Leslie Goode

And since life is corporate, and all outward acts of worship are corporate, life, so blending into worship, worship, so irradiating and energising life, are both safeguarded against selfishness, the great temptation, and loneliness, the great tragedy, of our experience.  The City of God is also His Temple: worship and service, in the vision of the perfect life, are only two sides of an inseparable whole. (F.C.N. Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice, p. 329)

 

  

A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD at Heythrop College, London: 2016

 

ABSTRACT

 

Theology that challenges traditionalist accounts of Atonement on the grounds of their being transactional and tainted with violence (revisionist theology) generally dissociates the Christian salvation event from sacrifice in the ‘history of religions’ sense.  Much Girard-based theology, for example, as well as theological gift theory, have understood sacrifice as a practice to which the salvation stands in an oppositional relation, while other revisionist theology tends to see  sacrifice in Christianity as only ‘metaphorical’.  A strand of revisionist theology, however, little heard in the current Atonement debate (sacrificial revisionist theology), has taken the opposite line, maintaining that the salvation event is a kind of sacrifice in the ‘history of religions’ sense, and only intellectually comprehensible when seen in such terms.  The choice between these revisionist positions – i.e. the non-sacrificial as against the sacrificial – is, in practice, crucial in determining the methodology adopted by the theologian; yet there is little justification generally offered for the adoption of one position over against another.

 The objective of this thesis is to investigate the implications of this fundamental choice by identifying generalizable tendencies in the characterization of salvation event and sacrifice by the respective positions which are attributable to their non-sacrificial or else sacrificial character, and considering these tendencies from the perspective of theological consistency, on the one hand, and their consistency with current thinking on sacrifice in the adjacent disciplines of history of religions and social anthropology, on the other.

 This study finds that, as regards theological consistency, non-sacrificial positions have implications that are incompatible with their continued adherence to a notion of Church as a sacramental community.  And that, as regards sacrifice, the implications of a sacrificial revisionist position, as exemplified by the study of F.C.N. Hicks, are more consistent (despite Hicks’ outdated ethnography) with recent tendencies in the conceptualization of sacrifice in adjacent disciplines than those of non-sacrificial positions.  At issue, both in relation to salvation event and sacrifice, is a social and collective dimension of religion which is central to the conceptualization of sacrifice in adjacent disciplines, but that non-sacrificial accounts of the Christian salvation event by theologians tend to exclude in favour of a largely individual, or interdividual, understanding of salvation.

It concludes that theology should abandon non-sacrificial approaches to Atonement theology – including sacrifice as metaphor – and develop a revisionist sacrificial theology on the lines set out by F.C.N. Hicks, engaging, as he did, with adjacent disciplines, in order to arrive at a conceptualization of the Christian salvation event that is consistent with the contemporary conceptualization of sacrifice in adjacent disciplines.

 

1 INTRODUCTION: SALVATION EVENT AND SACRIFICE – DETERMINING THE NATURE OF THE RELATION

What is the relationship between the Christian salvation event and sacrifice?  The term sacrifice has been used in the Christian context to refer not only to the salvific life and death of Christ (the Christ event), but to its emulation and enactment in the ritual of the Eucharist and the everyday life of the believer.  The term salvation event includes the full range of Christian religious phenomena to which the term sacrifice has sometimes been applied.  To ask whether that salvation event is, or is not, a sacrifice, is effectively to pose the question whether the salvation event is a specifically Christian transform of a more generic and transcultural phenomenon – what the Catholic theologian Robert Daly has termed ‘history of religions’ sacrifice: [1]  it is also to pose the question of how that salvation event relates – if at all – both to the cultic ritual of the OT, and to those sacrificial rituals that occur in other faiths and cultures that appear, in at least some respects, to resemble OT cultic ritual.  Sometimes it is argued that, in the context of Christianity, the term sacrifice is employed in a uniquely Christian sense that bears no significant relation to the sense it has in the history of religions.  However, this is tantamount to saying that the Christian salvation event has no significant relation to sacrifice (Daly, p.6).

                The need for the present study arises out of the fact that there is no consensus amongst theologians on this question.  On the one hand, there is language in the NT text that appears to point in the direction of a sacrificial interpretation of the salvation event.  In particular, the explanation given of the mechanism of Atonement – such as it is – consists in short prepositional phrases that appear to allude to the ritual efficacity of sacrificial blood.  These are scattered widely in the NT writings: ‘there is no remission without the shedding of blood (aneu haimatekchusias)’ (Hebrews 9.22); ‘we are justified in his blood (en to autou haimati; en to haimati autou)’ (Romans 3.25, 5.9); ‘redemption comes through his blood (dia tou haimatos autou)’ (Ephesians 1.7);  ‘you were brought close in the blood of Christ (en to haimati Christou)’ (Ephesians 2.13); ‘he has made peace though the blood of his cross (dia tou haimatos tou staurou autou)’ (Colossians 1.20).  Passages like these appear to place the Christian salvation event in continuity with the various forms of sacrifice described in the OT.  They would thus seem to confirm the place that theologians might in any case wish to assign to the Christian salvation event at the climax of that grand narrative of kingdom and salvation that commences in the OT.  On the other hand, this sacrificial phraseology is sometimes claimed to be metaphorical or merely figurative.  There is, of course, language drawn by NT writers from contexts other than sacrificial cult and applied to the salvation event, and no lack of ‘models’ and ‘theories’ which theologians have sought subsequently to construct on the basis of that language.  The sacrificial phraseology of the NT may, therefore, be considered inessential, or even just a part of a religious substrate from which the authentically Christian development has yet to be disengaged.  All of these responses to sacrificial language will be exemplified in the positions on sacrifice described in the following pages. 

Positions on sacrifice adopted by Atonement theology

The uncertainties that beset the interpretation of the sacrificial language employed by NT in connection with Atonement have given rise to a diversity of theological opinions concerning the relation between salvation event and sacrifice.  The various positions adopted by theologians on this question may be placed, for the purposes of our analysis, into three – in some degree, overlapping – categories: the traditionalist, the non-sacrificial (revisionist), and the sacrificial revisionist. [2]   

                The traditionalist position is the dominant position in Western Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant.  This has held that the Christian salvation event is indeed a sacrifice – though in the case of Protestantism the salvation event has sometimes been defined more narrowly than in Roman Catholicism so as to exclude the Eucharist.  The relation of the salvation event to OT cultic sacrifice is conceived typologically, with the Christian salvation event regarded as the fulfilment of OT cultic sacrifice, and the Mosaic ritual seen as foreshadowing or prefiguring the salvation event.  This way of thinking has a venerable history that goes back at least to the patristic literature, and is still very current.[3]  Beyond the Mosaic ritual of the OT, concern with manifestations of sacrificial ritual in other cultures rarely amounts to more than a background awareness of characteristics that link the Hebrew cult with ritual traditions in other cultures. 

This fundamentally sacrificial understanding of the salvation event is invariably coloured by a substitutionary interpretation of the Atonement.[4]  The traditionalist concept is substitutionary in the sense that it refers to the range of ‘penal’ or ‘satisfaction’ models that view sacrifice as an act by which the hitherto marred relationship of humanity and God is restored by means of a victim suffering in the place of humanity.  This pattern may be read, not only into the Christ event itself and its outworking in the life of the believer, but also, thanks to the typological understanding of OT sacrifice as a prefiguration of the salvation event, into the rituals of the Mosaic cult – as when the sacrificial beast of the OT sin offering, or the Atonement ritual, is thought of as suffering the punishment of the one(s) making the offering (Stott, pp. 90-91).  Beyond the religious domain, the idea of sacrifice as ‘suffering for someone or something’ has given rise to the secular, everday language use of sacrifice to designate any cost borne with a view to future benefit (e.g.: ‘he sacrificed everything for his future career’).  This substitutionary sense of sacrifice seems so deeply rooted in our culture that even social anthropologists and historians of other cultures have found it hard to escape – to judge by the accusations of ethnocentricsm sometimes exchanged in relation to their theories of sacrifice.[5] 

                The other position commonly adopted by theologians on the question of the relation of salvation event and sacrifice may be characterized as revisionist (as opposed to traditionalist) and non-sacrificial.  I will henceforth refer to it as the non-sacrificial position – for brevity’s sake, and because some measure of revisionism is already implied by the fact of being non-sacrificial.  Within this category I include the greater number of the theologies over the last twenty or thirty years which have vehemently rejected the traditionalist notion of sacrifice.  These argue that the salvation event is in no sense a sacrifice, or that it is a sacrifice in some special sense that bears no relation either to the sacrifice of Mosaic cult, or to the history of religions sense of sacrifice (i.e. a generic understanding of sacrifice that would embrace the sacrificial notions and practices of paganism), or to the everyday language understanding of sacrifice.  Their objections to traditionalist understandings are numerous, but the most significant tend to emerge in two general areas.  First, it is claimed, sacrifice involves an institutionalized form of violence – the murder or destruction of an innocent human or domestic beast.  Second, sacrifice, as substitutionary exchange, involves a quid pro quo, whereby God, far from simply giving out of unconditional generosity, must be constrained to give (forgiveness) by a prior gift (the life of his Son).  It would be hard to overemphasize how far such violence and transactionalism are antipathetic to the contemporary mind.  One has only to remember the ongoing academic preoccupation with the evils of religious violence, on the one hand, and the post-modern obsession with transcending economic relationality, on the other.  There may never have been a time when the idea of ‘no remission without the shedding of blood’ has been so out of joint with the spirit of the times.

                Within the non-sacrificial position, I propose to introduce two subcategories.  Probably, the most common way for its adherents to deal with the sacrificial language of the NT is to insist that that language is metaphorical.[6]  The implications of such a characterization will be discussed in detail below (2.1.).  For now, suffice it to say that a purely figurative construal of that language is one way to imply a fundamental ontological discontinuity between the salvation event itself and the sacrifice in terms of which it is described, and this effectively maintains the notion of sacrifice at a certain distance.  This subcategory of the non-sacrificial position I shall refer to as the sacrifice as metaphor position.  The other distinct subcategory of the non-sacrificial position views sacrifice as a practice to which the salvation event is radically opposed.  This position – which, following Michael Kirwan, I shall refer to as the anti-sacrificial position – brings salvation event and sacrifice into a far more immediate relation, since the purpose of the salvation event cannot, on this view, be understood altogether independently of the sacrificial practice for which it constitutes the antidote.  There are two contemporary manifestations of the latter position (subcategories of the anti-sacrificial, and, as it were, sub-subcategories of the non-sacrificial, position).  The first comprises theological positions based on the theory of René Girard, according to whom history of religions sacrifice constitutes the basis of archaic societies and cultures, but is demystified and ultimately disabled by Christian ‘revelation’.[7]  The second – which I shall refer to as gift-theology – associates sacrifice with what it sees as a distorted form of the divine:human relationship taking the shape of a quid pro quo, and formulates the salvation event accordingly as the totally ‘free’ gift of grace.[8]  What distinguishes both variants of the anti-sacrificial position is the conceptualization of the salvation event in oppositional relation to an empirically defined socio-religious phenomenon of sacrifice.  The sacrifice as metaphor position, on the other hand, tends to conceptualize the salvation event largely independently of history of religions sacrifice.

The traditionalist and the non-sacrificial (revisionist) categories as defined above account for by far the greater part of contemporary Atonement theology.   However, there is a third position on the relation of salvation event and sacrifice that has been advocated in the past, even if it is not much represented in recent and contemporary theological literature.  This is to maintain that the salvation event is a sacrifice in some real sense – but to seek to disengage this sense of sacrifice from the notions of substitutary exchange that bedevil it in its traditional form.  I propose to describe this as the sacrificial revisionist (as opposed to the non-sacrificial revisionist) position.[9]  The reasons for the relative unpopularity of this third option are evident enough.  A substitutionary understanding of sacrifice constitutes, as I have stated, the dominant paradigm of sacrifice in our culture.  To attempt to define a concept of sacrifice that is independent of this tradition requires a preliminary reflection on a wider generic and transcultural sense of sacrifice that can only be derived from the study of other (i.e. non-Christian) religious belief systems. 

The sacrificial revisionist approach generally retains the idea of a typological relation between the Mosaic cult and the salvation event.  There is a difference from traditionalist theology in the understanding of this typological relation, however.  The traditionalist position tends to develop this continuity through reading the Mosaic cult within an interpretative framework supplied by substitutionary theology.[10]  The sacrificial revisionist position takes the opposite tack.  Rather than narrowing the understanding of Mosaic sacrifice to the measure of a narrowly pre-conceived theology of substitutionary exchange, it allows a more anthropological understanding of the cultic sacrifice of the OT to set the parameters of an understanding of the salvation event. The commonest feature of the re-interpretation of ritual sacrifice is the insistence on a broader range of meanings underlying cultic ritual, claimed to be characteristic of sacrifice in all cultures, but represented in the Hebrew case by the different forms of sacrifice specified in the Mosaic code.  Expiation (represented in Levitical sacrifices of ‘sin’ (chatah) or ‘guilt’ (‘asham)) has to take its place alongside other meanings, such as that of ‘gift’ (represented in the ‘holocaust’ (olah)), or communion (represented in the ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘communion’ sacrifice (zebach)).  The resulting conceptual framework, when applied to the salvation event, highlights such aspects as Christ’s self-offering of a life of obedience to the Father (olah), or the eucharistic participation by his followers in its benefits (zebach).[11]   

Aims

The aim of this thesis is to weigh the merits of what I have termed the non-sacrificial and the sacrificial revisionist options.  So far as the traditionalist position is concerned, I accept the moral force of the revisionist critiques that have been made.  I do not intend to recapitulate in detail the various grounds on which the revisionists have found substitutionary theology, not only inadequate to expressing the truth of the Christian salvation event, but morally objectionable.  These arguments have already been rehearsed countless times in the theological literature.[12] 

                The question remains whether a revisionist approach should abandon the whole idea of sacrifice along with the substitutionary doctrine with which sacrifice has, almost universally, become implicated in Western Christianity.  The increasingly dominant view in contemporary theology, corresponding to what we have designated the non-sacrificial approach, seems to be that we should.  The present study seeks to weigh up the case for an alternative approach, advocated at various times in the past, but little discussed in the last two decades: that, rather than throwing the sacrificial baby out with the substitutionary bathwater, we should seek an alternative understanding of sacrifice that makes sense of the biblical text and contemporary Christian practice without infecting them with substitutionary notions – in short, an approach to the Christian salvation event that is both revisionist and sacrificial.

With most studies, the adoption of either a non-sacrificial or a sacrificial revisionist approach is merely presupposed – with little in the way of serious grounds for this presupposition being offered.  Given the preference of recent revisionist studies for some form of non-sacrificial approach, this has meant that even the possibility of a sacrificial revisionist position is frequently ignored, or, if acknowledged, quickly dismissed as self-evidently deluded (e.g. Daly, p. 6).  It is also the case, however, that, in the relatively small number of recent sacrificial revisionist studies, we find little, if any, space devoted to defending the choice of the sacrifical position over the non-sacrificial alternative. 

                Yet this fundamental ‘prejudice’ in favour of one option or the other effectively fixes the parameters of the investigation.  For a start, the pre-determined conceptualization of the relationship between sacrifice and salvation event is likely to have an impact on the conceptualization of generic sacrifice and of salvation event.   Where, for example, the salvation event is conceptualized independently of, or in isolation from sacrifice, there will be a tendency (see Chapter 2) for generic sacrifice to be perceived negatively, and for the salvation event to be characterized by avoidance of such negative features as might be associated with it.  Conversely, where the salvation event is situated within the domain of sacrifice, as a specifically Christian transform of a universal social phenomenon (see Chapter 3), wholly negative perceptions of sacrifice become impossible, and the Christian sacrificial tradition will be characterized as possessing certain features common to itself and non-Christian traditions.  There is a tendency, then, for the conceptualization of generic sacrifice and salvation event to be mutually defining, and largely conditioned, in turn, by the initial prejudice in favour of a non-sacrificial, anti-sacrificial or revisionist sacrificial position on the relationship of salvation event and generic sacrifice.  Ethnographic evidence of generic sacrifice that was independent of theological argument would help to counter-balance these effects and offer a useful independent source of corroboration (see below), but is often absent from the discussion.

In addition, the adoption of a non-sacrificial or sacrificial position pre-determines the methodology adopted and the overall shape that the enquiry assumes.  If generic sacrifice is irrelevant to the Christian salvation event, or else, relevant only to the extent of offering a metaphorical analogy for it – in the same way, for example, as the lawcourt or the slave market – then it will only be accorded the degree of attention accorded to those other Atonement metaphors.   The ‘metaphor of sacrifice’ will be dealt with in just one in a succession of chapters devoted to various metaphors for the salvation event.  If, as with the anti-sacrificial position, the salvation event and generic sacrifice are thought of as bound in an oppositional relation such that the one offers an alternative to the other, then the conceptualization of generic sacrifice will be all-important, and will proceed in tandem with the conceptualization of the salvation event.  But if, as with the sacrificial revisionist position, the Christian salvation event is considered a specific transform of a more generic phenomenon, then the development of a concept of generic sacrifice will form an indispensible preliminary to an account of the Christian salvation event.  In contrast to the anti-sacrificial position, the salvation event will not be definable through its oppositional relationship with generic sacrifice, and will constitute the second phase of a two-stage enquiry.  Thus sacrificial revisionist studies invariably devote several initial chapters to explicating genericsacrifice before passing on the question of where specifically Christian phenomena are to be situated within this more general category.

                 Given the initial presupposition of a position on sacrifice is of decisive importance for both the content and the shape of theological enquiry in relation to the Atonement, it is surprising how infrequently the grounds for adopting one position rather than another receive any serious discussion.  The present study is, I believe, the first to focus exclusively on this fundamental issue, and to attempt to replace theological ‘prejudice’ with a reasoned argument for a particular position that aims to settle the fundamental issue once and for all, and offer rational grounds for the future studies to pursue Atonement theology in one way rather than another.  The central question for this study, therefore, is how the relationship between Christian salvation event and generic sacrifice should be conceptualized:  whether Christian salvation event and sacrifice occupy, as it were, mutually exclusive zones (non-sacrificial), or zones sharing only a common hostile frontier (anti-sacrificial) – or whether Christian salvation event should be thought of as a specific transform of a more generic phenomenon of sacrifice – as it were, a species of the genus (sacrificial revisionist). 

Methods

If the goal of this study is to weigh up the case for a sacrificial revisionist as against a non-sacrificial position, the method followed will be to evaluate the implications of the respective positions for the conceptualization of the Christian salvation event and for the conceptualization of generic sacrifice (‘theological’ and ‘anthropological’ implications).  This requires us:  first, to identify general tendencies or biases in the conceptualization of the salvation event and of sacrifice that can be shown to arise specifically from the adoption of either a non-sacrificial or sacrificial revisionist position and to generate concepts of the salvation event and of generic sacrifice possessing certain generalizable characteristics; second, to determine the impact of the contrasting characterizations of salvation event and generic sacrifice arising from the adoption of these positions both on the attempt by Atonement studies to achieve theological consistency (the ‘theological’ impact), and on the degree of convergence or divergence we find between their characterizations of generic sacrifice and the characterization of generic sacrifice that we discover in studies emanating from adjacent disciplines (the ‘anthropological’ impact).    

As regards the theological impact of the non-sacrificial or sacrificial positions, the theological studies considered in Chapters 2 and 3 of our study remain to a considerable degree rooted (and see themselves as rooted) in the mainstream Christian religious tradition.  The task for this study, therefore, is to determine precisely where (if at all), and (if so) to what extent, the sacrificial/non-sacrificial bias of the particular revisionist theology lies at the root of tendencies in its conceptualization of the salvation event that are hard to accommodate within the view of Christianity to which the theology itself claims to adhere – where, in other words, those tendencies give rise to systematic inconsistencies which may or may not be acknowledged by the theologians themselves.  

