficial’ version of our Gospel message. To this, I suspect, many evangelicals have recourse without letting it be too widely known.
I am referring to the position adopted by evangelical dissidents like Steve Chalke, Brian McLaren and Rob Bell. Their Christian testimony focuses on the coming of God’s Kingdom in the shape of the Church – its inauguration by the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels, and its vindication by God through his Resurrection. This offers a less individualistic account of the Gospel, one that restores our collective experience of God’s Kingdom community to the heart of the Christian message. As for the forgiveness of our sins, that becomes part and parcel of the larger story of the Kingdom. The possibility of our ‘citizenship’ in that Kingdom requires a general amnesty to sinners, authoritatively invoked in the case of those who repent of their former rebellion against God, and acknowledge, through baptism, the messiahship of Jesus Christ. According to the Chalke/McLaren account of the Gospel message, Jesus Christ certainly brings the restoration of our relationship with God. However, vicarious punishment plays no part in the process. The claim of Jesus to ‘forgive sins’ could certainly have been one of the factors bringing about his death – indeed, is highly likely to have been. But Jesus’s death was in no other respect necessary to securing or funding God’s forgiveness.
This presentation of the Gospel struck a chord in me from the first time I heard it. I can’t say that it had any part in my own return to faith. That had taken place some twenty-five years ago, and was the work of other, quite personal, factors. But it offered me a way out of the difficulties of traditional penal substitution. I increasingly came to adopt it on the occasions when I had to offer an account of my Christian faith. For example, I used it to explain the Gospel to my own children. I even turned it into a little prayer which we repeated every night.
But my commitment to a Chalke/McLaren-style account of my faith was not something I discussed in my church community. I have never sought arguments with those who, for all their traditionalist views, appear to me much better Christians than myself. And I had no wish to find myself debarred from teaching in Sunday school.
However, there was another problem with this ‘unofficial’ alternative – quite apart from its divisiveness. It had plenty to say about the message of Jesus, next to nothing about his sacrifice. This was an element that had somehow dropped out of the picture. I began to wonder how far such presentation could be held adequate to what St Paul had to say of Jesus Christ – let alone to the grand salvation narrative of the whole Bible, in which Christ’s self-offering somehow fulfils all the aspirations of the ancient temple sacrifice!
So, I formed a plan which I conscientiously followed – up until the moment when, as I shall shortly relate, I eventually found a satisfactory resolution to my soteriological difficulties. Here it is.
Provisionally, I would continue to employ the ‘unofficial’ account for the purpose of giving an account of my faith to others. But I also committed myself to investigating the whole question of sacrifice and how it related to our individual and collective experience as Christians. I would spend every available moment reading ethnographic accounts of religious sacrifice, especially those written by social anthropologists, casting my net as broadly as possible amongst the world’s religions so as to avoid ethnocentric bias.
The realization of this programme took me about ten years. Having accomplished this first step, I engaged upon and completed a PhD thesis at Heythrop College, London, examining the relationship of the Christian Gospel event to the phenomenon of sacrifice in the general ‘history of religions’ sense.
The solution: a more ‘participative’ understanding of sacrifice
My ten-year programme of reading on sacrifice brought me to conclusions that I initially found unsettling.
‘Sacrifice’ is not a religious concept that is easily defined. But through my ethnographic reading I had discovered a religious behaviour sometimes classified under the term ‘sacrifice’ that had some good claim to be considered universal. I mean the aspiration, in every time and place (it would be hard to think of an exception) to give back something to the source of our personal and collective life – whether that be a personified deity, ancestral spirits, or the clan of one’s ‘wife-givers’.[1]
This, it seemed to me, was the essence of religion in all its forms. The problem for a protestant evangelical was how on earth this could relate to Christianity, as I understood it. I had been brought up to believe that, if there was one thing that we, as practising Christians, could not presume to do, it was to ‘give back’ to God. This conviction I probably first imbibed as a child hearing it so eloquently encapsulated in the words of the 1662 Anglican prayer book:
Not that we are worthy to offer thee any sacrifice ….
It was a sentiment subsequently rammed home by evangelical classics, like Philip Yancey or Miroslav Volf, speaking of the distinctive Christian understanding of grace as something that emanates uniquely from God and relegates all of us to the gloriously uniform status of recipients in the face of God’s sovereign bounty. In fact, the Eucharist itself (the closest thing to the ritual sacrificial practices of other religions) seemed to embody this principle. For all the occasional (and to me puzzling) Catholic references to the communion as a ‘sacrifice’, ultimately, the culmination of the ritual was an act in which bread and wine were received, not given.
So how was I to bring ‘history of religions’ sacrifice and Christianity together?
No one, I think, should embark on a thesis without an initial hypothesis. So, when I eventually began my own PhD study at Heythrop College, I started out with the idea that the whole point of the Gospel-event was to act as an ‘anti-sacrifice’. By this I mean an act that reversed the dynamic of the pagan relationship to the sacred as one in which the human being could stand as a potential donor or giver. My ethnographic reading had convinced me that, in other (non-Christian) religions, the practice of sacrifice, as I now understood it, came out of the human need to ‘give back’ to the source of our existence. In Christ, I now wanted to argue, God Himself became the author of the only act by which a relationship could be sustained between Himself and humanity. And this was a relationship in which the giving was all on God’s side and not on ours.[2]
That, then, was my point of departure. In retrospect it seems to reflect the religious prejudices of my protestant evangelical background. As I pursued my studies, I was forced, as never before, to engage with other theological positions on Christian sacrifice. In so doing, I found my initial hypothesis turned on its head! In particular, I discovered, in Anglo-Catholic, Roman Catholic and Orthodox studies of the Eucharist, an understanding of the Gospel-event which differed from my own ‘receptionist’ understanding[3]. This saw Gospel-event and Eucharist as ‘sacrifice’ in very much the sense it had in other religions – as a gift to God in which we everyday Christians are not relegated to the role of mere recipients, but also participate in Christ’s sacrificial agency.