As regards the anthropological impact, the theological studies discussed in subsequent chapters differ considerably in the prominence they accord to the notion of generic sacrifice.  Indeed, some of the studies associated with sacrifice as metaphor, for example – have little to say of an explicit nature about it.  Yet, if nowhere else, the impact of the adoption of a non-sacrificial or sacrificial position tends to show up in differences of attitude with regard to the ritual sacrifice of the Mosaic temple cult – with sacrificial revisionists tracing the pre-history of Christian Revelation back through Hebrew ritual sacrifice, and non-sacrificial revisionists tracing it instead through the line of the alleged critique of sacrifice by the OT prophets.  This is crucial as regards our investigation of the anthropological impact of the choice of position, because the Mosaic cult represents not only the point at which the Christian salvation event connects, diachronically, with its own past, but also – on account of the obvious parallels between the cultic rituals of the OT and those of other religious traditions – the point at which the salvation event connects, synchronically, with other religions.  Non–sacrificial revisionists, to the extent that they view the Christian salvation event as discontinuous with Mosaic ritual, characterize the salvation event in opposition to those practices of ritual sacrifice that the Mosaic cult appears to share with other religious traditions.  Conversely, sacrificial revisionists are more likely to entertain a favourable view of the ritual sacrifice per se – because they view that ritual, at least in the case of the Mosaic cult, as a vehicle for the communication of grace rather than an obstacle to a more spiritual and ethicized form of religion. 

Some tendencies in the characterization of generic sacrifice, therefore, are invariably discernible in Atonement studies – at minimum, in their interpretation of the Mosaic ritual sacrifice.  And where, from time to time, the attempt is made by these studies to situate the Christian salvation event in a comparative context, the practice of other religions will tend to be characterized in a manner that is consistent with the attitude to sacrifice expressed in relation to Hebrew cult.  In other studies, however, including those singled out below as representative of anti-sacrificial or revisionist sacrificial positions, the characterization of generic sacrifice is integral to the understanding of the Christian salvation event.  And in these studies, generic sacrifice assumes an importance that goes well beyond just the mirroring of features of OT ritual practice.  

In both cases, however, it is possible to distinguish contrasting tendencies in the conceptualization of generic sacrifice that are attributable to the non-sacrificial or sacrificial biases of the theology.  This study will seek to define these biases and the concepts of sacrifice that arise from them – and then to examine them in the light of tendencies in the conceptualization of generic sacrifice that we find in interpretations of non-Christian ethnography by scholars of religion and social anthropologists.  Our aim here will be to determine where and to what extent the tendencies in the conceptualization of sacrifice that we observe in the work of theologians and non-theologians differ, and whether any of the contrasting conceptualizations of sacrifice in theology shows a systematic disparity from conceptualizations of sacrifice that we find in non-theological studies.  A systematic disparity of that kind, whether in the case of non-sacrificial or sacrificial theology, would certainly raise questions, if not for the theology itself, then at least for the fundamental position adopted by the theology with regard to the relationship between salvation event and sacrifice.  In this way, I would suggest, the representation of sacrifice in adjacent (i.e. non-theological) disciplines can act as an independent check or control on the conceptualization of sacrifice in theology. 

To put the matter in more concrete terms, let us, for the sake of argument, suppose it to be the case that the Christian salvation bears no relation – or an oppositional relation – to generic sacrifice (as supposed by non-sacrificial positions).  In that case, to proceed, like sacrificial revisionist theology, on the assumption that the Christian salvation event constituted a form of sacrifice could be expected to produce two kinds of distortion.  On the one hand, it would result in the importation of incongruent religious notions that the theologian would have difficulty accommodating within a mainstream Christian theology; on the other, it would generate ethnocentric and christianizing distortions in the theological understandings of generic sacrifice.  Now let us suppose the opposite to be the case: namely, that the Christian salvation event constitutes a species of generic sacrifice (as is assumed by the sacrificial revisionist approach).  In that case, to proceed, like non-sacrificial theology, on the assumption that the Christian salvation event bore no relation – or else an oppositional relation – to sacrifice would also produce distortions: on the one hand, it could be expected to de-emphasize those aspects of sacrifice in the Christian salvation event that find themselves replicated in the sacrifice of other religions; on the other, it would generate a reductive and impoverished understanding of generic sacrifice.  Such distortions (whether on the part of non-sacrificial or sacrificial theology) should, in principle, be discernible, both in the difficulties that theologians experience in accommodating their account of the salvation event, without inconsistency, within the bounds of what they see as orthodox doctrine: and, on the other, in the incompatibility of their characterizations of generic sacrifice with the realites that we observe in the case of other (non-Christian) religions.

                Some degree of calibration against accounts of sacrifice in adjacent disciplines appears all the more desirable when we take into account certain important factors.  First, there is the tendency, already observed, for theological characterizations of generic sacrifice to be determined by an identificatory (sacrificial revisionist) – or, more frequently, oppositional (non-sacrificial) – relationship to the Christian salvation event rather than on the basis of independent ethnographic evidence.  This effectively lends a decisive importance to the choice of position at the outset (or indeed before the outset) of the study, as we have seen.   

Where, as often, the choice of an oppositional characterization of the relationship of sacrifice and salvation event is motivated by a radical rejection of the concept of substitutionary Atonement (partly no doubt on account of the characterization of sacrifice as substitutionary), this tends to result in the association of generic sacrifice with features of the substitutionary concept to which the revisionist version of the salvation event is opposed.  It is, of course, far easier to assume a substitutionary notion of generic sacrifice and reject it out of hand than to retain a notion of generic sacrifice and re-interpret it in a non-substitutionary manner – especially as the theologian’s primary interest is likely to be in the interpretation of the Christian salvation event itself rather than its implications for our understanding of generic sacrifice.  And, to this extent, it could be argued that the revisionist impulse itself is conducive to a non-sacrificial, rather than a sacrificial, bias.  A very conscientious determination is needed not to lose sight of the wider anthropological implications of theological positions in order to counteract this effect. 

The frequent association by non-sacrificial theology of generic sacrifice with features of the substitutionary sacrifice of traditionalist theology can, in turn, lead to a characterization of both salvation event and generic sacrifice in relation to features of the traditionalist theological understanding which the theologian finds objectionable.  So, for example, to the extent that the traditionalist understanding is perceived to be mired in a transactionalist view of the human:divine relationship, non-sacrificial understandings tend to characterize the Christian salvation event as a response to pagan transactionalism.  Such oppositional characterizations, even if they are not altogether unfounded, risk over-emphasizing the feature they see as distinguishing the proper understanding of the salvation event from the sacrifice of traditional theology, at the expense of other features which have not been a bone of contention between traditionalist and revisionist theology.  Here, I would argue, the greater depth of perspective on sacrifice offered by a more comparative anthropological perspective will be helpful in disengaging the discussion of salvation event and sacrifice from an overly polemical preoccupation with the inadequacies of the traditionalist position.

Possible  objections to the methology proposed

See Appendix A

 

Structure of this study

The goal and the method set out above impose the following structure on our study.  I identify those features of representative theological studies that derive from the adoption of either a non-sacrificial (Chapter 2), or sacrificial revisionist (Chapter 3) approach to the relation of Christian salvation event to sacrifice.  I distinguish three subcategories of the non-sacrificial approach:  sacrifice as metaphor; an anti-sacrificial approach based on Girardian theory; an anti-sacrificial approach based on gift theory.  In the case of each category and subcategory, I consider the implications of adopting that particular approach for its shaping of the conceptualization, first of salvation event, then of generic sacrifice.  The outcome of this analysis will be a set of characteristics in respect to which a non-sacrificial can be opposed to a sacrificial one as regards its theology and its anthropology.

                The following two chapters (Four and Five) relate exclusively to the anthropological implications of the adoption of either the non-sacrificial or the sacrificial revisionist approach.  They consider ethnographic evidence of sacrifice, first in human cultures more generally (Chapter 4), then in confessional religions such as Theravada Buddhism and Islam, in respect to the set of characteristics elaborated in Chapters Two and Three.  This ethnographic evidence is drawn from non-theological studies in the adjacent disciplinary areas of the study of religions and social anthropology.

                The final chapter (Six) returns to the conceptualization of generic sacrifice by theologians in the light of the understanding of generic sacrifice that emerges in Chapters Four and Five, with a view to determining whether tendencies in the conceptualization of generic sacrifice characteristic of non-sacrificial theologies or those characteristic of sacrificial revisionist theologies are more in conformity with the picture of generic sacrifice deriving from adjacent disciplines.

Part I – sacrifice in theology

2 NON-SACRIFICIAL REVISIONIST THEOLOGIES

2.1 The sacrifice as metaphor position

This chapter considers the main strands of contemporary non-sacrificial thinking, with a view to analysing their consequences for the way we conceptualize both the salvation event and generic sacrifice. 

We begin with sacrifice as metaphor – the subcategory of non-sacrificial theology which justifies conceptualizing the salvation event independently of sacrifice by the systematic interpretation of the sacrificial language traditionally applied to the salvation event as metaphor.  According to the classic definitions, metaphor involves the description of one thing (tenor/focus) in terms of another (vehicle/frame).[13]  The possibility of metaphor, therefore, implies a separation between the referents of the terms that metaphor brings into relation.  In the revisionist application of metaphor to theunderstanding of NT sacrifice, the separation implied is between the ritual sacrifice of the OT and the salvation event.  The metaphorical understanding of that relation represents a radical shift as compared with the traditional understanding of the relation as typological.  The latter involves a connection between the referents of two terms, ‘the first of which signifies not only iself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first’. [14]  The possibility of a typological relation, then, implies, not a separation, but a degree of ontological participation between the referents of the two terms.  In other words, a typological relation exists independently of our awareness of it (as the result of the fundamental interconnectedness of reality); whereas metaphor is a kind of relation constituted intersubjectively in human discourse. 

This important distinction is often blurred by the lax application of the term metaphor by both traditionalists and revisionists to any non-literal language – even language that is evidently typological.  A result of this has been the concealment of the shift that I want to argue has taken place in Atonement theology to a properly metaphorical understanding of NT language of sacrifice.  The revisionist studies that I would classify as belonging in the sacrifice as metaphor category frequently fail to offer an adequate theoretical reflection on their use of the concept of metaphor, and what might differentiate it from the use of the concept in earlier studies.  (Gunton’s study constitutes a rare exception (pp. 27-52)).  Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that revisionist theologians are actively availing themselves of this conceptual ambiguity in order to be able to represent their own revisionist understandings of NT language as in line with theological tradition.  Certainly, it is rarely acknowledged that the adoption of a metaphorical interpretation of the sacrificial language of the NT could be anything less than self-evident – even in the exegisis of those cases of sacrificial language that are patently typological, such as in Hebrews.[15]

                This situation poses considerable challenges for our analysis.  It is hard to define as a distinctive theological ‘position’ an approach to the interpretation of NT language that so many theologians appear to see as the only one available.  The task of demonstrating the existence of fundamental discrepancies between that position and what others, in earlier times, have sought to express in the same language, falls to the disputatious critic who wishes, in defiance of the seeming consensus, to make such distinctions.  Inevitably, the process of assigning studies to one ‘position’ or the other, on the basis of a scheme of classification that appears to proceed out of the head of the critic, rather than having been shared between the critic and the authors of the studies themselves, risks appearing arbitrary and needlessly contentious.   

                It is for these reasons that I propose in what follows to approach the definition of sacrifice as metaphor by way of scholarly investigations of question of the role of metaphor in religious language more generally.  For we find amongst philosophers of of religious language – as we do not among the theologians of Atonement – a recognition of the vastly accrued importance of the concept of metaphor in contemporary thinking, and an interest in investigating its implications.  We also find some acknowledgment of alternative conceptual frames through which the characteristic functions of religious language have sometimes been understood, such as symbol and analogy.  These studies can be shown in some cases to have exercised a direct influence on Atonement theology, and are certainly representative of the range of understandings of metaphor that we find there.  For the purposes of our enquiry, therefore, these general investigations of the question of metaphor will serve to supply the deficiency of methodological reflections in the literature of Atonement.  The implications of the properly metaphorical interpretation of religious language for the understanding of sacrifice will emerge in the course of this preliminary phase of our investigation – as will a range of potential positions on metaphor in religious language.  Our interlocutors at this point will be Sallie McFague, Janet Soskice,[16] and Colin Gunton.   I shall then go on to show how the respective positions of McFague and Soskice, when transposed into the realm of Atonement theology, account for the range of theological possibilities that we see developed in Atonement studies. 

There is a second motive for our engagement with the philosophy of religious language, however.  This lies in the recognition on the part of these authors that metaphor is not the only available conceptual frame within which to make sense of religious language.  The acknowledgement of certain limitations on the utility of metaphorical frame goes along with occasional allusions to an alternative in the shape of the symbol.  The particular form of religious language that, for both McFague and Soskice, happens to raise such issues, and the form of language in relation to which those issues go on to be discussed, happens to be the language of eucharistic ritual as exemplified in the words of institution: ‘This is my body’ (McFague, p. 12; Soskice, p. 90).                 

That an alternative to metaphor should be evoked in connection with the Eucharist is evidently very significant for the purposes of the present study.  After all, the Lord’s Supper, as recounted by the Gospels, conveys much of what the biblical Christ has to communicate to his disciples about the significance of the salvation event (if, that is, we follow those theologians who see it as inaugurating the eucharistic ritual); while the Eucharist, as enacted by the Church, expresses what it means for the Church to participate in that event.  Eucharistic language, therefore, has as much likelihood as any to be sacrificial.  And if that language demands to be construed symbolically, this is certainly relevant to the interpretation of sacrificial language in general.  The case that Soskice and McFague make for the metaphorical interpretation of that language, therefore, has the utmost relevance for our evaluation of the arguments that can be made for adopting either a metaphorical or symbolic frame in relation to sacrifice.

Background

Religious language as metaphor

McFague and Soskice both belong in the tradition of those who have sought to offer a defence of metaphorical language against the claim of Logical Positivists and their successors that it is cognitively empty.  The stakes of such a debate greatly exceed theology; but the interest of McFague and Soskice stems from the fact that language about God is necessarily metaphorical, and that the adherents of Logical Positivism are therefore among the number of those who are critical of its truth value.  In response to such philosophical interlocutors McFague and Soskice argue that metaphor, far from being just another way of saying what could be said literally, or else conveying a merely emotive meaning, can be a unique cognitive vehicle ‘enabling one to say things that can be said in no other way’ (Soskice, p. 24).       

For all this common ground between them, however, it is actually a very different position on metaphorical language that is being defended in each case.   Both positions deserve attention as representative of approaches to metaphor that have had their influence on Atonement theology.

With McFague, the defence of metaphorical, as against literal, language coincides with the prioritization of ‘live’ metaphor over univocal meaning.  By live metaphor I mean the kind of language that has generally been at the core of the metaphor debate: namely, innovative juxtapositions (e.g. ‘knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care’) that hold together normally discrete ideas (‘sleeve’ and ‘care’) in order to jolt us into the apprehension of hitherto unapprehended realities.  There is a distinction between this literary form of metaphor and the banal form represented in everyday expressions such as ‘the leg of a table’ or ‘the ship of state’, highlighted by the findings of Lakoff and Johnson (L&J),[17] who argue that much of what we think of as literal language is actually dead metaphor.  ‘Live’ metaphor’ is equivocal.  In the words of McFague (p. 13), ‘it contains the whisper “it is and it is not”’.  For example, the understanding that ‘care’ is a ‘ravelled sleeve’, for example, comes simultaneously with the apprehension that, in a literal, it is not.  ‘Dead’ metaphor, on the other hand, is univocal – like literal language.     

 The privileging of live metaphor over the usage fixed by tradition happens to fit well with McFague’s concern as a feminist theologian to sanction a non-traditional characterization of the Godhead in terms of feminine attributes.  But, more importantly, it also reflects a tendency common to both recent Atonement theologians and contributions to the wider metaphor debate towards the valorization of equivocal over univocal language.  Along with this emphasis there goes the defence of metaphor on grounds of its heuristic value.  The plurality of metaphorical meanings suggests an openness to potential determinations, which theologians see as a point of comparison between the theological and the scientific, or literary, process; whereas the univocality of literalism points to a hegemonic pretention to absolute truth masking the mere ossification of established usage.  Hence McFague favours the proliferation of metaphors on the grounds of a modesty in respect to truth claims ‘essential both to avoid idolatry and to attempt to express the richness and variety of the divine human relationship’ (p. 20).

This prioritization of equivocality and heuristic processes is not a feature of every theory of religious metaphor – as is evident from the other influential position that we have referred to – that of Soskice and Gunton.  Soskice’s primary concern is (to a far greater extent than McFague’s) to defend religious language – and, in some degree ordinary language – against its Positivist detractors.  This does not require the prioritization of one kind of religious language over another; even a concept of metaphor as broad as L&J’s would not invalidate her thesis.  Given, however, her assumption that religious language is metaphorical, her defence of it requires her to demonstrate that metaphorical language has the capacity for cognitive content.  Any theory, she argues, must confront the problem of evaluating the ‘appropriateness’ of metaphors.  And the issue of appropriateness, in turn, ‘holds concealed’ that of ‘reality depiction’ (p. 104). Earlier attempts by Frederick Ferré and Ian Ramsay to defend the cognitive content of theistic language (pp. 104-5) fall short, according to Soskice, because they are unable to specify the referent of their language (i.e. God) without recourse to further metaphors.  Scientists, whose conceptualizations are frequently held up as a parallel for metaphorical theology, are able to calibrate the predictions of their models against mathematical equations and the results of scientific experiment.  But the kind of experience to which theologians refer offers no such independent source of corroboration.   At some point, Soskice argues, theologians inevitably fall back on the assessment of metaphors in terms of their valuational significance as opposed to their truth value. 

Soskice’s own answer to this theological aporia is what she terms a realist approach to religious language, and is expounded in the final two chapters of her book (pp. 118-61). Its broad lines are as follows.  Our ‘referential activity’ – in sphere of religious language as elsewhere – is both ultimately grounded in experience, and mediated through a ‘community of interest’ or ‘community of investigation’.  This community will be united by agreement on fundamental presuppositions as to what will count as explanation or evidence of experience.  Language is forged within that community to reflect those presuppositions.  Thus, the reference of a biogeneticist, let us say, to ‘inheritance’ will rely on experimental evidence; yet, it is the characteristic assumptions of the community of bio-geneticists that will determine how ‘inheritance’ in this context is to be understood – i.e. as a biological process, and not a legal procedure.  In the same way, a religious community will be united on certain assumptions about, for example, what constitutes a mystical experience.  The language that is applied to supposed instances of experience (‘mystical marriage’ etc.) will reflect those shared presuppositions as well as individual experience.

Gunton criticizes Soskice’s theory as tending towards a sceptical Wittgensteinianism that sees the operation of our religious language as no more than the imposition of ‘mental constructs upon an essentially unknown world’ (p. 33).  This is unfair.  On the existence of a relation between ‘world’ and ‘mental constructs’, there is little to differentiate Soskice’s position from Gunton’s.  However, they explicate that relation in different ways.  Gunton evokes the thought of Coleridge and Eberhard Jüngel on the mysterious imbrication of ‘Word’ and ‘World’ (Gunton, pp. 32-36).  Soskice accounts for the relation through a notion of community of interest/investigation that draws on Hilary Putnam’s thesis that ‘it is speakers rather than words that refer’ (pp. 149-50).  Her attention to the social mediation of religious experience, suggests, as compared with Gunton’s model, additional considerations arising in relation to the collective aspect of human reality – a dimension that is evidently important, but to which Gunton pays no attention.     

Neither Soskice not Gunton identifies metaphor with equivocality, in the way McFague does.  With Gunton, however, the notion of a socially unmediated reciprocal ‘conversation’ of World and Word represents a constant bias towards literary concepts of metaphor.  Soskice’s insistence on social and linguistic mediation tends more to the prosaic, and anchors religious language securely within univocality.  Underlying the definition of metaphor is the issue of religious tradition.  Both authors show some bias in favour of continuity and tradition.  But Soskice’s insistence on the indispensable mediatory role in referential activity of community over time, and the uses of language that it sanctions, inevitably imparts to her understanding of the operation of religious language a stronger bias towards tradition than we find in Gunton.  If our reference is authenticated by a community of interest/investigation constituted over time, as well as by the experience itself, then any major disruption of that community will inevitably bring some degradation of the capacity for reference.  It follows that such a theory has a tendency to consecrate traditional forms of language.   As such it tends in precisely the opposite direction to McFague’s.

Limitations of a metaphorical understanding of religious language

I shall now give some brief attention to that second point of interest in the work of McFague and Soskice to which I alluded in my introductory comments – namely, their allusion to the limitations of a metaphorical account of religious language, and their discussion of the language of the Eucharist in that context. 

With McFague, an allusion to the limitations of metaphor occasions the reference to eucharistic language.  The relevant passage occurs at the outset of her study, and defines McFague’s understanding of metaphor in relation to an alternative way of meaning that she labels symbolic (p. 6; pp. 11-13).  Whereas the metaphorical relation ‘always contains the whisper “it is and is not”’, the symbolic relation, she argues, is one of ontological participation.  Metaphoric relations involve entities which are understood to be, in some sense, discrete, and whose entry into relation occurs only through a purely subjective thought-event such as is exemplified by the discourse of the poet;  symbolic relations presuppose a real-world interconnectedness (p. 12: ‘symbolic participationism’) that pre-exists any subjective intervention on the part of a human consciousness – ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’ (p. 6).  At this point eucharistic language enters her argument in the shape of the words of institution.  The formulation – ‘this (bread) is my body’ – is, she claims, the ‘most extreme example’ of symbolic language (p. 11).  Curiously, in view of the ongoing importance of the Eucharist within Christian practice, McFague then relegates the symbolic relation to the status of a relic of a bygone age – on the grounds that it presupposes a ‘sacramental universe’ no longer capable of speaking to today’s world.  She does not reject its alternative way of meaning as inadequate to the truth of the salvation event, but considers it obsolescent.  Theological experience formerly understood in symbolic terms must, she argues, be translated into metaphorical language – or else ‘the future for religious language is grim’ (p. 12). 

                For Soskice, the line between metaphor and symbol runs between what is – and what is not – ‘purely verbal’ (p. 90).  Here again, as in McFague’s study, the issue of the delimitation of the metaphoric and the symbolic arises along with the discussion of the words of institution (p. 90), though it is unclear, in this case, which occasions the other.  ‘This is my body’ is metaphorical, Soskice affirms, in much the same sense as the statement: ‘there is a strong electric current flowing through the wire’.  In both cases, the metaphoricity of the speech act is beyond question, but is not particularly important for its ‘work’, which she implies, is primarily symbolic.  The work of meaning, we might therefore conclude, may be twofold, consisting in an element that is properly verbal – that of metaphor itself – and an element that is primarily symbolic, though expressed through metaphor.  The language of the Eucharist is presumably an instance of the latter element. The other ‘work of meaning’, which has primacy in this case – that of symbol – Soskice claims to fall beyond the scope of her study.  This might appear to challenge the importance of metaphorical language to religious meaning.  At all events, it would suggest that, where sacrifice is concerned, there is a case for extending the scope of our enquiry beyond the realm of the linguistic and the metaphorical.  And this, given the ubiquity of sacrificial reference in the NT, would seem, pace Gunton, to bring into question the value of metaphor as a means of appropriating the meanings of the salvation event. 

The possibility raised by McFague that language could itself do symbolic work – the possibility, in other words, of collapsing the distinction between word and act – is systematically ignored by Soskice.  Yet it is precisely this alternative construction of the process of ritual meaning that we find almost universally deployed in discussions of ritual language – including the words of institution – by social anthropologists.  In what follows I shall draw on some well-known studies drawing on social anthropology which discuss the Eucharist in the course of their analyses:  Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols; Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory; Douglas Davies, Anthropology and Theology (A&T).[18]  All these works offer an interpretation of religious language that is symbolic in a sense that is hard to reconcile with the metaphorical.  For a start, they point to a marked disinclination, on their own part and on the part of their sources, to draw Soskice’s sharp distinction between word and act, language and ritual.  They speak of verbal actions (i.e. words that effect some change); but there is no indication in what they say, that the work of meaning, in assuming a verbalized form, thereby alters its character, or, conversely, that the verbal aspect of ritual actions distinguishes itself from the non-verbal in a way that would make it reasonable for the interpreter to treat words and actions independently. Quite the contrary, Davies speaks of ritual action, including the Eucharist, in terms of ‘knowing by eating’, alluding to Cranmers’ evocative phrase, ‘stomach of the heart’; ‘alimentary knowledge’ implies ‘verbal food’ and vice versa. (A&T, pp. 82-83)  This may explain why the terminology of metaphor is relatively infrequent in ethnographic studies, while some anthropologists, like Pierre Bourdieu and Valerio Valeri, conscientiously eschew it (Bell, p.112).   

The work of symbolic meaning is performative in the social and political domain.  It brings to effect the changes it describes, whether changes in the realities themselves or our perception of them – a distinction that would in any case often be hard to maintain.  Either way, we are speaking of a changing state of affairs in human relationships – as when the utterance of the words ‘I will’ in the course of the marriage service causes a transformation in the social world of the bride and groom and their families, or the pronouncement ‘The body of Christ’ contributes to effecting the re-creation of Christ’s ecclesial body in the here and now.  In both cases this is religious language itself doing symbolic work rather than a verbal metaphor associated with a non-verbal symbolism. 

                 But what does the capacity to bring about such effects imply about the nature of the relation of symbol and symbolized?  Bell sets out, on the basis of her sources, a detailed account of the internal structure of the symbolic relation that contrasts illuminatingly with accounts of the structure of the metaphoric relation that we find in McFague and Soskice. That structure is described as a circular one through which actions, including verbal actions, project ‘organizing schemes’ on the space-time environment, and then re-absorb those schemes as the nature of reality itself.  The two poles of physical act and environment – symbol and symbolized – become ‘homologized spheres’, which are ‘orchestrated (or ‘confused’ or ‘collapsed’) so as to produce an experience of their basic identity or coherence’.  There are two points to make here in relation to our discussion of metaphor.  The first is the extent to which this anthropological understanding of symbol accords with McFague’s characterization of the symbolic relation, based primarily, I suspect, on her understanding of the mediaeval concept of analogy.  The second is the way in which it appears to invert the relational structure that McFague describes for metaphor.  In place of the ‘tensive’ relation that maintains the distinction of the two poles of the relation, accompanying the assertion that something ‘is’ with the whisper that it ‘is not’, we have, in the case of the symbol, collapse, confusion or homologization of the poles with a view to producing an experience of ‘basic identity’ or ‘coherence’. 

                How well, then, does this account of symbol fit the case of the words of institution, where these are discussed by our authors (Douglas: p. 11; Bell: pp. 112-3; Davies, pp. 82-85)?  

As regards the general characterization the symbolic relation in terms of its imbrication of word and act, its performative nature, and its operation within the domain of the social, the language of the Eucharist bears this out remarkably well. The deictic character of the proposition: ‘This is my body’ itself suggests a fusing of word and gesture.  The eucharistic action in which this proposition has its place, is performative in the sense that it accomplishes and re-accomplishes the union of God’s people – which evidently constitutes a transformation within the realm of the social.

But, to a striking degree, the eucharistic action taken as a whole also exemplifies the internal structure of the symbolic relation as that is described by Bell.  The ‘physical and verbal act’ of distribution and ingestion of the bread projects onto the ‘space-time environment’ of the assembly of a representative crowd within Church space the ‘schema’ of the body of Christ.  The naturalization of that schema comes about with the homologization of the two spheres: the shared bread and the participation in the social body of the Church.  ‘We are one body’, states the Anglican liturgy, ‘because we all share in the one bread’.  It is not that the assembled faithful resemble a body, or are prompted by this paradoxical formulation to experience participation in a social group as embodiedness, or embodiedness as participation in a social group (which would be the implication of a relation that was metaphorical); the expression ‘body of Christ’ has no other meaning than the social participation (Church) which it symbolizes.  The body of Christ, quite simply, is the Church, without any contained whisper of an ‘is not’.

The concept of metaphor in Paul Ricoeur

See Appendix B

The impact of sacrifice as metaphor on conceptualization of the salvation event

In this and the following sections I shall turn to some representative instances of Atonement theology (especially, Green and Baker, Boersma, Gunton, Fee[19], O’Collins and Goldingay[20]) in order to consider the implications for our concept of the salvation event and of sacrifice of adopting the position that Christian sacrifice is a metaphor, whether in the strong – i.e. exclusively ‘live’ and ‘heuristic’ sense – reflected in the work McFague, or in the broader and more inclusive sense represented by Soskice’s realism.  Common to all versions of the sacrifice as metaphor position is the decision to explicate the how of Christian Atonement through a multiplicity of explanatory schemata on the grounds that no single schema could ever constitute the whole truth of the salvation event.  The latter conviction, along with the pluralistic approach that it underpins, demands closer investigation than it has hitherto received, even in the theological studies mentioned above, which are those that come closest to subjecting the question to any theoretical examination.

The strong form of sacrifice as metaphor

According to the strong version of the position, metaphor is identified with the equivocal use language, and thus opposed to language that is univocal.  This definition results in a characterization of the explanatory schemata applied to the salvation event as heuristic – allegedly in the much the same sense as models in scientific or literary discourse.  By heuristic is meant the capacity, within these areas of discourse, for schemata, through their ‘tensive’ association in metaphor, to point beyond their individual and literal meanings to an idea that could not otherwise be captured in language.  The advocacy of a metaphorical and pluralistic approach to the explanation of the salvation event sometimes also includes the claim to avoid the risk of discursal ‘hegemonism’ characteristic of literalist and univocal explanations.  Thus in the theological context, the familiar postmodern suspicion of truth claims that seem to overreach the limits imposed by essentially situational character of all discourse finds itself reinforced by a recognition of the ineffability of ultimate reality that disallows any attempt to capture the truth univocally.  

The problem with this version of metaphorical Atonement theology is, fundamentally, that it fails to live up to its claim to be heuristic.  It tends to be forgotten that the heuristic claims of metaphorical schemata depend on the tensive association by which they point beyond their individual and literal meanings to a new and deeper meaning at which that tension is resolved.  The alliance of heuristic claims with postmodern anti-hegemonism tends to obscure the fact that any heuristic process involves the emergence of schemata of increasing explanatory power, and, to that extent, a totalizing movement towards a unified perspective on whatever constitutes the matter of investigation.  When we turn to the studies of such as those of Green and Baker or Boersma – it swiftly becomes apparent that this is simply not how their multiple schemata actually function.  There is, in practice, no tensive association, but, at best, a foregrounding of common themes (Boersma pp. 107-14), and, at worst, a juxtaposition of multiple, sometimes contradictory, views.  At all events, nothing that would point in the direction of a reality inexpressible in literal language.  Ultimately, the very structure of these studies, reflecting their characteristic espousal of multiplicity, militates against the emergence of an over-arching and unifying perspective. 

If ‘metaphors’ of Atonement theology do not, in fact, function like scientific or literary metaphors, to treat them as though they did may have detrimental consequences.  The argument that Soskice directs against Ramsay and Ferré applies also to Atonement theology: namely, that it cannot specify its referent without recourse to further metaphor (unlike scientific metaphors, for example).  It follows that to foreground the metaphoricity of Atonement language by multiplying metaphors (as proposed by McFague, Green and Baker or Boersma) is effectively to force on our attention the potential groundlessness – or, even, ungroundability – of Atonement metaphor, and hence to raise a question mark over the very existence of the mechanism of Atonement which the various schemata are invoked to explain. 

This de-actualizing impact of the ‘strong’ version of metaphorical theology – and the detrimental impact of its transference into Atonement studies – happens to be predicted by Soskice’s realist theory.  Drawing on Putnam, it will be remembered, she defends a theory of reference according to which the existence of a ‘community of interest/investigation’ and its possession of a ‘shared descriptive vocabulary’ and shared traditions of ‘conviction’ plays an indispensable role in mediating religious experience – and, indeed, conditions that experience to the point that it can no longer be isolated from the tradition in which it is embedded.  This means that capacity for reference – which, for Soskice, clearly involves our conviction of the actuality of the referent – depends not only upon the truth of experience but on the consensus of a common tradition.  But if Soskice is right about this, the converse also holds true.  If the capacity for reference, as she claims, depends on the community of a shared tradition and the relative consistency of its descriptive vocabulary, it follows that the desolidarization of the community and the fragmenting of its vocabulary necessarily result in the degradation of its capacity for reference.   Where there is no longer a single voice with which the community claims to speak, nor any single perspective from which the truth may be approached, the conviction that its members have of the actuality of the experiential referent will tend to fade.  This, I would argue, is precisely what occurs where theology entertains multiple and fragmented accounts of the salvation event.  Where the very possibility of ‘making sense’ is denied (and, after all, ‘making sense’ implies, as we have seen, a unifying and totalizing perspective earnestly repudiated by McFague), we end up forfeiting the conviction of there being any sense to be made.  So Green and Baker’s recommendation for theologians to approach the ‘mystery’ of Atonement via a multiplicity of explanatory schemata is – at least, on Soskice’s understanding – ill-advised.  It will result, not in the hallowing of the divine mystery, but the hollowing of our theological language.

The weak form of sacrifice as metaphor

So we turn now to the ‘weak’ version of sacrifice as metaphor, which is by far the commoner version of the position.  Nevertheless, it has been necessary to dedicate some space to the strong version, if for no other reason because, in practice, the two versions often merge into each other.  Because the theology of sacrifice as metaphor rarely defines its terms, its concept of metaphor rarely displays much consistency, but shifts constantly in order to reflect the exigences of the specific context in which it is deployed.  Even where a strong version of sacrifice as metaphor is explicitly disavowed in one context – it may reassert itself in another.

                So what then of the weaker form of metaphorical Atonement theology?  In what precisely does it consist?  Here explanatory schemata are not claimed to have a heuristic function, nor is there any pretention to the postmodern suspicion of hegemonism.  What we are left with is the same settled commitment as in the stronger version of sacrifice as metaphor to approaching the salvation event through a multiplicity of explanatory schemata rather than a single integrated account – a commitment based, if not on the conviction that the explanatory schemata are metaphorical, then at least, on the rejection in principle of the idea that any single – i.e. integrated – schema could capture the ‘reality’ of the referent.  What defines the weak version of this position in relation to the strong version is the fact that metaphor is no longer equated (at least explicitly) with live metaphor, or univocal language, but is defined (at least by implication) in such a way as to accommodate the broader definition of metaphor we find in Soskice or Lakoff and Johnston, which, as we have seen, includes both live and dead varieties, and does not mark the distinction between equivocal and univocal language.  This broad definition accords with the eclipse of the emphasis that we find in the strong version on the heuristic function of theological metaphor.

                The problem with this version of the Atonement as metaphor position is that, on the broader definition according to which metaphor equates with practically all language, it is no longer clear what could be the epistemic gain of the characterization of schemata as metaphorical, or what basis it could possibly provide for the principled rejection of a unifying explanatory scheme in favour of multiple schemata  – other than through re-introducing, underhand, a notion of the heuristic function of metaphor that cannot be defended on a theoretical level.  As far as Soskice is concerned, of course, that basis is clear: metaphor constitutes a dimension of ordinary language (including religious language) that opposes it to logical languages or mathematics.  In her defence of metaphor, therefore, is vested the claim that ordinary language can give access to the truth.  But, with the Atonement theologians, it is hard to see what is at stake in the claim that their discourse is necessarily ‘metaphorical’.  After all – if we accept Soskice’s broader definition of metaphor as applying, effectively, to all ordinary language – how could it not be?  So what is really at issue in the distinction that these theologians make between metaphorical and non-metaphorical – when, for example, traditionalist accounts are accused of being (in the words of one of the few theologians to address the specific issue of sacrifice as metaphor) ‘innately resistant to seeing (the schema of) justification as metaphor at all’? (Fee, p. 62)  If the distinction between metaphorical and non-metaphorical language is to no purpose, why should theologies of Atonement stress the metaphoricity of their own discourse?  The deployment of the terminology of metaphor in this context would seem to serve only to register an objection to traditionalist theology on the grounds of its attachment to a particular schema.  Consistent with such an interpretation would be the fact that O’Collins, who claims, in a rare methodological footnote, to follow Soskice in his understanding of religious language (pp. 244-5), abandons metaphorical terminology entirely in seeming consistency with that position, with no lessening of commitment to a non-univocal approach, preferring to speak, instead, of ‘verbal’ and ‘visual images’.  But if the real problem with a non-metaphorical approach is its ‘unilateral privileging’ (p. 167) of one schema, then one needs to state one’s grounds for objecting to ‘unilateral privileging’.  And if we want to avoid circular arguments, such an objection must consist in something more than the claim that it fails to take account of the metaphorical nature of religious language.

Defence of a strong form of sacrifice as metaphor on the basis of NT usage

We shall return to the real nature of this objection in a moment.  But first, we need to consider one last possible argument for a limited version of the strong form of sacrifice as metaphor that sometimes emerges where this theology becomes involved in the interpretation of the biblical language of Atonement.  It runs as follows.

There are cases of metaphorical language in Scripture – especially St Paul – that are equivocal and heuristic, and thus genuinely metaphorical in the strong sense.  Traditionalist theologians, it is argued, have unfortunately interpreted these metaphorical schemata as though they were literal – and, as a result, have given rise to a theology that is based on a literalizing misinterpretation. 

This seems a reasonable argument.  There most certainly are instances of non-literal language in St Paul that have been subjected by theologians to interpretations that pay scant regard to their non-literal character (see O’Collins, p. 152), and it is natural to suppose that any genuinely equivocal or heuristic language would probably have suffered the same treatment.  The important thing to establish, then, becomes whether Paul’s usage is genuinely metaphorical in the strong sense.  Such metaphoricity might be a feature either of St Paul’s combining of schemata – in which case we would expect to discover in the NT texts McFague’s ‘tensive association’ of metaphors pointing beyond themselves to some further and otherwise unspecifiable reality: or it might be a feature of the individual schema – in which case we would find it in the tensive association between the ‘image’ (i.e. ‘redemption’, ‘justification’, ‘sacrifice’, etc.) and that to which it is applied. 

Considerations of space do not allow us to discuss every NT passage in which the nature of metaphor could be considered an issue.  In general, however, theological discussion has tended to focus upon the core schemata of ‘justification’, ‘redemption’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘reconciliation’.  Romans 3.24-5 (which contains all these elements) has been a long-established crux:

They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of Atonement by his blood, effective through faith. 