At first, such a view struck me as a betrayal of everything my protestant background had taught me distinguished Christianity from other religions. But, on further reflection, I began to be convinced that this participationist position made better sense of my Christian experience than anything I had encountered hitherto. It also brought the theological sense of Christian sacrifice into line with the understanding of religious history and social anthropology.
Slowly, I found myself coming round to an understanding of Christian sacrifice that seemed the very opposite to the one with which I had set out!
Underlying this understanding is the idea that the goal of God’s intervention through Jesus Christ is not just forgiveness of sin (though it certainly achieves that). It is more like the restoration of a proper form of sacrificial worship. This was, after all, something which the Jews had prefigured in their God-given temple cult, and all peoples of the world (so my ethnographic reading had taught me) ultimately aspire to. This sacrificial ‘giving back’ is also the basis of our social and political communities – as social anthropologists have so convincingly demonstrated in the case of other cultures and religions. In the case of Christianity, our sacrificial worship constitutes – and is constituted by – the Church.
Here then is a broad-brush summary of what I would term a participationist theological position, distilled from a range of theological sources.[4]
The self-offering of Jesus (the ministry of his whole life as much as the cross) accomplishes the proper response to the self-emptying (kenotic) generosity of the Father. As such, it constitutes the perfect sacrifice in the ‘history of religions’ sense of a giving back to God. All the Father’s earlier gifts to humankind culminate in the 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, this same perfect sacrificial response to His own initial generosity. Here, then, was sacrifice in the sense I had come to understand it. But, not only does the Son himself make this adequate sacrificial response on his own account; he also, with the advent of the Holy Spirit that is consequent on his death, enables his disciples to share in his response. The accomplishment of sacrifice therefore involves a mutual giving between the persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And into this sacrificial movement of self-offering humankind is progressively drawn, first in Christ alone, then in the entire Church. The latter, 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.
To a protestant evangelical eye, such as had formerly been my own, the first unfamiliarity here was the idea that Christian sacrifice was not just the death of Jesus Christ, but the whole of his self-offering in life and death.[5] Indeed, sacrifice was also a participation in the cosmic sacrificial self-offering of the Trinitarian Godhead.
But there was an even more important and more disconcerting unfamiliarity. This sacrifice of Jesus Christ (and the cosmic sacrificial self-offering of the Trinity) 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. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ’s followers, gathered in his Kingdom as the Church, were, it seemed, able to accomplish the fundamental religious aspiration of humankind in offering back something to God in a worthy act of sacrificial worship.
From a certain perspective (which was fast becoming my own) such an understanding had everything to recommend it. First, on this conception of sacrifice, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross didn’t need to be explained in terms of funding our forgiveness. We could, therefore, allow that God could forgive sins wherever there was penitence in the offender. If, in the case of a redeemed humanity, he chose to forgive through the self-offering of Christ, however, this was because, in so doing, He also achieved another, larger goal. This was the enabling of our human participation in a worthy act of sacrificial worship – the ultimate aspiration of humans of every place and time. My new-found understanding also explained the centrality of the Christ-event to our experience of Christian community, as penal substitution had signally failed to do. Whereas Chalke et al. marginalize the concept of sacrifice in favour of the more socio-political concept of a Kingdom of God, I had now discovered that sacrifice itself (the very thing Chalke et al. had rejected) should be placed front and centre of the whole notion of the Kingdom. Penal substitution is abandoned, but our understanding of the Kingdom becomes dependent on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, now understood as an act of self-offering and worship, rather than just one of atonement and propitiation.
Finally, this understanding of Christian sacrifice turns out to be line with the notion of sacrifice promoted by social anthropology and the religious studies.
The lesson from all this? We evangelicals need to be able to give an intellectually sustainable account of the propositional basis of our faith. This penal substitution will not supply. A popular, but divisive option hitherto has been to throw out sacrificial baby with the substitutionary bathwater. But there is another way of understanding the Gospel-event that makes much better sense of our individual and collective Christian experience. It will also speak much more forcibly to our interlocutors. That is to replace the ‘receptionist’ understanding of sacrifice which seems one of the most ingrained legacies of the Protestant Reformation with a ‘participationist’ one. Key here is seeing that sacrifice not just as something accomplished once-and-for-all in which our role as ordinary human beings is to receive. But it is an ongoing action of the whole Church, in which Christ enables us to share his sacrificial agency, and ourselves to become givers to God along with him. It is this participationist – not the traditional receptionist – understanding that makes sense of the Christian Gospel. I therefore propose that, whatever the ‘Catholic’ taint such views may have held for our Protestant forebears, it is an understanding that, in the interests of effective evangelism, we evangelicals now urgently need to embrace.
[1] A brief survey of the ethnographic evidence is given in: L. Goode, Re-evaluating the relationship between Christian salvation event and ‘history of religions’ sacrifice, pp. 129-218 (https://gdoc.pub/doc/e/2PACX-1vQh36ynQiz-ut-uLC7UC7Bx4c0ij-QSPSJdeDmnNk66h3tcMHGKrSKpCYPHsrYPIg)
[2] See: L.Goode, ‘Pagan benevolence and Christian grace’, Theology, 112, no. 865, 2009; ‘Beyond sacred violence’, Theology Today, 66.4, 2010
[3] F.C.N. Hicks, The Fulness of Sacrifice, London: 1930; Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, London: 1945; Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, Washington DC: 1988; Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, London: 2009; Edward Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West, Collegeville: 1998
[4] Ibid.
[5] F.C.N. Hicks, op.cit.; John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body, Farnham: 2013