Let us, for brevity’s sake, focus in this passage on the pairing of schemata which would appear to present the greatest contrast, and hence strongest likelihood of McFague’s ‘associative tension’.  This would certainly be the pairing of, either ‘redemption’ or ‘justification’, on the one hand, and of ‘sacrifice’ (including ‘expiation’), on the other.  Is there a tensive association between these schemata such that St Paul’s use of language could reasonably be described as metaphorical in the heuristic sense?   Surely, the answer (even in respect to this most contrasted of pairings) has to be ‘No’ – for the simple reason that the notions of ‘redemption’ and ‘sacrifice’ already belong to each other, and have always done so.  As Gunton himself recognizes, citing John Rogerson: ‘”ultimately, all sacrifices in the Old Testament depend for their context upon the story of God’s deliverance of his people from Egypt at the Exodus” (Rogerson 1980 p.57)’ (Gunton, p. 121).  To which Gunton could have added that the story of God’s deliverance at the Exodus depends, in turn, for its ritual evocation upon the occasion of sacrifices – or, at all events, supplies their mythological aetiology (Exodus 12.26-7; 13.14-6).  In short, redemption and sacrifice stand as complementary aspects of a single well-established mytheme that may have constituted the framework of many a Jewish ‘salvation event’ before it became the basis for the Christian one.  The association of ‘redemption’ and ‘sacrifice’ can scarcely, therefore, be described as tensive.   A similar argumentation can be applied to most of the other thematic juxtapositions that have sometimes been proposed as evidence for the metaphoricity of St Paul’s discourse.  Of course, literary metaphor occurs in St Paul’s writings; but, in regard to his overall themes, St Paul remains within a religious tradition as defined by Soskice; he is not juxtaposing previously unrelated paradigms, like a contemporary poet or scientist. 

                This brings us to the further question whether the individual schemata of ‘redemption’ and ‘sacrifice’ are themselves helpfully described in respect to Paul’s usage as metaphorical in the heuristic sense.  Again, the answer is ‘No’.  The context of this language would appear to be a transformation (through the incarnation) of Jewish religious tradition so radical that notions of ‘redemption’ and ‘sacrifice’ now had to be applied by early Christians in an extended sense.  To restrict ourselves, for the moment, to the purely formal and linguistic aspect of this situation – we could say that the problem with which this confronted contemporary users of religious language like St Paul would have somewhat resembled the task that we may imagine confronted the inventors of cycling when, in order to describe the new form of activity enabled by this invention, they had to resort to a terms drawn from the vocabulary of equitation such as ride and saddle.  Meanings that are extended in this sense are sometimes referred to by dictionaries as ‘metaphorical’ – as, for example, when we speak of the director of a company as its head.  But it is important to observe how the terminology of metaphor is being employed in this case.  Metaphor here has the broader sense of Lakoff and Johnson or Soskice: the meaning of ride in ride a bicycle – or, in St Paul’s case, ‘redemption’ or ‘sacrifice’ – is purely univocal, not heuristic or equivocal. 

While this purely formal and linguistic perspective serves the purposes of our argument, it is probably simplistic to suggest that Christian language users like St Paul just extended the sense of existing terms.  The reality of the situation may rather have been that those language users felt they had discovered a fuller and more encompassing meaning of terms like ‘redemption’ and ‘sacrifice’ in the light of which both the old and the new notions could find their place.  Something like this is implied by the typological perspective presupposed by Hebrews.  For the purposes of the present argument, however, this distinction is not important – because the typological perspective, which assumes an ontological continuity of type and antitype, is even less consistent with the understanding of ‘redemption’ and ‘sacrifice’ as metaphors than the purely formal and linguistic perspective considered above.

What is really at issue with sacrifice as metaphor

So what – to repeat our question – is the substance of Fee’s objection to the traditionalist interpretation of the Pauline schema of, say, ‘justification’, when he complains that it is resistant to the idea of its own metaphorical status?  Maybe, it is not so much a failure to recognize the equivocality of biblical or theological schemata of Atonement, but simply the need for a safeguard against interpretations of St Paul that rely on one schema and ignore the rest, and theologize that schema in way that seems incompatible with what St Paul writes elsewhere.   The oft-repeated charge against literalizing interpretations of ‘pressing metaphors by making them walk on all fours’ (p. 65) implies that in qualifying religious language as ‘metaphorical’ we are primarily assigning it a restricted, and context-determined, field of application beyond which it should not be pushed: that we should not, for example, proceed too swiftly on the basis that the salvation event is the ‘payment of ransom’ to speculations about who it is to whom that ransom is paid. 

                One could hardly object to the principle; yet, there is a problem about expressing it in terms of the metaphoricity of religious language.  Fee’s strictures against ‘literalizing’ interpretations would presumably apply equally to all forms of over-interpretation – and if all language is metaphorical, the question of whether such interpretations are ‘literalizing’ is beside the point.  Introducing the notion of literalization, however, implies, as we have seen, a blanket devaluation of the metaphorical (hard as this is to make sense of, if, as we are constantly told, ‘the metaphorical’ includes all language).  In other words, in order to deal with the relatively localized problem of theologies that extrapolate on a metaphor in a manner not warranted by a balanced reading of the NT as a whole, we are adopting the drastic expedient of relativizing the value of all theologizing extrapolations.  What is effectively ignored by such a strategy is the possibility of a theological extrapolation on the basis of a single NT schema that is not incompatible with other schemata or a balanced reading of the NT as a whole.  In short, the presumption against theologies that develop a single unified account of Atonement seems unjustified on any basis other than the very questionable one of the metaphoricity of all schemata. 

                In practice, the perspective of sacrifice as metaphor can very easily be foreshortened to one of ‘damage limitation’.  A theologian like Fee may be far too anxious about the potential substitutionary implications of the sacrificial idea to be willing to concede much value to theological extrapolations on the ‘metaphor’ of sacrifice.  There would be much to recommend this minimalist strategy of interpretation, if it were possible to deduce an adequate theology of Atonement from the ipsissima verba of the NT.  Granted, however, that it is not, the practice of theological extrapolation is not the expression of something unjustifiably wayward – as the talk of of ‘pressing’ of metaphors ‘to walk on all fours’ tends to suggest – but more akin to the motivation for developing a Trinitarian theology, namely, an urgent need on the part of orthodoxy to give an account of itself to the world.  The scandal – if scandal there is – lies not, as sacrifice as metaphor supposes, in the impulse to develop a comprehensive model, but in the failure of theology, with the Spirit’s leading, to arrive at an enduring consensus – even to the extent of what was achieved in regard to Trinitarian doctrine by the creedal formulation of the early centuries.  As already argued, the failure to agree a sense leads inevitably to the suspicion on the part of Christianity’s interlocutors that there is ultimately no sense to be made.

Let us, then, suppose that the rejection of theological literalism amounts to no more than inhibitions about theologizing such as we attribute to Fee in the above paragraph.  The problem for Atonement as metaphor in that case becomes the following: why, given the evident need for an adequate account of the Atonement event to replace penal substitution (i.e. one that neither neglects aspects of the NT teaching, nor proves to be incompatible with it), that need would necessarily be better served by a multiplicity of schemata rather than a single integrated theory.  After all, there seems no inherent reason to suppose, on the above understanding of the position of metaphorical theology, that unifying and cohesive accounts of the salvation event would necessarily prove unbalanced or incompatible with NT teaching.  I shall argue in the next chapter that there are sacrificial revisionist accounts that do not offend in this way – yet, at the same time, do not suffer the disability of metaphorical theology: namely, that of de-actualizing the referent of their own theological discourse.  In fact, it is even a curious feature of some of the studies we have classified as belonging to the sacrifice as metaphor position (e.g. Gunton and O’Collins) that they come so close to unilaterally privileging a non-traditionalist sacrificial account of the salvation event (as with Gunton’s reference to sacrifice as the ‘dominant metaphor’) – yet finally draw back from that step in the interests of a theory of religious language as metaphor that they seem to have little theological interest in maintaining.

The impact of sacrifice as metaphor on conceptualization of sacrifice

As regards the development of an explicit position on ‘history of religions’ sacrifice, sacrifice as metaphor can represent a significant advance on traditionalism, despite its tendency to dissociate salvation event and sacrifice.  It does so by making room for other schemata in place of – or, more often, alongside – the traditionalist schema.  Whether and how far the traditionalist substitutionaryschema is thereby abandoned, or else sidelined to one amongst a number of ‘metaphors’, varies with the study.  But the separating out of a schema of sacrifice – whether alongside or in place of the traditionalist schema of ‘justification’ – can make room for anthropological notions of sacrifice to enter the picture, whether from social anthropologists like Mary Douglas (Gunton), or, more commonly, from Girard (Boersma (pp. 133-151), Goldingay (pp. 3-20)).  Nevertheless, the retention of a sacrifice as metaphor framework ensures that this genuinely anthropological schema of sacrifice, where it arises, is not offered as a substitute for the traditionalist substitionary sacrifice as the ‘literal truth’ of Atonement – which would be, for a sacrifice as metaphor theology, to ‘absolutize’ sacrifice – but as just one among a number of verbal images of something (i.e. the truth of Atonement) the essence of which somehow eludes all conceptualization.  From a sacrificial revisionist perspective, the problem about this is that an account of generic sacrifice which may embody much of the truth of the salvation event finds itself buried amidst a welter of more accessory material.  Good examples of this are the studies of O’Collins and Gunton, which compress what a sacrificial revisionist would see as the essence of the matter into just a few intriguing but easily missable paragraphs (pp. 171-7 and pp. 117-120).  

                However, attitudes to generic sacrifice among theologians who adopt a sacrifice as metaphor position are sometimes far more ambivalent than this.  In theory, the appropriateness of the sacrificial metaphor would seem to presuppose at least certain elements of commonality between sacrifice and the salvation event.  In practice, however, such elements are often minimized – largely, it would seem, because the sacrificial schema remains dangerously imbricated with troublesome aspects of the traditionalist position.  The section of Fee’s paper devoted to sacrifice (pp. 55-60) offers a good example of this.  The restriction of NT sacrificial metaphors to a bare four instances (by the exclusion from this category of passages that refer simply to the efficacy of blood), and the disproportionate concentration on the meaning of hilasterion in Romans 3.25, have much to do with the concern to fend off a traditionalist propitiatory understanding of the latter passage, and the importance, to this end, of specifying an understanding of the modifier ‘in/with his blood’ that does not tend in a traditionalist direction.  Such evaluations of the sacrificial metaphor from the perspective of theological ‘damage limitation’ can easily fall short of a positive exploration of the sacrificial dimension of the salvation event. 

There are various ways in which the metaphor of sacrifice may be acknowledged in principal without being accorded any positive value.  One is by viewing sacrificial language as a concession to human weakness – a necessary evil without which no good would be possible.  Another is to identify sacrifice as a socio-religious institution of such fundamental significance within the NT world as to render inconceivable any articulation of new truth except in its terms.  Thus Goldingay (p. 18), having observed that Jesus seems to concur with Hosea that God desires faithfulness not sacrifice, suggests that, if ‘God offers and accepts the sacrifice of Jesus, or accepts an interpretation of his death along such lines’, it is perhaps because ‘God is characteristically condescending to where humanity is: we desire sacrifice, so God gives it, as was the case with the gift of the temple and the institution of the monarchy in Israel’.  Such a view comes very close, as we shall see, to Girardian theory – which Goldingay, like other proponents of the sacrifice as metaphor position (e.g. Boersma), cites with approval (Goldingay, pp. 16-17).  It justifies the place that the metaphor of sacrifice seems to occupy in the biblical accounts of the salvation event, while at the same time absolving us from the need to explore sacrifice in order to understand the salvation event.

                There are, then, a number of sacrifice as metaphor studies in which the place accorded to sacrifice is largely nominal.  However, regarding those which do indeed view the notion of sacrifice as having a distinct contribution to make to our understanding of the salvation event, a number of generalizations can be made about tendencies in their characterization of sacrifice.

1. The structure of the metaphorical relationship, with its distinction of tenor and vehicle, becomes a means of setting off the two terms (Gunton, p.122: ‘duality’) of the metaphorical relationship rather than specifying some common feature(s) by virtue of which one term relates to the other (O’Collins, pp. 162-3; Gunton, pp. 121-2; Goldingay, pp. 14-5). 
2. This contrast between the literal sacrifice of the OT and metaphorical sacrifice of the NT is developed in terms of an opposition between ritual action, on the one hand, and a kind of action that is inward and spiritual, on the other (O’Collins, p. 165; Gunton, pp. 124-5; Goldingay, p. 17).
3. The metaphorical sacrifice that corresponds to the Christ event is seen as so far eclipsing the literal in importance that it comes to constitute a new measure of what it is to be sacrifice.  ‘The centring of the new meaning of the word sacrifice on the death of Jesus brings it about that there is now only one sacrifice that really matters’ (Gunton, p. 123.  See also O’Collins, p. 164.) The strangeness of this dawns on us when it is remembered that we are speaking here of the literal and metaphorical senses of a single idea.  The metaphorical sense is claimed to establish the new frame in which the literal sense is to be understood. How can this be?

I have argued that the terminology of metaphor is not appropriate to the phenomena of sacrifice.  What we see exemplified in the above, is the manner in which the phenomena themselves seem to pull apart from the conceptual framework that is being applied to them.  It is as though the fullest realization of the sacrificial concept (i.e. in Christian metaphor) were claimed to consist in its estrangement from its literal content.  As though the closer that concept came to realization, the less it retained of its proper definition.  There is clearly something wrong here.  But it is less important to define the obvious absurdity, than to consider its effects.  And what is being achieved  by this  squeezing of sacrificial wine into metaphorical bottles, I would argue, is to impose an oppositional frame (i.e. ritual vs. ethical) onto a phenomenon (i.e. sacrifice) which would be better framed in other terms.  When we consider the specific features in respect to which the literal and metaphorical are opposed, and the manner in which the content of the sacrificial concept is defined, we find precisely those features that characterize the realist anti-sacrificial conceptualizations of sacrifice to be discussed below in the work of Girardians and gift-theorists.  In both cases (the sacrifice as metaphor and the anti-sacrificial position) this characterization of sacrifice has three principal features.  The first is exemplified by Gunton, and the second and third by Goldingay.

Transactionalism.  For Gunton, an important possibility opened up by the metaphorical development of sacrifice is that the idea of a gift made to a deity (i.e. literal sacrifice), such as we find in the OT, can become that of a self-offering, such as the one that Christ – and ultimately God himself – makes on our behalf.  The latter idea of sacrifice – i.e. that of a self-offering – is seen as a metaphorical extension of the literal sense.  The oppositional frame implicit in the metaphorical relation as here understood tends to set that literal sense over and against the freedom and gratuity of the metaphorical sacrifice of self-offering.  Thus Gunton, having referred to the latter as ‘the most remarkable metaphorical transfer of them all’ goes on to observe that ‘in most sacrificial systems, sacrifice is something people give to God: in some of them as a means by which the deity is appeased or “bought off”’ (p.126).  What we see in this instance is that the emphatically non-transactional character of metaphorical sacrifice tends, given the oppositional frame implicit in the metaphorical relation, automatically to generate a contrasting idea of literal sacrifice as transactional.

Ritualism.  An analogous possibility opened up by metaphorical development is that of a sacrifice offered ‘in the world rather than in the Church building’ ‘in service, proclamation and the winning of people for Christ’ (Goldingay, p.15).  The idea of this altogether non-ritual sacrifice is represented, once again, as a metaphorical extension of the literal sense.  This time, the source of the oppositional tendency in the framework of the metaphorical relation emerges explicitly in Goldingay’s assertion that, with the cross, the regime of sacrifice has not only been ‘fulfilled’ but also ‘terminated’ (Goldingay, p. 14).  This discontinuity allows the literal sense of sacrifice to be set over and against a notion of the salvation event characterized by the absence of ‘places, rites, castes and times’ (Goldingay, p. 14).  ‘In Christian faith there is no longer shrine, sacrifice, priesthood, or Sabbath.’  The practice of Eucharist (which might appear to constitute an exception to this rule) is re-defined as ‘sacrament’ as opposed to ‘sacrifice’ (p. 15). The tendency of this oppositional characterization of the salvation event is to generate a contrasting definition of ‘sacrifice’ as essentially ritual – an affair of ‘places, rites, castes and times having no necessariy salvational value’.  Lest Goldingay’s understanding of sacrifice be dismissed as representative only of Protestantism, it is worth pointing out here the close resemblance that it bears to the views of the Catholic, Robert Daly, discussed below.

Violence.  Finally, the idea (already encountered in the above paragraph) of the cross as the ‘end’ of sacrifice (i.e. both its fulfilment and its termination), and, therefore, as a ‘good, bad thing’, a necessary evil, is strongly conducive to the idea of sacrifice, both in the OT and in the cross, as a means of channelling human violence and absorbing its ill effects.  Evidently, this is not to absolve sacrifice itself from all taint of violence.  But the oppositional framing of the relation of literal and metaphorical sacrifice implicit, as we have seen, in the theological use of the notion of metaphor, provides a way of understanding the relation between the wholly non-violent Christian ethic of Romans 12.1 (St Paul’s ‘living sacrifice’ of the Christian life offered) and the sacrifices of the cross and Hebrew cult. The result of all this is to characterize literal sacrifice as in some measure inherently violent – a means whereby violence is given an outlet, and so controlled.  The best-known instance of this kind of interpretation is the work of Girard.  Other treatments of Atonement, however, such as some of those classified within our category of sacrifice as metaphor (Goldingay, Boersma, Daly), have, without entirely espousing the Girardian theory, shown themselves to be very receptive to its characterizeration of sacrifice as institutional violence. 

2.2.1 The anti-sacrificial position: 1. theology based on the theory of René Girard

We come now to the other major non-sacrificial approach to the relation of sacrifice and salvation event: the anti-sacrificial position.  Like sacrifice as metaphor, this involves distancing sacrifice from the salvation event.  But this distancing is achieved, not by relegating sacrifice to the realm of metaphor, but by characterizing sacrifice as a real-life sociological phenomenon, and then conceptualizing the Christian salvation event in an oppositional relation to it.  This oppositional relationship is thought of either in terms of the actual historical termination of the sacrificial phenomenon by the salvation event, or in terms of an ongoing antithetical relation of the sacrificial phenomenon to the alternative form of social practice that the salvation event inaugurates.  These anti-sacrificial positions enjoy one very obvious advantage over sacrifice as metaphor.  They specify the theological referent in terms of its relation to a real-life socio-religious phenomenon (ritual sacrifice), rather than purely in terms of an experience that remains ineffable – and this confers an apparently greater objectivity upon the salvation event that they describe; the latter becomes something capable of an impact that can be demonstrated in sociological terms.  This offers a welcome alternative to the de-actualizing consequences of sacrifice as metaphor.  At the same time, this benefit comes without the cost of having to forego – as with sacrificial revisionist theology – the kind of negative attitude to sacrifice that plays well to contemporary anti-ritualist sensibilities. 

                The first of the two versions of the anti-sacrificial position mentioned above – the one that posits the historical termination of sacrifice – is exemplified for us by the large number of recent theological studies that share, as their common basis, the mimetic theory first developed by René Girard.  The theory itself finds fullest expression in studies, largely by Girard, that, during a first phase, centre on the Western literary tradition and archaic ritual sacrifice,[21] and only subsequently turn to the analysis of biblical texts.  In the course of that second phase, the theory begins to be taken up by collaborators more disposed than Girard himself to advance the theory in a theological direction.[22]  It is possible, I would argue, to identify a theological line that is specifically Girard’s (one that appears to change, however, over time and through engagement with theologians);[23]  yet, from the point when the discussion advances beyond the confines of biblical exegesis into theology, mimetic theory becomes an increasingly collective enterprise.  

Anti-sacrificial theologies – whether based on mimetic theory or gift theory – pursue the theological development of non-theological ideas.  This imposes both on those theologies and on our evaluation of them a two-stage analysis involving the examination of, first, the anthropological basis of the position, and, second, its theological development.  Studies by different authors tend to figure at each stage.   In the case of Girard-based theology, the works of Girard himself will figure at the first stage of our analysis, while the second stage will focus primarily on the work of scholars other than Girard himself – notably, S. Mark Heim, James Alison, Robert Daly and Raymund Schwager.  This is because the work of these others represents more fully than that of Girard himself the theological implications of adopting a Girardian anthropology.

Background

Girard’s anthropological theory

I shall begin, then, with a general outline of Girard’s understanding of ritual sacrifice, as this is developed in relation to mimesis and the ritual scapegoat,in his seminal studies: Deceit, Desire and the Novel and Violence and the Sacred. 

Ritual sacrifice – which underpins all pre-Christian societies – originates in a socially-protective act of violent scapegoating.  The need for this stems ultimately from the fundamentally mimetic character of our human desire, which does not select its objects autonomously, but must always have those objects designated to it by the desire of others who become our models.  Unchecked mimesis tends ultimately to a murderous rivalry of all against all – a state of violent reciprocity, which is the antithesis of all society.  Girard therefore theorizes that, for some kind of social order to take root, there must have been a historical moment when the murderous desires of conflicting individuals converged simultaneously on a single victim.  His/her elimination brought peace through the instantaneous removal of the apparent cause of conflict – and this, claims Girard, would have constituted the institution of community and culture.  Subsequently, the community, inaugurated through scapegoating, recalls and affirms its identity in collective actions recapturing the foundational moment.  Paradoxically, credit for the institution of community and culture is attributed retrospectively to the victim, who is divinized as founder.  The collective actions reproducing the inaugural moment are what we know as ‘ritual sacrifice’; the associated narratives sacralizing the victim – and simultaneously concealing the truth of salvific violence from its perpetrators – are ‘myths’. 

As hitherto described, Girard’s theory appears to be concerned with certain universals of the human condition, such as the necessity for sacrifice, and their implications for the establishment of archaic society and religion.  But, of course, this raises the problem of the apparent irrelevance of sacrifice in contemporary Western society.  If Girard is correct about the centrality of sacrifice to human social and political institutions, then why is it that in the case of modern Western societies alone, such practices appear to have become largely obsolescent?  What accounts for the difference between archaic societies and our own?

It is at this point in Girard’s thinking, and in response to such questions, that a new element enters the picture, namely, what Girard terms the ‘biblical revelation’.  This becomes an integral part of the theory as it is subsequently developed both in the major texts of Girard (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World; The Scapegoat; I See Satan Fall like Lightning)[24] – and in those of his theological collaborators. According to these studies, the biblical texts themselves offer a deconstructive reading of myth that lays bare the workings of the scapegoat mechanism – waveringly in the early stages, but with increasing clarity as we move from Old Testament to the New.  In this respect, the biblical narratives, which appear to occupy a place homologous to myths in pagan religions, have a diametrically opposed effect.  For while the myths engender a socially beneficial misunderstanding of the scapegoating event, the biblical narratives puncture the mythical deception in order to reveal the truth of the scapegoating event that underlies them.  Revelatory truth speaks through those heroes of scripture who, like Job, resist the role of divine victim that the mythical discourse of an emerging sacrificial community threatens to thrust upon them, and manifest the reality of human victimhood behind the spurious sacralizations of myth.  Finally, in the person of Christ, God is seen to put Himself in the place of the victim, and by holding both positions – God and victim – simultaneously without relinquishing either, unmasks the sacrificial deception that represses their essential identity.

The relation of ritual sacrifice and salvation event

Girard, who is essentially a literary critic, sees both ritual sacrifice and salvation from the perspective of the discourses associated with them.   Thus, in his work, the relation of sacrifice and salvation event is given in the relation of mythical discourse and the discourse of insight.  Both discourses are related to each other through the relationship each has to the primordial scapegoating event.  

                That event itself is, of course, altogether non-discursal.  It occurs at the climax of a mimetic crisis when the community has descended into the total chaos and violence of a war of all against all. It is consequently a moment of absolute blindness at which a collective act precedes any meaningful representation in the mind of the agents.  Indeed, the very possibility of representation comes about as a result of that act, and instantly structures the consciousness of the agents on mythical lines.  It is a condition of the solidarity thereby established, that this structuring is subsequently protected against the emergence of all insight – and myth is the discursal form of that repression, the vestige that the event leaves in the collective consciousness, evoked and re-affirmed through ritual sacrifice.  

                It follows that insight is entirely precluded in the archaic societies where myth and sacrifice prevail.  Not simply because it is against the interests of anyone – save, perhaps, potential future scapegoats – for truth to emerge.  There is simply no occasion at which such an emergence could take place.  So long as myth and sacrifice maintain their hold, consciousness is structured so as to ensure what Girard terms ‘miscognition’ – i.e. the interested misunderstanding of the primordial scapegoating event; at times of mimetic crisis, where this mythical structuring is momentarily lost, the minds of all tend towards a state of violence in which insightful reflection becomes impossible.  Only the consciousness of the victim constitutes a potential chink in society’s defences (though, it is to be suspected, even the consciousness of victims will be overwhelmed by universal tide of violence); but, of course, the victim is eliminated.  Insight is thus impossible – and the maintenance of social order is predicated on this exclusion.

                So much, then, for mythical discourse.  What of the discourse of biblical revelation?

                For Girard, biblical revelation is nothing more, or less, than sacrificial insight.  Its emergence within archaic society cannot be explained, since, as we have seen, there is simply no occasion when sacrificial insight could arise.  Such insight, Girard concludes, is entirely supernatural (a characteristic which, incidentally, confirms its exclusive derivation from the salvation event itself).  Once successfully introduced, however, it changes the nature of society forever:  society has already ceased to be archaic and has entered the modern age.

                To appreciate the significance of this effect, we need to bear in mind that revelatory insight constitutes, not merely an intellectual advance, but a transformation of consciousness, resulting in a new sensibility and a total re-orientation of the ethical.  The discourse of insight engenders what Girard terms ‘the concern for the victim’ (le souci des victimes), as embodied, for example, in the revulsion most moderns experience at the thought of scapegoating in all its forms: the baiting of gays, anti-semitism, and the repression of women.  It propels modern humans to act in ways that cannot be justified by any appeal to enlightened self-interest, social utility or even political realism.  Mythically based social institutions which are founded upon concealed victimary mechanisms are bound to oppose such a discourse, not just on the grounds of vested priestly or political interest, but in the interests of the social order itself, which mere observation reveals to be imperilled by the assault on its religious underpinnings.  Even a modest infusion of sacrificial insight will discredit mythical discourses, and runs the risk of sending society spiralling into violent crisis.  The intense resistance likely to be opposed to revelatory insight in the name of the sacrificially maintained social order is explained by this vulnerability.

                So what precisely, on this anti-sacrificial view, is the relation of the two discourses?  Evidently, they are opposed in respect to their relation to the scapegoating event.  But they are also held together, at least from the one side, in a relationship of dependence.  The entire function of the discourse of revelation is exhausted in the dissolution of the discourse of myth and the disclosure of the scapegoat – and the entire function of the salvation event in the dismantling of ritual sacrifice.  The relation between the discourse of myth and the discourse of insight – hence also the relation between the salvation event and ritual sacrifice – thus resembles the relationship between the insight into a conjuror’s art and the magic of its effects.  On the one hand, the magic perishes with the dawning of insight; on the other, the insight has no aim but the dissolution of its object. 

The impact of a Girard-based theory of ritual sacrifice on the conceptualization of the salvation event

The particular conceptualization of the relation of salvation event and sacrifice presupposed by Girardian theory as described in the above paragraphs poses a number of distinctive challenges for theologians who seek to construct a theology on this basis.  In the following section I seek to define those challenges and examine the way in which Girard-based theology (largely as developed by writers other than Girard himself) has responded to them.

The most obvious challenge is that of finding a place for a distinctively Christian practice (as opposed to revelatory insight) in the dark, and darkening, landscape with which a Girardian account of the post-sacrificial world of modernity confronts us.  On the whole, the negative aspects of Christian revelation seem to dominate over the positive in Girard’s vision.  It has to be remembered that sacrificial institutions have an apparently indispensable role in protecting humanity from its own violence.  So, by stripping away that protective institutional envelope, revelation leaves humanity perilously exposed to the violence from which it is no longer protected.  Furthermore, whereas the impact of the salvation event on sacrificial institutions appears global and almost instantaneous, the renunciation of violence requires an individual response of conversion.  It is no surprise then that Girard seems altogether too absorbed by the apocalyptic implications of this state of affairs to have much to say about the positive, if limited and local, impact of Christian enclaves in resisting the tide of violence – no doubt because the negative so exceeds the positive as to render the latter almost insignificant on the historical level.  At all events, the characterization of a distinctively Christian response to the biblical revelation is largely neglected by Girard – or else left to the attention of theologians.

Yet there may be a more underlying theoretical difficulty here.  For other considerations deriving from Girard’s theory might lead us to speculate whether the renunciation of violence is even possible for human beings.  If all intentional behaviour is mimetic, and if all mimetic behaviour leads inevitably to violence, what possible room could there be in the theory for a notion of specifically Christian practice – other than a purely negative idea of disengagement with all socially or politically orientated human behaviour? 

Girard-based theologians (including those mentioned above) have tended to answer this question by developing a notion of positive mimesis.  Even Girard himself seems to have adopted this solution at some point on his trajectory, and, indeed, considerably developed the idea in later works, notably Evolution and Conversion and Battling to the End.[25]  The Christ event renders possible for Christians a new kind of non-rivalrous imitation – namely the imitation of Christ; and the human potentiality that the Christ event finally embodies belies any conception of our human nature that would confine it within the bounds of fallen desire.  Theologians like Alison and Schwager have developed their ‘theological anthropology’ on the basis of this possibility.  There remain problems of a practical nature, however, in specifying what positive mimesis or the imitation of Christ actually means.  As these problems touch not only upon the question of Christian ethical behaviour but on the particularly thorny issue of ritual and symbolic behaviour, I propose to give them some attention here.

The definitional issue consists in delimiting precisely what in the model (Christ) constitutes an ultimate goal for human behaviour to be imitated by all Christians – that is to say, what is properly paradigmatic in that model.  By a model here I mean, like Girard, a person who becomes, for whatever reason, an object of imitation for others; by paradigm I refer to those qualities in respect to which the model is imitated.  For example, few would regard Christ’s performance of healing miracles as itself paradigmatic, and so require of every Christian that they imitate Christ in this specific form of activity. The paradigm consists, we might more plausibly claim, in the compassion or the obedience that is exemplified in the healing miracle; and it is the latter, not the contingent form of its expression in the case of Jesus’s earthly life, that constitutes the paradigm, and which we are called upon to imitate.  Of course, healing miracles may well have been the only form in which that compassion or obedience could have been manifested in the Jesus’s case; but that does not alter the fact that, as Christians, we are all called upon to be compassionate, but not all called to be faith-healers.

We can now state more succinctly the definitional concern for Girard-based theology around the notion of the imitation of Christ: namely, whether the martyr’s death, as exemplified by Christ’s suffering and death, is, stricto sensu, paradigmatic, or whether some more general characteristic – let  us say, his obedience to his Heavenly Father – constitutes the paradigm, while suffering and death constitute the contingent form which that obedience was compelled to assume in the historical circumstances.  The question is dealt with most fully by S. Mark Heim (pp. 244-8).  His problem and ours is that, where the martyr’s suffering and/or death enters the Christian paradigm, the result, as feminists are not slow to point out, is a Gospel of victimhood admirably suited to maintaining the oppressed in their state of oppression.  The case Heim makes for positive mimesis in the shape of the imitation of Christ therefore requires him to delimit precisely what are the aspects in which the model is, and is not, to be imitated, and, furthermore, to place warnings around certain texts of St Paul that would seem to exceed those limits.  ‘To put this in personal terms, Paul can’t earn his own salvation by imitating every misery that was inflicted on Jesus’ (p. 248).  Accordingly, passages that seem to imply such a view (e.g. Philippians 3.10-11) have, he says, to be regarded as a moment of ‘half-conversion’ (p. 248) in St Paul’s journey towards a more completely un-sacrificial, and hence properly Christian, understanding of salvation.  Regarding the ethical outworking of the paradigm, Heim pulls no punches; he is less forthright, however, when it comes to its ritual expression.  But this brings us to an aspect of the second, and more intractable, area of theological difficulty with which Heim is less immediately concerned, though it is implicated in the same ethical problematic. 

This second problem is that of finding a place in Girard’s post-sacrificial landscape, first, for the Church as a valued institutional – i.e.  social and/or political – entity, second (and it is here we touch on the aspect of the definitional problem that Heim tends to neglect), of finding a place for the kind of ritual activity that Christians term sacramental and would seem to be closely associated with the life of the Church. 

So far as concerns the Church itself, we need to remind ourselves of Girard’s consistently maintained position on the fate of institutions – and ritually maintained institutions, especially.  This is most cogently set out in the compelling final chapters of I See Satan Fall from Heaven.  Girard sees all political and social institutions, not simply archaic ritual ones, as alike grounded in scapegoating, and destined to follow archaic religion into oblivion thanks to the universal dissolvent influence of biblical revelation.  Their disappearance leaves behind it a social world increasingly restricted to the sphere of non-institutional – i.e. inter-personal – relations which Girard terms interdividual.   Not even this intimate social world is immune to the disintegrative effects of revelation, however, though here the ersatz mythologies of psychology take over from archaic mythology the role of concealing and safeguarding a last enclave of socially constitutive scapegoating against the destructive truth of naked desire.  These ‘secular’ mythologies are doomed to fade in their turn, exposing even the domestic sphere to the violence prophesied by Christ’s apocalyptic evocation of the last times in which ‘brother will betray brother to death, and a father against his child’. The ultimate beneficiary of this progressive degradation of the relational sphere, both socio-religious and interdividual, is the single all-conquering religion of modernity: the concern for the victim (le souci des victimes) – as a result of which every human individual without exception comes to be viewed exclusively in the light of his/her potential victimhood.  The most remarkable thing about this vision is its total exclusion from redemption of all institutions – religious, social and political.  The whole-hearted adoption of the Christian ethos of love of one’s fellow holds out some hope for the interdividual sphere; but, for social institutions, there is no quarter.

So what is the place of Christianity within this bleak vision?  At least to some extent, there seems little doubt, within the endangered realm of institutions.  It is a point of irony, which Girard appears to relish, that the institution by which the Christian revelation has through history been disseminated should be passing into obsolescence at the very moment when the revelation that it serves to articulate has become all-triumphant.  The essence of Christianity, then, would seem to lie not in the socio-religious vehicle (which fades like a flower after the fruit is formed), but in the revelatory message that the vehicle exists to articulate.  There is a problem with identifying Christianity too exclusively with its revelatory message, however.  The very extent of the demythologizing impact of that message, as described by Girard, effectively makes all shades of religious opinion its beneficiaries; on this definition of Christianity, there would be almost no religious or political position that would be left outside it – not even atheism.  It turns out, therefore, that Christianity can be identified neither with the community that has been its institutional vehicle, nor with the ethic which that institution has served to disseminate.  Does it, then, have any existence of its own capable of surviving the imminent dissolution of the institutional container in its revelatory content?  A third option would be to identify Christianity with the definition of Christian practice developed, as we saw above, by most Girard-based theologies – that is to say, with the positive mimesis constituted by the imitation of Christ.  After all, such a practice does not limit itself, like revelation, to concern for the victim, but extends to the rejection of all violence.  On this understanding, Christianity, as represented by the Church, would be the tradition through which the practice of positive mimesis is transmitted.  Such a tradition would be interdividual and ethical, not institutional or political, and could therefore be expected to survive the degradation of all institutions, including the institutional Church, while at the same time halting the encroachment of violent mimesis into the interdividual sphere.  Something like this third option is adopted, as we have already indicated, by most Girard-based theologies; but there is considerable variation between them in how the tradition of positive mimesis is related to the institutional Church, on the one hand, or the ideology of concern for the victim, on the other. 

We can now deal, more briefly, with a second, though related, aspect of the problem we have been considering: namely the place of the kind of action associated with the Church that is termed sacramental.  Such action evidently has to do with the definition by Christians of a collective identity, and it is hard to see how this can be consistent with an idea of Christianity that is restricted to the sphere of interdividual relations and consists exclusively in the interpersonal transmission of habits of positive mimesis.  This would be the case even if Girard’s own theory did not specifically draw attention, in the case of all non-Christian forms of religious activity, to the relation between social entities and ritual actions.  There may be understandings of religious community that make little reference to the role of ritual.  But Girard’s theory does not belong in that category.  Like academic social anthropologists, Girard believes that social groups of all kinds are reproduced by symbolic action.  Given the resemblance, on Girard’s own admission, of the institutional Church to non-Christian social entities, and the existence in association with the Church of ritual actions that parallel the ritual practices of those non-Christian entities, it would be strange not to attribute to those practices the same role that non-Christian ritual practices have in reproducing the social entities with which they are associated.  It would be like insisting that the similar conformation of reptile and mammalian bodies – their possession, say, of two eyes and four limbs – had been arrived at, in each case, through absolutely independent evolutionary processes, and that the apparent convergence in outcome was the result of mere coincidence.  But if it is the case that the sacramental actions of Christians bear the same relation to Chrisitian community that sacrificial actions bear to community in non-Christian traditions, then those Christian rituals will, on Girard’s view, be destined to the same oblivion that awaits the communities they serve to reproduce.  In short, the place of sacrament is as problematic within a Girard-based theology as the place of the sacramental community.    

Christianity without sacramental community (Mark Heim)

The problem outlined above is, as we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, fundamental to all anti-sacrificial theologies.  As regards those that are Girard-based, it is possible to distinguish four types of response – which I shall illustrate through the studies of Mark Heim, Alison, Daly and Schwager.  The most straightforward is to understand the Church non-sacramentally in the terms already specified above, as the transmission of positive mimesis in the interdividual sphere.  However, I can think of no actual study that adheres to this prescription very rigidly – maybe because the understanding of the Church as a sacramental community is too entrenched in the biblical text and Christian tradition.  In practice, we find studies, like that of Mark Heim, that give sufficiently little space to the notions of Church and sacrament for the question of their inconsistency with Girardian theory not to force itself on our attention.  This is easily possible where the spiritual goal of Christianity is understood in primarily individual terms, and the role of community is viewed as largely instrumental in respect to the achievement of that goal.  A concern for Christian fellowship is not, of course, precluded by this individualist understanding; but, ultimately, the goal of the Church is seen as the salvation of individual souls, not institutions.  When viewed from this perspective, the decadence of all human institutions, as predicted by Girard, is not theologically catastrophic.  Indeed, a degree of cynicism around institutional religion and entrenched religious practices plays rather well to contemporary anti-ritualist prejudices, and helps to present Christianity as having more to do with ‘personal relationships’ than ‘religious tradition’ – as well as encouraging an exceptionalist understanding of Christianity as differing from all other religions in this respect.

Christian sacrament as Girardian revelation (Alison)

The problems posed by a Girardian anthropology for any theology that remains attached to an understanding of Church as sacramental community are well illustrated by the case of James Alison’s study, The Joy of Being Wrong.  Like Mark Heim, Alison sees Christianity as a tradition of positive mimesis, of imitatio Christi, which he illuminatingly compares to good parenting (p. 33).  However, unlike – or to a far greater extent than – Mark Heim, he identifies that tradition of positive mimesis with an orthodox conception of the Church as a sacramental body reproduced in the eucharistic rite instituted at the Lord’s Supper.  The problem here is the linking of the Lord’s Supper – and thereby the content of the positive mimesis conveyed inter alia through the Eucharist – with a key moment, if not the key moment – of biblical revelation.  If the Lord’s Supper is, for most theologians, including Girardians, the means whereby Christ conveys to his disciples his own understanding of his forthcoming death, then, from a Girardian perspective, it must also be the crucial moment in the revelation of the scapegoat mechanism.  In practice, the eucharistic ritual will be seen as a kind of anti-sacrifice, which, like the Gospel texts in their entirety, re-runs the sacrificial script – but with a view to rendering it explicit and thus ineffectual.  If, however, Lord’s Supper and Eucharist are also regarded as instituting the paradigm of positive mimesis that we have been discussing, then the tendency to identify the content of that positive paradigm with the sacrificial insight conveyed in the Girardian revelation will perpetuate, as constitutive of the paradigm, the roles defined – or re-defined – through the revelation: those of the ‘forgiving victim’, on the one hand, and of the ‘penitent persecutor’, on the other.  And this is what we clearly see in Alison’s characterization of the paradigm of positive mimesis in terms of the role of ‘willing victim’.  For Alison, there is nothing contingent about Christ’s victimhood; it is the very essence of the Christian paradigm – the aspect of Jesus’ experience that all Christians (not just a select company of martyrs) are called on to imitate.  If you want to know what the self-donation of God looks like ‘in the midst of humanity’, says Alison, nothing resembles it so much as ‘a dead human victim’ (p. 83).  ‘What this says about our relationship to God’, he goes on, is ‘that we are related to God as to a dead human victim, either in ignorant complicity in the victimization or, from now on, in the beginnings of a penitent solidarity.’  One does not need to be radical feminist, or a liberation theologian, to have profound misgivings about the ethical implications of this blatant exaltation – even divinization – of victimhood.  From a political perspective, it appears to condone the acceptance of oppression on the part of the oppressed; from an ethical one, it suggests the kind of murky moral compromises that give sacrifice a bad name.  Yet Alison is unapologetic.  ‘What the new unity of humanity looks like is the beginnings of the gathering of penitent persecutors around the body of the self-giving victim […] and the creating of acts of worship of the victim both in celebration and in fraternal service.’ (p.62)

It is important to recognize that the victimary character of Alison’s theology cannot be put down to an idiosyncratic reading of Girard.  Any attempt to build an ecclesial and sacramental theology on the basis of a Girardian anthropology will be prone to the same difficulties as his.  This is because what Girardian theory has to offer the theologian is an account of Christianity as revelation; whereas what the theologian of Catholic persuasion requires in addition is an ecclesial and sacramental paradigm.  Revelation involves a momentary passage from one state to another, a light that comes on in the human heart.  It is the moment when the resurrected Christ offers forgiveness to his penitent persecutors – a moment repeated whenever a human individual passes over from the persecuting mob into the ranks of Christ’s supporters and disciples.  A paradigm, on the other hand, constitutes the recipe for the maintenance of a steady orientation – keeping alight the light that has been lit.  In practice, it is a life lived as far as possible without scapegoating or sacrifice, either in relation to Christ, or in relation to one’s fellow human beings.  In other words, the difference between revelation and paradigm is the difference between entering into a new state, and continuing in that state.  To fuse them, as Alison does, can only be a mistake.  In effect, it prolongs indefinitely the moment of conversion, and fixes the new state of positive mimesis permanently in the relational structure that characterizes the moment of transition from negative mimesis which marked its inception.  The paradoxical formulation of the ‘willing victim’ says it all: a victim who is ‘willing’ has, by definition, ceased, or is currently ceasing, to be a victim.  Thus, if Christ could be said to have occupied that role, he transformed it into something else by the very act of occupying it.  To speak of the ‘willing victim’ in relation to a Christian paradigm is consequently to hang onto what, in that transformative moment, is already ceasing to be, and to fail ever to reach the point at which sacrifice has finally been left behind.  If, as Alison would have it, we stand in respect to God permanently in the role of the ‘penitent persecutor’, the generalization of this paradigm will involve the perpetuation of relational structures of victimage (albeit in an anti-sacrificial mode) that are the absolute antithesis of spiritual (or literal) ‘good parenting’.  Good parent:child relationships do not express themselves in the language of Girardian sacrifice. 

The relation of Christian sacrament and revelation unspecified (Daly)

Robert Daly’s position, which represents the third of our four possible theological responses to Girardian theory, avoids the pitfalls that beset Alison’s by appearing to disavow the idea of the Church as a sacramental community.  The ‘Christian sacrifice’ which he associates with the authentic Eucharist has apparently ceased to have anything to do with ritual.  It is the ethical practice of Christians, the sacrifice of self, modelled on the Son’s relation to the Father.  In Girardian terms, it is the practice of positive mimesis.  And the Eucharist in which it is symbolically expressed is not, fundamentally, a sacrifice in the ritual sense.  Daly’s account of its development focuses exclusively on the eucharistic prayer, which he evidently sees as the essence of Christian worship and as detachable from the various ritual accretions which which it subsequently becomes overlaid.[26]  Accordingly, Daly does not identify Christian sacrifice in either its ethical or symbolic expression with the de-mythologizing of scapegoating in the way that Alison does.  That task he assigns, like Girard, to the Gospel texts themselves.  Thus, paradigm and revelation are maintained in separation, and Christian sacrifice, including Eucharist and positive mimesis, is left free to designate a purely ‘spiritualized’ and personal concept.  Spiritualization in this sense is regarded as altogether at odds with institutionality, and establishes Christian sacrifice on a trajectory that Daly sees as epitomized in the strongly anti-ritualized notions of Philo and Clement of Alexandria before achieving its consummate expression in Augustine’s account of Christian sacrifice in The City of God (X.6).   Daly seems little concerned to articulate the relation of this ethical Christian sacrifice to the ritual sacrifice of Girard.  But his views are sufficiently close to Girard’s own, that, had he felt the need to make that relation explicit, he could easily have found what he needed in Girard’s own account of the good and the bad sacrifice as exemplified by the judgment of Soloman (Things Hidden, pp. 237-244).  According to Girard’s interpretation of well known story, the good sacrifice of positive mimesis is expressed in the true mother’s forfeiture of her rights to the child, while the bad sacrifice is represented, for both women, by the slaughter of the child in order to satisfy their mimetic desire.      

The problem with Daly’s response to the theological challenge of Girard’s theory lies not on the side of its adequacy to that theory, but on the side of its theological consistency.  Daly characterizes the Eucharist as ‘non-performative’ (pp. 16-17) – a view which he evidently believes himself to have derived from the work of Edward Kilmartin,[27] and some other recent liturgical studies (e.g. Cesare Giraudo and Hans Bernhard Meyer) summed up in Kilmartin’s book (pp. 247-338).  The latter argue, against both the ‘modern average Catholic theology of the eucharistic sacrifice’ and the ‘mystery theology’ of Odo Casel and his followers, that the Eucharist operates, not by ‘re-presenting’ the passion of Christ to the participants of the mass, but by ‘re-presenting’ those participants to the passion of Christ.  Daly, however, takes this to imply that the Eucharist is ‘non-performative’ – a view that drives his eucharistic theology in a radically subjective and individualist direction.  Thus he argues that ‘a properly Trinitarian theology (…) totally excludes that sacrifice can mean that something is done to something or, even worse, that something is done to someone.  It sees sacrifice as a totally personal – indeed the person-constituting event par excellence (Daly’s italics).’  This personal event he subsequently defines as ‘saying yes to the self-giving love of God in their lives’ (p. 22).

 Although Daly appeals to Kilmartin in support of this subjectivism, the idea that eucharistic action is non-performative seems to be contradicted by the explicit formulations of Kilmartin and Giraudo (see Kilmartin: pp. 341, 350, 360, 371, 380, 331).  On the other hand, it is entirely consistent with aspects of Daly’s characterization of the authentically Christian sacrifice of the early Church to which we alluded in the previous paragraph: namely, its antithetical relation to ‘institutionalization’ (Daly, p. 69), and its epitomous expression in the strongly anti-ritualized formulations of Philo and Clement of Alexandria (pp. 85-93).  Furthermore, it is also, as we have seen, entirely in accord with his development of a Girardian theological position.  Indeed, like any Girard-based position, Daly’s theology has no option but to insist on the non-performativity of Christian ‘sacrifice’, because the only kind of sacrificial performativity the theory will allow is, as we have already seen, the social performativity of the ritual enactment of primordial scapegoating.  It might seem perverse to insist on this fit between the understanding of eucharistic action as non-performative and the advocacy of Girardian theory, when it is something to which Daly himself draws no attention.   Indeed, it is one of the remarkable things about Sacrifice Unveiled that its discussion of Girardian theory omits any allusion to the idea of Christian sacrifice that constitutes the primary theme of the earlier part of the book.  The fact remains, however (whether Daly intended it or not), that his non-performative understanding of Eucharist – which seems altogether unsupported by the eucharistic theology of Kilmartin – seems to accord perfectly with his development of a Girardian theological position.

The question remains, however, whether Daly really does hold this position.  The obvious objection is that, if eucharistic ‘action’ is an event entirely contained within the subjective consciousness of the individual participants, then it is not evident how it is distinguishable from any other form of personal devotion – and, indeed, why it should be needed at all.   As Gregory Dix[28] puts it, ‘recollection of the passion and redemption (…) are commonplaces of every sincere christian’s spiritual life, in no way limited to the performance of the eucharist’:

Unless the eucharistic action in itself effects something specific and sui generis both in the Church which performs it corporately and in the individual who takes part, it is difficult to see why the eucharist should necessarily be preferred to other forms of corporate worship.  (p. 601) 

Adherence to such a position might therefore be expected to go along with the de-institutionalizing theological tendencies that we find associated with the more radical manifestations of Protestant reform that Dix is discussing in the above citation.  Given the avowedly ‘pastoral’ objectives of Daly’s study, one might expect, in the light of his eucharistic theology, to encounter a tendency to minimize the role of the sacraments in the social life of the Church.  So what are we to make of statements such as that the Eucharist celebration is ‘the high-point of the Church’s being and activity’ (p. 183), or that it is ‘the source and summit, the centre and foundation of all that the Church is and is supposed to be’ (p.158)?  We are left – to an even greater extent that in the case of Mark Heim – with the sense of an unresolved tension, and the impression that Daly may not have adequately thought through the implications of Girardian theory for the development of a consistent position on the Church as sacramental community.  

 

The relation of Christian sacrament and Girardian revelation explained on the basis of a broadened (not exclusively Girardian) anthropology (Schwager)

Plainly unsatisfactory as it stands, Daly’s position raises the question whether it would not be possible to develop – within the context of mimetic theory – a more whole-heartedly sacramental understanding of Christian sacrifice than Daly’s, which would trace back to Christ’s own institution the ritual form of eucharistic practice as well as its ethical content.  The problem here would be to explain the existence of that ritual form in the context of a theory that understands the Christian revelation as the demystification of all ritual forms.  The obvious solution is Alison’s: namely, to understand eucharistic ritual as a kind of anti-sacrifice.  This neatly brings sacrifice and sacrament together, and does not require us to go beyond the resources of Girardian theory itself in order to explain the sacramental phenomenon.  But it has serious problems too, as we have seen.  The alternative is to keep sacrifice and sacrament separate, making of first the ritual phenomenon described by Girard, and of the second the unique form of non-sacrificial ritual phenomenon involved in the dissemination of the Christian paradigm of positive mimesis.  This is the solution of Girard’s long-standing theological collaborator, Raymund Schwager.  The difficulty of this approach lies in the additional requirements it makes of the theologian.  First, he must specify a content for Christian non-sacrificial paradigm that is other than the mere deconstructive mirroring of the phenomenon of Girardian sacrifice.  Supplying such content involves him in going beyond the limits of what is available within the theory itself.  Second, he must – if he means to keep within a Girardian framework – explain the relation between the Christian non-sacrificial ritual which he has described and Girardian sacrifice.          

                Schwager meets both of these requirements by recourse to his idea of a ‘salvation drama’ (Heilsdrama).  This is a core element of his theology that is quite independent of Girardian theory, and could even be claimed to have an anthropological basis of its own, since the notion of covenant that underpins it is explored anthropologically in its relation to non-Christian religions.  To understand how Schwager responds to the problems posed by a Girardian anthropology, therefore, involves saying a few words about the ‘salvation drama’.

                This represents the history of mankind’s relation to God as a series of challenges and responses.  Humankind repeatedly fails to respond adequately to divine challenge, producing situations that are other than might have been hoped for; but God enters into those situations in order to turn evil into good.  Each new intervention involves a fresh challenge to which humans may, once again, fail to respond adequately, and will produce new situations, which remain open to further divine intervention.  It should be noted that this is essentially the pattern of human:divine relations that we find set forth in the historical and prophetic books of the OT.  According to Schwager, it plays out once again, this time, to some more definitive effect, in the narrative of the NT.  Christ proclaims the Kingdom of God (challenge).  When the Jewish world reacts with hostility (response), he perseveres – and the Kingdom which he continues to preach comes increasingly to be identified with his personal messiahship.  By continuing his mission in this way (challenge), he causes his enemies to bring a manifest judgment on themselves through the judgment they believe themselves to be bringing against him and his Kingdom (response).  (This is where Girardian scapegoating comes in).  With the return of the Christ in peace and forgiveness (challenge), the people are given a second chance to respond, after his death, and in the Spirit, to the message to which they failed to respond before his death (response). 

So how is the content of the non-sacrificial ritual paradigm, inaugurated, according to Schwager, in the Lord’s Supper, to be defined in relation to this salvation drama?  What Christ enacts symbolically in the Lord’s Supper is his renewed challenge to humankind in the face of an initial response of hostility and resistance.  This takes the form of a continued offering of the Kingdom, which is now, given the rejection of his initial message, increasingly identified with his own person (p.113).  It is this proclamation of the Kingdom through the offering up of oneself (symbolised in the breaking of bread) that is the content of the paradigm that Christ’s followers are called upon to imitate in both ritual and ethical actions.  Such a paradigm would certainly correspond to what Girard-based theologies have termed positive mimesis, and it fits very well the pattern of Christian ethical sacrifice for which Daly seeks the authority of Augustine.  The difference with regard to the latter is, of course, that Schwager’s eucharistic paradigm is capable of assuming a symbolic and ritual form.  However, its content is not identical with the revelation of scapegoating – and it it is here that Schwager diverges from Alison. 

This brings us to the consideration of the second of the two requirements that we stipulated for an adequate Girard-based theology: namely, that it should be possible to specify the nature of the relationship between the eucharistic paradigm and Girardian revelation.  Schwager’s account of the Lord’s Supper allows us to do this.  Far from implicating Christ’s followers permanently in the role of forgiven persecutors, the breaking of the bread as Schwager interprets it constitutes an action that Christ means for his friends and which he addresses in faith and across time to a future beyond his death, when he knows those friends will be able to receive worthily, and, in so doing, replicate his own action for themselves.  In other words, it establishes a paradigm of positive mimesis for those whose relationship to Christ has already ceased to be one of persecution.  (The implication that the Lord’s Supper is not itself ‘the first Eucharist’ but the basis of the subsequent (post-Pentacostal) development finds ample support in contemporary eucharistic theology (Kilmartin, pp. 366-67).)  At the same time, while not itself primarily focused on the revelation of scapegoating, the paradigm of relationship established by the Lord’s Supper constitutes the condition of possibility for revelation in that it offers the participants a perspective from which the workings of the mechanism may subsequently be apprehended.  Thus Schwager distinguishes two modes of relation with Christ, of which the first – the paradigm – is for the inner circle of the Church, the second – the revelation – is for the world at large.

Schwager shares the desire of Alison and Daly to see the Christian paradigm of positive mimesis, the imitatio Christi, expressed in sacramental terms.  In the case of Alison and Daly, we see that a sacramental theology cannot simply be bolted onto a Girardian anthropology.  Schwager, however, succeeds in demonstrating how such a theology can be made to articulate with it – admittedly in a rather complex way.  Like Alison, he offers a theological interpretation of Girardian scapegoating as original sin.  This does not, however, lead, of itself, to a sacramental theology (as we see from Schwager’s earlier and more comprehensively Girardian study, Do We Need Scapegoats?), but, like Girard’s own work, leaves us poised in the aftermath of an apocalyptic revelation such as we find foretold in the Psalmist and the prophets (Scapegoats, pp. 220-7).  What is needed in addition in order to make that Girard-based theology properly sacramental is Schwager’s essentially non-Girardian explanation of the eucharistic paradigm as an expression of a distinctively covenantal understanding of the relation in Christ between God and humankind.

                Schwager’s position, therefore, meets the requirements we specified.  Its only weakness lies in the doubtful  plausibility of the argument that (Girardian) sacrifice and (Christian) sacrament constitute distinct social phenomena – the former a mystification of scapegoating, the latter a symbolic and paradigmatic expression of the essential mode of Christian relationship – especially given the apparent isometry of the roles these rituals occupy in the reproduction of their respective communities.  Schwager offers no response to this objection, nor is it easy to imagine, given this isometry, what such a response could be.  Here we have what appears to be a weakness inherent in any conceivable Girard-based theological position.

The impact of a Girard-based theory of ritual sacrifice on the conceptualization of sacrifice

 

From the challenges that a Girardian anthropology poses for the development of theological ideas we turn now to its implications for the understanding that these theologians entertain of generic sacrifice.  The Girardian concept of ritual sacrifice is relatively easy to pin down, unlike its understanding of Church and Eucharist, and has diverged little from its initial formulation in Violence and the Sacred – despite the criticism of social anthropologists and others.[29]  Girardian anthropology has occasioned a considerable literature on hominization arising out of an ongoing dialogue with the disciplines of ethology and evolutionary anthropology;[30] there has also been an interest in applying a Girardian perspective to other mythologies – such as those of early India.[31]  But these represent extensions, rather than developments, of the initial theory.              

The most conspicuous feature of sacrifice as conceptualized by Girardians is its inseparability from violence.  The various religious rituals that we find scattered through archaic societies are displacements of human sacrifice; human sacrifice, in turn, has its origin in a primordial act of scapegoating, than which nothing more violent could be imagined.  Contemporary rites often retain this violent character, but, whether they do or not, their effectiveness ultimately depends, as we have seen, on the miscognized violence of the past, since their socially beneficial divinization of the victim/god is only maintained by a ritual replication of the primordial act.  Thus present-day ritual action, even if not itself violent, colludes with the violence of the past. 

                A second feature of Girard’s concept of ritual sacrifice, which particularly marks its oppositional relation to Christian revelation, is its entirely instinctual character.  Girardian sacrifice is inherently blind to its own ends.  It evokes a primordial act of scapegoating that preceded any capacity for reflection, and it does so with a view to perpetuating the state of blindness that characterized the primordial act.  Girardian sacrifice is, therefore, by definition, an action the logic of which escapes all rational and ethical insight.  It is, in the proper sense, instinctual, and Girard frequently describes it as a mechanism.  This is not to say, of course, that sacrifice does not offer accounts of itself – in the shape of the myths that accompany sacrificial rituals.  But such accounts are, for Girard, pure rationalizations.  The genuine account of sacrifice is one that it will never give for itself, but must, as we have said, be given for it by Christian revelation. 

Girard’s characterization of sacrifice as violent is probably shared by the majority of sacrifice theorists, and finds some support in anthropology and the history of religions.  Schwager, who may, in this context, be enlarging the scope of his anthropological reference to avoid over-dependence on Girard, rightly places Girard in the tradition that includes Freud, Jensen and Burkert (Drama, p. 172).  Of course, the latter do not, like Girard, associate that violence with scapegoating.  But the focus on violence certainly places him in the mainstream.  The more controversial aspect of his theory concerns the characterization of sacrifice as instinctual.  This is not widely shared by contemporary anthropologists for whom attention to indigenous accounts is a matter of principle.  It is probably an aspect of Girard’s thought that owes more to Freud – and, in particular, to Totem and Tabou.[32]

                Both features of Girardian sacrifice – its violence and its instinctual and mechanistic quality – remind us of the first and second points in the characterization of sacrifice that we earlier attributed to sacrifice as metaphor.  The discontinuity between salvation event and OT cult, and the resulting characterization of archaic sacrificial ritual as devoid of ethical content to be found in sacrifice as metaphor positions, emerge with even greater sharpness in the Girard-based anti-sacrificial positions.  In both cases the antithesis between ‘history of religions’ sacrifice and Christian salvation event tends to polarize around an opposition between ritual and ethical religious forms on the basis of the characterization of ritual as essentially instinctual and violent.  The nature of the ethical is seen to lie in the liberation of religion from these ritually imposed features.  With sacrifice as metaphor it was the terminology of metaphor that tended to frame the opposition, and the ethical was conceptualized – somewhat vaguely – in terms of the inward and spiritual.  The anthropological orientation introduced by Girard-based theologies characterizes ritual in terms of its socially reproductive function – as socio-symbolic; accordingly, the ethical sphere of Christian religion, which, as in sacrifice as metaphor, is characterized in opposition to ritual, assumes a more precise and sociological character, as the realm of interdividual relationships.

                So the anthropological question raised by both types of non-sacrificial position – sacrifice as metaphor and the anti-sacrificial – is whether the relation between ritual and ethical religious forms is rightly expressed in these oppositional terms.  On this issue, the sacrificial revisionist positions that we investigate in Chapter 3 will be found to take precisely the opposite view.  This poses the question:  what is the relationship between ritual and ethical religious forms?  Ultimately, its resolution will require us to place the theological arguments in the broader context of the investigation of religious ethicization in non-theological disciplines (Chapter 5).  It will, of course, also enable us to form a judgment on the issues relating more particularly to Girard-based theory: namely, the violence and instinctual nature of sacrifice.  First, however, we must turn to another strand of antisacrificial theology that raises somewhat different anthropological issues – namely, Christian gift theory. 

A postscript on Schwager’s understanding on ritual sacrifice

Our remarks hitherto concern the notion of sacrifice adopted by Heim, Alison, Daly and others, who all adhere to the anthropological principles set out in Violence and the Sacred, and make little or no recourse to any anthropological work other than Girard’s.  Schwager alone seeks to broaden somewhat the anthropological basis of his theology through a wider-ranging consideration of anthropological treatments of sacrifice and vengeance.  This arises above all in relation to his development of the notion of covenant as a scriptural template for a ‘dramatic’ understanding of the salvation event, the importance of which is attested by references at the introduction and conclusion of his five-stage representation of the NT salvation drama (Drama, pp. 19-25; 154-5). Particularly significant, from an anthropological point of view, is the way in which Schwager contrasts the covenantal nature of the Jewish relationship to its God with understandings of the human:divine relationship to be found in neighbouring cultures.  Here Schwager demonstrates a ethnographic comparativism that appears to owe little to Girardian anthropology. 

Schwager contrasts the kind of human:divine relationship implied by the covenant with the ‘ancient oriental ideology’, according to which the god is the progenitor of his people – or, at least, the progenitor of their kingly representative (p. 20).  The relationship with the stranger Deity who chooses a people for Himself constitutes a difference as regards the ancient oriental ideology that has enormous implications – especially for the exercise of the obligation of vengeance that represents, according to Schwager’s source, Raymond Verdier,[33] the foundation of the social bond in archaic societies.  Where the god is progenitor, the interests of his cult are inevitably implicated in the interests of his kingly descendants.  But the God of Israel is not bound in this way – with the result that the obligation of vengeance, which guarantees, in cultures dominated by the ancient oriental ideology, a hierarchical social order, finds itself liberated so as to become a principle of universal justice.  This introduces the possibility that we see developed with the Hebrew prophets.

Faith did not make the existing order inviolable, but rather desacralized it (Jeremiah 7:1-22; 3-13) and frequently stigmatized it as a brutal order of violence (Ezekiel 22:3-13; Hosea 4:1ff.; Micah 7:5ff.). (p. 20)

The same identification of the covenantal relation as the essence of the Judeo-Christian differentia – and the same contrast with the sacrificial cults of Israel’s neighbours – occurs elsewhere in Schwager’s work (Scapegoats, p. 111).  While clearly not deriving from Girardian theory, it finds interesting parallels in a surprisingly wide range of theological studies – including other (non-Girardian) anti-sacrificial and even sacrificial revisionist theology.  Schwager’s anti-sacrificialbias, however, tends to move the contrast between covenantal and pagan religion in the direction of an opposition between covenant and ritual sacrifice (a tendency we shall see once again in the case of John Milbank).  Thus, in a passage of Do We Need Scapegoats? ,  the religion of the convenant is set against the background of an image Schwager takes from the Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh, of the gods descending like birds on the sacrificial victim (p. 11).  This effectively characterizes the covenantal relation in opposition to the kind of human:divine relation in which the deity is dependent on the sacrificial system rather than the other way round.  The Deity of the covenant is thereby distinguished on the grounds of the reality of His existence, and the resulting ‘personal’ nature of the human relationship that it is possible to have with Him.  Of course, this raises the question of the significance of the OT sacrificial cult, which might seem, at least in its outward form, to resemble the Babylonian rite. 

What is the place of sacrifice in the OT?  In the substantial treatment which Schwager gives this issue (Drama, pp. 172-7), Schwager recognizes the cultic sacrifice of OT as an ‘unresolved problem’ (p. 182).  But, after an extended survey of the options, comes down in favour of tracing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments ‘not through the cultic line, but through the line of criticism of the cult, which emphasizes obedience’ (p. 182).  This is, of course, entirely consistent with an anti-sacrificial position.  

2.2.2 The anti-sacrificial position: 2. theology based on gift theory

We come now to the second version of the anti-sacrificial position in theology, according to which, as we said in our introductory remarks, the salvation event is characterized by an oppositional relation to sacrifice.  Here, sacrifice is also understood as a social practice which Christianity resists; but, in this case, it does so not through a demystifying revelation, as with Girard-based theology, but with an alternative form of social practice – that of the ‘gift’.  Our task will be more complicated here than it was with Girard based anti-sacrificial theology.  The underlying theory of sacrifice developed by Girard remains consistent for all Girard-based theologies, and is easily located in a couple of texts by Girard.  The theories of the gift underlying gift theology, on the other hand, vary considerably from one author to another, and develop in the course of exchanges between them.  In what follows, I shall try to outline the parameters of the gift theory by tracing key moments in this debate.

                Gift theory – if it may so be called – is also a relatively complex phenomenon.  Fundamental to all its manifestations is the whole of post-modernism and its critique of ‘economism’.  The gift frequently finds a place in this post-modern thinking as the locus of the ‘aneconomic’ – and it is this aneconomy of the gift that becomes theologically central for gift theology.  But post-modern understandings of the gift frequently remain at a largely philosophical and abstract level.  In gift theory proper, the gift must also cease to be a mere philosophical idea (as in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Marion) and assume the aspect of a fundamental human behaviour.  Thirdly, there is an element of gift theory crucial to gift theology that emerges solely in Christian manifestations of gift theory – though to different degrees and in different ways.  This is the association of economism with rejected traditionalist understandings of sacrifice.  It is largely to the extent that this third element is present that gift theory becomes anti-sacrificial in its implications.  In general, it is primarily commodity relations and traditionalist conceptions of the Christian salvation event that fall under the condemnation of being ‘sacrificial’; where archaic sacrificial ritual gets drawn into the analysis, it is often only by implication, and on a rather secondary basis.  This is unfortunate as regards my own investigation, but not fatal to it.  It explains why, in the anthropological section of our analysis of gift theology we will sometimes be reduced to pursuing the logical implications of gift theology rather than its explicit formulations.

The following section will explore the distinctive gift theories that arise in the work of Jacques Derrida and John Milbank. Milbank’s gift theory – which constitutes the basis of an anti-sacrificial theology – will be examined: first, in its earlier phase prior to Milbank’s response to Derrida’s 1991 monograph, Given Time;[34]second, in the more socio-anthropological turn that it takes as a result.  Derrida’s gift theory figures in the following section on account of the indispensable contribution it makes to Christian gift theology through that encounter.  First, on Milbank (pushing the latter’s work in a more socio-anthropological direction); second, via the encounter of Milbank and Derrida, on subsequent gift theology – including that of Tanner, whose own gift theory, described at the end of the following section, develops out of a reaction to the work of both Derrida and Milbank.[35] A third figure frequently associated  with theological gift theory, Jean-Luc Marion, whose thinking is no less a response to Derrida, does not figure in our discussion of gift theology because our interest is primarily in the Atonement debate, with which Marion is not so directly engaged.   

Background

Gift theory in Derrida and Milbank

Milbank shares with Derrida the postmodern worldview according to which the ‘infinitely many possible versions of truth’ are inseparable from ‘particular narratives’ and ‘outside a plot, one cannot imagine how objects and subjects would be, nor even if they would be at all’.[36]  The dominant modernist narratives, seen from this point of view, constitute a hegemonic enterprise to secure peace by ‘drawing boundaries around “the same”, and excluding “the other”’.(The Future of Love (FL), p. 342)  The sociological  – indeed, ethnographical – turn in Milbank’s postmodernism is present from the outset.  As a theologian steeped in Augustine, Milbank automatically associates modern forms of hegemonic discourse with the daemonic civic cults of pagan antiquity.  These are, as Milbank sees it, no less economicist than modern totalizing discourses in that they sacrificially purchase a groundless, and ultimately empty, trans-temporal identity (such as ‘being Roman’) at the price of real flesh and blood.  Also, they function in much the same way by drawing boundaries that serve to guarantee, against the perceived violence of the world, a space of temporary peace and security – though, from Milbank’s Augustinian perspective, this is at the cost of a kind of collusion in the violence they seek to resist.  The latter tendency Milbank describes as spatialization. 

The possibility of a genuine alternative to the modern hegemonic enterprise in the shape of the gift is found, Milbank claims, in Augustinian Christianity, which (as we see from City of God) seems to Milbank to oppose to the rule of economicist sacrifice, in the shape of the Church, the possibility of a universal order of humanity, the embodiment of which – being real, not daemonic and so empty – requires no sacrificial exactions and imposes no boundaries. This social entity knows no form of sacred offering other than the abandonment of self that arises naturally from faith in a constantly arriving reign of peace and abundance that ultimately guarantees against all violence and impoverishment.  Such an offering finds everday expression in a practice of giving, liberated from all pre-occupation with the means of its continuance, and free to respond appropriately and creatively to every situation of exchange. 

                Milbank sees in this notion of gift the possibility of a kind of improvised, grass roots social ordering, of which the only rule is that on which its own continued freedom depends: namely, the rule of not falling into sacrificial and daemonic self-limitation.  (The latter condition reflects Milbank’s commitment to an Augustinian ‘privative understanding’ of the falll as an impoverishment of being – in this case, the impoverishment of our essentially exchangest humanity through fear-induced boundary-setting.) The possibility that our individually ordered free acts should ultimately turn out to constitute retrospectively, and sub specie aeternitatis, a peaceful order that we could not have pre-conceived seems, for Milbank, to offer a genuine Christian alternative to the violence of hegemonic discourses, on the one hand, and the acceptance of a postmodern value relativism, on the other. 

Without this Christian alternative, we are left, according to Milbank, with postmodernism in its ‘nihilistic’ form.  This is represented pre-eminently, for gift theologians, by the worldview of Derrida.  The latter warrants our attention at this point, because it, too, issues in a kind of gift theory – which is highly relevant to my account of gift theory here, because of its crucial role in catalysing the gift theory debate in theology, and on account of its enunciation of implications of postmodernism that the gift theologians see Christianity as the only means to escape.

This secular understanding of gift emerges, most famously in Derrida’s 1991 monograph, Given Time.  The latter appears to offer a rather unsympathetic critique of Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of the gift phenomenon, his Essay on the Gift; Derrida attributes what he considers the evident contradictions and ‘non-sense’ of Mauss’s argument in that text to the non-realizability – and thus non-actuality – of the phenomenon that Mauss purports to describe.  So, ultimately, it is Derrida’s characterization of the gift, rather than Mauss’s, that constitutes the real topic of Derrida’s monograph. The gift, Derrida claims, is nothing other than the ever futile attempt to transcend the inevitable economism of human relations. The gift is, by definition, disinterested; yet, in any envisageable real-life actualization, it must create debts (of gratitude and recognition, if nothing else) which belie its disinterested character.  However, as Derrida makes clear both in Given Time and other contexts, his point is not that we should – or can – simply give up on the gift.  For, unactualizable as it may be, the gift remains something to which humans are morally called – a ‘necessary impossibility’ that marks empty site of an obligation on which we cannot morally renege.  So Mauss’s ‘folly’, according to Derrida, lies not in the choice of his topic, but in the decision to pursue it in the manner of an empirical fact rather than as a philosophical conundrum.  

                We may conclude that, while both Milbank and Derrida evoke the gift in the context of the defence of postmodern anti-economism and in relation to the possibility of the aneconomic, the character of the ‘gift’ that emerges as the social expression of that possibility is altogether different in the two cases.  With Derrida, all social exchange is tainted with economism; so the real gift involves an aspiration to transcend our social nature in the direction of an impossible ideal of absolute unilateralism.  With Milbank, by contrast, social exchange is tainted with economism only where it is ‘sacrificial’; so the aneconomic does not involve exiting the social, and the gift can be actualized in our real-life reciprocity, as Mauss himself would indicate.  The distinctiveness of the gift, he argues, lies, not in the disinterestedness that, for Derrida, marks its remove from economicist reciprocity, but in the creative freedom that is achieved when reciprocity is liberated from the defensive economicist strategies of sacrifice. 

The catalysing effect of Given Time on Christian theology is most obviously explained by the challenge that an eminent postmodern thinker’s denial of the possibility of the gift represents for Christians who – whether they are postmodern or not – necessarily have, qua Christians, much vested in the notion of a paradigm of Grace that can be realized in everyday acts of reciprocal giving.  Unsurprisingly, therefore, not only Milbank, but Jean-Luc Marion, and subsequently Katherine Tanner, all respond in their various ways by arguing that, in such-an-such cases, the gift can indeed be shown to be actuallized.

Milbank’s 1995 paper, ‘Can a Gift be Given?’, of which the title attests the author’s intention to offer a response to Given Time, shares this general objective.  However, both here, and in later texts, Milbank articulates moral objections to Derrida’s understanding of the gift.  Their general tenor is already suggested in the description I have given above of their respective positions.  Broadly, Milbank views Derrida’s unilateralist ‘impossible necessity’ as a deluded – and consequently immoral and dangerous – aspiration to escape the conditions of human life.  Indeed, in his 1999 paper, ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’,[37] he associates it with the fashionable view that ethics should be founded upon a principle of readiness to forfeit life itself for the sake of the vulnerable other.  This Milbank regards, far from being a guarantee of altruism, as the last ruse of a fanatical drive to achieve a kind of ultimate self-possession, and, to the extent that the principle is actualized, as the very epitome of a sacrificial – and consequently economicist – transaction.  Instead, for Milbank (as he sets out his position in the 2003 text, Being Reconciled (BR)[38] genuine self-abandonment, or what he terms ecstasis, is only achievable within the context of life – and that means social life.  The true gift is ecstatic, because it depends on a faith in the advent of genuine sociality through which happiness is achieved for the individual along with others, and a willingness to take risks, since that genuine sociality is, at the point of giving, always still to be accomplished.  Compared with this real ecstasis, which involves a certain courageous projection of a state of felicity not yet achieved, Derrida’s ideal of self-sacrifice offers only a delusional echo.  For Milbank, the contrast between a ‘genuine’ and a ‘delusional’ form of ecstasis corresponds to the opposition of the terms gift and sacrifice.  Gift is expressed, above all, in the image of ‘conviviality’, which both evokes the material joys of the feast (present and eschatological), and, etymologically, suggests, as the condition of their enjoyment, that the parties be simultaneously (‘con’) living (‘viv’), not – as with the contested position of sacrifice – separately dead. 

However, the shape of the subsequent theological gift theory owes much to the sociological turn that Derrida brings in the postmodernism debate, and here the context in which Given Time frames the philosophical discussion is as influential as anything that Derrida actually says. It is, I suspect, because Derrida speaks, not just – like Heidegger or Marion – of a philosophical concept of gift, but of real-life social practice, and, furthermore, because this, in turn, leads him to engage (albeit superficially and inadequately) with an anthropologist’s account of that social practice as manifested over history, that subsequent theological positions on gift theory revolve, to the extent that they do, around archaic, as well as modern, practices of gift and sacrifice.   This sociological framing of the postmodern debate is not simply something contingent, but probably reflects the development of Derrida’s own views against the background of the French sociological tradition.  I would argue that, to some degree, the development of Milbank’s own views, subsequent to Given Time, reflects his entry into this new territory.  There is an analysis of sacrifice in his 1990 text, Theology and Social Theory,[39] that owes much, as we have seen, to Augustine; but the reader will search in vain there for any reference to Mauss outside the footnotes.  So, in the interests of offering a more complete picture of the postmodern modern engagement with gift and sacrifice, I shall cast a brief glance over the sources of this development, before proceding to examine what it brings to Milbank’s own thinking.

The theologian, Mark C. Taylor,[40] traces the anthropological tendencies of Derrida’s thought to his 1967 paper, ‘From Restricted to General Economy’.[41]  This contains a postmodern critique of the dialectic of the Hegelian grand narrative – one with which the later development of Milbank’s own thinking strongly converges.  Like Milbank, Derrida questions the adequacy of the moment of Hegelian ‘negation’, regarding it as a ‘mere ruse’ to give an impression of dialectical development to what would otherwise be a mere calculus of means and ends. (Taylor, p. 54) This style of argumentation finds wide application in postmodernism to ‘foundational’ discourses of a political and historical nature that appear to legitimate institutions by giving their development an appearance of autonomous finality.  But what chiefly interests us in this paper is the way in which Derrida – to demonstrate the emptiness of Hegel’s negation – contrasts it with the authentic negation he finds in the notion of sacrifice developed by George Bataille, with its valorization of pure extravagance and absolute loss.  Now this understanding of sacrifice clearly marks out the space of the aneconomic, and the space that will be occupied by Derrida’s notion of gift in Given Time.   But it also marks the introduction into the debate about economism, thanks to Bataille, of a genuinely anthropological element.[42]  Bataille’s concept relates to social practice, and makes some (albeit limited) reference to ethnography.  More importantly, however, it offers a counter-reading – or perverse reading – of Mauss’s Essay.[43]  The insistence on sacrifice as absolute negation and excess recuperates an aspect of Mauss’s anthropology – agonistic exchange or potlatch – in a way that subverts Mauss’s own understanding of reciprocity.  Thus when Derrida renews Bataille’s critique of economism in the 1967 paper, this anchors Derrida’s own anti-economist position within a tradition of anthropological reference going back to Mauss himself, and seems to mark, within the critique of economism, a return to intellectual currency of terms which signal the social and religious nature of the aneconomic: namely, sacrifice and gift.  

In the subsequent text, Given Time, however, we find that Maussian gift has entirely displaced Bataillian sacrifice as the primary anthropological locus of the aneconomic, with sacrifice returning in a somewhat secondary role in the 1995 monograph, The Gift of Death.  The latter is left to designate the subclass of the gift constituted by the gift ‘of death’ – a specialization of the term that is no doubt partly attributable to its meaning in everyday usage.[44]  A factor in Derrida’s preference for the language of gift over that of sacrifice is likely to have been the influence of a more philosophical current of thinking about the gift – which it is worth noting of at this point, not only on account of its possible impact on Derrida, but also for its independent impact on the theology that springs from the encounter with Derrida’s texts.  This is the notion of ‘givenness’ (German: Gegebenheit) within the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, and the ‘theological turn’ that this notion received in the work of Jean-Luc Marion.  Derrida himself may have been directly influenced by the terminological coincidence, and the happy isomorphism, between his (and Bataille’s) understanding of the aneconomic and the ‘es gibt’ of Heidegger’s conceptualization of time as the horizon of the eventuation of being.  Marion had already identified the potential of Heidegger’s given-ness for an alternative (‘non-ontological’) theology in God without Being (1982).

So how does Milbank’s engagement with Derrida in his 1995 text, ‘Can a Gift be Given?’ (CGG), contribute to the development of his understanding of the gift?  The first thing to say here is that the broad lines of Milbank’s ‘postmodern Augustianism’ position remain unchanged – including his concepts of gift, sacrifice, and their oppositional relation.  What is new in the 1995 text is his engagement with Maussian reciprocity.  Milbank associates the Christian Augustian understanding of gift, as he has already defined it, with the (largely) archaic social practices of reciprocity described by Mauss.

                On the face of it, this is curious.  For Milbank’s Christian – like Derrida’s secular – notion of gift broadly derives from the modern, common language, definition in terms of freedom from constraint, disinterestedness and personal expression.[45]  (Milbank foregrounds personal expression; Derrida puts all the emphasis on disinterestedness.) What confronts both authors in Mauss’s analysis of archaic practices is a kind of reciprocity that, far from being free, involves the response to, and the creation of, social obligations, and tends towards a uniformity of content.  There are anthropologists who would question whether our common language understanding of gift has anything to do with Maussian reciprocity.  Needless to say, the idea of a single unified social reality of the gift remains the basic assumption of Mauss, Derrida and Milbank, and allows them all, in their different ways, to make potentially universal generalizations.   One should not, however, underestimate the degree of ‘stretch’ this requires in their respective definitions of gift. 

Whereas Derrida understands this gap between modern and archaic notions in terms of the distance between the principle of the gift and its practice, Milbank does so in terms of the separation between the genuine and fully human sociality restored to us in Christianity and the impure or sacrificially impoverished form it assumes outside the Christian dispensation. The former – Christianized – notion (imperfectly conserved in the contemporary common language understanding of gift as free and expressive) points back ultimately to the uncorrupted practice of the prelapsarian past; the practice that Mauss describes, constitutes, in all its real-life variations, what the gift has become in a world corrupted by sin, where the full reality of human sociality emerges only incipiently. This understanding of the relationship between modern and archaic conduces to a more gradualist formulation of the relationship of gift and economism than we find in Derrida.   For Derrida, the gift, in order to be a gift, must exhibit the properties of total freedom and disinterest; the distinction is non-gradable.  Milbank, by contrast, conceptualizes the gift as ‘non-identical repetition’, or ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’,  the ‘gift-ness’ of the gift being constituted in the element of delay in the response to an earlier transaction, and of non-identity of its content (i.e. what is given) with the content of the transaction to which it responds.  (Both of these elements – delay and non-identity – allow, it will be noted, of a certain expressive freedom.)  This definition is not, like Derrida’s, a black and white affair.  Milbank’s gradualism is consistent with his view that the salvation event involves, at least in its social aspect, not the unveiling of something previously unheard of (as though Christianity were to mark a clean break with all sociality as it had hitherto existed), but a purification of the archaic in the direction of a more genuinely human – hence also more genuinely social – kind of sociality. 

I would conclude that Milbank’s engagement with Mauss (via Derrida) enables him to see the Christian paradigm in socio-anthropological terms, as he might not have done (any more than Girard), had he made the advent of the aneconomic dependent upon the salvation event.  Milbank’s understanding of the Christian aneconomic thus takes on board an important element of empirical anthropology: the impurities of the archaic gift can be described in terms of those features of the archaic gift as described by social anthropologists that distinguish it from the Christian ideal of Augustine.  These emerge in Milbank’s engagement with an ethnography of the archaic gift that goes well beyond that of Mauss himself, extending into more contemporary social anthropology; also, as we shall see in greater detail below, in the contrast he develops between the sacrificial symbolism of those archaic practices and the non-sacrificial symbolism of the covenantal practice he regards as distinctive of Judaeo-Christianity. 

It will come as no surprise in the light of what I have already said about the relationship of gift and sacrifice in Milbank’s theology that those  impurities turn out to be none other than the features of the archaic gift that render it sacrificial.  Milbank’s earlier texts, it will be remembered, equate the fallenness of the gift with pars pro toto sacrifice, whereby real human substance is forfeited against the promise of an abstract trans-temporal identity, and with the investing of the polis with city-walls, or spatialization. Unlike the notion of gift, this notion of sacrifice has already received an anthropological characterization in the shape of the understanding Milbank derives from Augustine of the cultic definition of the pagan city.  In CGG, however, he seeks to show the embodiment of that notion in the concrete practices and structures described by social anthropologists.  I will give more detail below in the section dedicated to Milbank’s conceptualization of sacrifice.  Here suffice it to say that the idea of exact and circular repetition (as opposed to prelapsarian asymmetric repetition) suggests, on the one hand, the uniformization of gift content required for that giving to acquire the symbolic character we see in religious and ritualistic behaviour, on the other, the self-limiting and spatializing implications of this symbolic determination of social space.  Thus the violent correlations of spatializing and totalizing practice that Augustine opposes to Christianian ecclesial sociality may be deduced from the character of real-life symbolic gift practices observed by relatively contemporary social anthropology.   

Tanner’s anthropology of the gift

Like all gift theologians, Tanner insists contra Derrida on the ‘possibility’ of the gift.  Furthermore, her anthropology resembles what we find in other gift theology as to its embodiment of the aneconomic, its basis in everyday social practice, and its oppositional relation to a transactionalist notion of sacrifice.  Its distinctiveness lies in its development of one particular aspect of the common language understanding of gift: its unconditionality – and, in this fundamental respect, it differs from the anthropology of gift theories that focus on other aspects, such as, in the case of Derrida and Milbank, respectively, its disinterestedness and expressivity.  By unconditionality Tanner means the absence of constraint or obligation either on donor or recipient.  In respect to this absolute freedom, Tanner’s gift represents the antithesis of the quid pro quo of commodity exchange in which everything has its price.  When actualized on the political level in an ‘economy of grace’, its shapes a society very different from the one instituted purely through economic transactions. 

                Tanner’s notion, like Milbank’s, develops partly out of a reaction against Derrida’s theory.  What particularly attracts her criticism here is Derrida’s idea that gift is necessarily disinterested – a requirement that, as we have already seen, Derrida takes so far as to declare the gift impossible on the grounds its unachievability.  Derrida’s notion depends, she argues, on an everyday language understanding that restricts the aneconomic to the private/personal sphere of ethical intention.  The problem about such an understanding, from Tanner’s perspective, is its implicit collusion with the notion of an absolute separation of the private/personal and the public/political spheres, and the monopolization of the latter – the sphere of power – by economicist relationality.  The development of the disinterested gift, culminating in Derrida, is thus a corollary of the increasing hegemony of an unmitigated economism in the domain where power is exercised – and Tanner, like Carrier, sees this schema as historically embodied in the emergence of commodity capitalism from the later eighteenth century and the resulting institution of a public/political sphere from which gift relations are effectively excluded.  Needless to say, such a notion of the disinterested gift is attributable not to Christianity itself, but to a corruption of the Christian ideal supportive of the liberal capitalist status quo.  It is therefore in opposition to this ultimately secularized paradigm that Tanner develops her own notion of an authentically Christian gift of alms that refuses the separation of the private/personal from the public/political, and reclaims a place within the public and political sphere for forms of human interaction not actuated by economic gain, thereby threatening the hegemony of economics over the political.  Of course, there is a danger, which Tanner acknowledges, that charitable practice can itself perpetuate economic marginalization through the creation of charity enclaves.  Tanner’s blueprint, however, is for the fullest possible integration of aneconomic unilateralism into mainstream economic life.  The result is a kind of aneconomic economics – or, as Tanner herself terms it, an ‘economy of grace’.

                Tanner notion of gift seems also to be developed out of a reaction against Milbank’s. 

This may be seen in their contrasting evaluation of unilateralism and reciprocity.  Milbank sees the Christian gift as ultimately continuous with archaic reciprocity (as represented in Mauss’ study) – of which it is a ‘purification’.  Tanner’s ‘gift of grace’ is characterized in radical opposition to Maussian reciprocity on almost every point: it is unconditional (where the Maussian gift is obligated); entirely alienated (where the Maussian gift is inalienable); non-productive of relationships (where the Maussian gift is the principal means through which relationships are generated).  To expand on this last point, which marks a fundamental difference with the concepts of Mauss and Milbank – Tanner’s gift is notprimarily concerned with establishing social relations at all, but solely with the meeting of human need.  There is consequently no continuity, on Tanner’s view, between Maussian exchange and either the Christian gift of alms, or everyday contemporary notions of the gift like those of Derrida or Carrier, which may be supposed to originate in a perversion of the Christian paradigm.  While Mauss’s theory evidently cannot, on Tanner’s view, account either for the phenomenon of Christian gift or its recent secularized avatars, there remains the secondary question whether it even gives an adequate account of the social practices which constitute Mauss’s primary subject – and, if not, what alternative account of such practices might be available to the gift theologist.  These issues are by no means unimportant for the evaluation of Tanner’s own anthropology.  For if, like some readers of Mauss, we were to suppose a pre-Christian world that was not dominated by economism, we would have to ask what relevance Tanner’s anti-transactionalist gospel could possibly have had for its original recipients.  Tanner does not address this issue directly – though she engages with the Maussian material for the purposes of contesting his interpretation of them.  However, her discussion of archaic reciprocity tends towards the position of those anthropologists who criticize Mauss for exaggerating the distinction between capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of social practice and see the world of archaic sociality as not untouched by a kind of economism.  This would indicate a sceptical view of Maussian theory even in respect to its application to archaic social practices.    

The impact of gift theology on the conceptualization of the salvation event

The kind of gift theories outlined above pose some of the same challenges for theology as a Girardian anthropology.  These concern, above all, the conceptualization of Church as a sacramental community.  A Girardian anthropology, we have argued, lacks the means to conceptualize sacramental (or indeed other) social institutions in other than negative terms as ‘sacrificial’; Christian sociality is consequently restricted to the interdividual sphere.  We shall now demonstrate that theologies based on gift theory encounter a similar difficulty.  

For these, the practical outcome of Christianity lies in its exemplification of a realizable aneconomic paradigm for human social behaviour in the shape of the gift.  Unlike early Girard, the gift theologians clearly have a specific form of social practice in mind, and they differ from Derrida in their conviction that it is actualizable in the everyday world.  My task in this section will be to examine this social practice, and, above all, to consider whether, like the Christian practice presupposed by Girard-based theologies, it excludes any socio-symbolic and/or institutional dimension.  For, upon the results of this enquiry depends our response to the question of what kind of thing we see the Church as being, whether or not – and in what sense – it should be considered a sacramental community.  

                It will come as no surprise in the light of our analysis of the gift theologies of Milbank and Tanner that the answers to these questions differ in the two cases.  Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate that there is important common ground between them in respect to theological possibilities that both gift theologies, in their different ways, exclude – common ground that will prove to be highly significant of an orientation that they share by dint of being anti-sacrificial. 

With regard to Milbank, the answer to my question is far from self-evident.  I have shown how the way Milbank understands the Christian gift as ‘asymmetric reciprocity’ implies an opposition with the impure or sacrificial gift of ‘exact and circular repetition’.  In the latter case, it is evidently the symbolic nature of the gift that imposes a uniformity on the content of what is given – and that symbolism is socio-symbolic to the extent that its effect is to limit the gift to a social space within which that symbolism has currency, and mark it off, therefore, from its social environment. Unquestionably, then, the Christian gift is not socio-symbolic.  But does this imply that, for Milbank, the Christian gift is also non-institutional? Where Girard-based anti-sacrificial theology is concerned, there is little doubt that the socio-symbolic and the institutional go together.  Girard’s theory is unable to envisage any basis for social institutions other than the sacrificial mechanism, and this is probably the reason why Girard has so little to say about social life under the non-sacrificial regime of Christianity, as I have indicated.  By contrast, Milbank has a great deal to say; indeed, a defining feature of Christendom, as he understands it, is precisely the richness of associative life that it generates from the grass-roots right up to the most global level.  Equally, the most frequent criticism he levels against what he considers modern embodiments of the sacrificial and socio-symbolic principle, such as the totalizing secular state, and liberal capitalism, is their elimination of the pre-existing fauna of ‘corporate bodies’ and ‘intermediary associations’ in the  interests of a single and uniform abstract social space.[46]  The former are exemplified for Milbank, above all, by the fraternities and guilds of the high Middle Ages.  Evidently, Milbank supposes these not to be socio-symbolic, through they are clearly institutions, not simply the adventitious product of interdividual sociality.  This is curious, because these social forms include some, such as pre-modern kingship, that are constituted on the basis of a principle of hierarchical representation that social anthropologists have considered to be the very hall-mark of socio-symbolically reproduced structures.

 With Tanner, the situation is equally unclear.  Here the Christian aneconomic takes the form of the philanthropic gift or gift of alms – a kind of ethical behaviour on the part of individuals and collectivites that, far from being interdividual in Milbank’s sense, is scarcely even relational, and operates largely on the economic plain to alleviate material need wherever it occurs.  Its primary characteristic is that of being entirely unilateral and non-reciprocal – and it is symbolically expressed in the paradigm of a divine giving in creation and redemption that is sustained regardless of the response, or lack of response, that it meets in its human recipients. 

As with Milbank, however, the relation of Christian aneconomic to the socio-symbolic and institutional sphere seems to be expressed in what Tanner has to say about sacrificial relationality.  At first sight, it might be assumed that a unilateralism of the kind she describes in connection with the Christian paradigm would suggest sacrifice.  After all, the monopolization of the gift by one party would seem to imply a corresponding accumulation of debt on the part of the other – rather as, on a traditionalist understanding of Atonement, the grace of God, would entail, on the part of the forgiven sinner, an ongoing state of obligation.  Tanner is adamant, however, that any such interpretation of the Christian aneconomic is altogether to be excluded; neither our enjoyment of life in general, nor our forgiveness in Christ, renders us ‘debtors’.    

Notions of debt, contractual obligation, loan, even stewardship, should be written out of the Christian story about God’s relations to the world and our relations with God and one another, in the light of an understanding of grace that is fundamentally incompatible with them. (EG, pp. 56-7)

At the basis of this unilateralism without sacrifice is, I suspect, a Trinitarian theology that envisages the divine persons as ‘only giving to one another what they have and hold in common’ (EG, p. 78).  Accordingly, ‘What Jesus does for us – die on a cross – does not come at his own expense […], but is part of the process of perfecting his own humanity to glory.’ (p. 83)

                On the human level, what the actualization of this paradigm ought to look like is a generalized practice of philanthropy, or almsgiving.  I say ‘ought to’ because remarks by Tanner herself seem to place a question-mark over the possibility of this actualization in everyday life.  The reason for this is that any individual who sought to follow Christ’s example of unconditional giving outside the context of an already existing ‘economy of grace’ (i.e. a form of economic management by the state that favours economic justice over the market) would find themselves doomed to swift impoverishment.  Worse still, any unilateral action by such an individual would inevitably be sacrificial, and consequently fail to actualize faithfully the Christian paradigm (p. 76).  In other words, Tanner appears to admit that the actualization of an economy of grace is not possible outside the context of an economy of grace.  Does this not render the gift of grace and the institution of the economy of grace, as Derrida would put it, ‘aporetic’?  Not necessarily, says Tanner; but it requires the prior institution – by collective action – of a new political order that favours the (anti)-economy of grace over the transactionalist economy of economic liberalism.  EG is clearly intended as the manifesto of this new political order.

                So what kind of social practice is implied by Tanner’s paradigm?  An institutional – or, as with Milbank, a merely interdividual one?  A genuinely Christian social practice, it would seem, can only be realized within an economy of grace.  And the economy of grace has to be legislated into existence by an existing polity – since a still unrealized economy of grace could hardly be supposed to have endowed itself with means of legislation.  This would seem to render the realized economy of grace indistinguishable from the legislating polity.  Those who obtain sufficient control of the political apparatus to frame the legislation to make the economy of grace a practical possibility will constitute, for all intents and purposes, both Church and state: cuius regio, eius religio.  Yet, until such time as this political control can be exercised, an actualized form of Christian social practice could hardly be said to exist.  The identities of state and Christian polity are thus, at the very least, closely intertwined. 

So to summarize our findings thus far: both versions of gift theology – that of Milbank and of Tanner – have implications for our understanding of Christian social practice.  Milbank sees the Christian aneconomic as transcending all socio-symbolically reproduced spatial structures – including, most importantly, the liberal capitalist state; Tanner vests Christian social identity in an ‘economy of grace’ which is not essentially relational, and can only be instituted through the political fiat of an existing polity – that is, in practice, the liberal capitalist state.  In effect, then, Christian social practice is associated, in both cases, with a resistence to – and, potentially, a Christianizing transformation of – pre-existing political institutions (above all, the liberal capitalist state).  What is precluded by both theologies is the possibility that Christianity might have a political institutionality of its own, of the kind that these anti-sacrificial theologians (no less than the social anthropologists to whom they refer) attribute to anti-Christian forms of socio-symbolism.  As a result, the aneconomic is opposed to a category of institutionality that effectively lumps together contemporary state-like structures with archaic, symbolically reproduced, ones. 

This excluded possibility of an intrinsically Christian form of the socio-symbolic brings us at last to the question of the anti-sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist.  This is all-important, first, as regards the argument of this thesis, since it relates to the consistency of the anti-sacrificial position with an orthodox sacramental understanding of Christianity: also, however, as regards our understanding of Milbank’s own thinking, since – paradoxically, perhaps – his gift theology has always been radically committed both to a very ecclesiologically orientated Christian theology, and to the centrality of Eucharistic ritual within that ecclesiology.  How, we might ask, in the light of his negative attitude to socio-symbolism, can such a strongly sacramental view be maintained?  Our discussion of this question will bring us, at last, to the examination of an aspect of Milbank’s thinking, the centrality of which would have ensured its positioning at a far earlier point in my discussion, but for the exigencies of orderly exposition.  The case of Tanner more closely resembles that of certain Girard-based theologies, in that she appears simply to neglect to follow through the ecclesiological implications of her anti-sacrificial theology.  Thus – rather as in the case of Daly – views about Christian community emerge in the context of other areas of theological debate that appear point in quite a different direction from the implications of her gift theology. 

I shall begin with Milbank.  His apparent inconsistency about ritual symbolism (that it is bad, save in the case of Christianity) is due to a radical distinction that he makes between, on the one hand, ritual symbolism that is properly sacrificial and reproduces spatially bounded social entities (spatialization): and, on the other hand, ritual symbolism that is anti-sacrificial and maintains the openness and freedom of human social relations through resisting tendencies to ‘social closure’.  The first category of symbolism is evidenced in all cultures prior to Christian influence (as well as heretical tendencies in Christendom).  It represents the social and political outcome of the ‘post-fall emergency economy’ –[47] the present ‘default’ state of humanity, no longer secure in God’s bounty, and therefore bound to guarantee itself against impoverishment and violence by turning inwards, and restricting its exchanges with the other – so that the once open field of human social relationships coagulates into the proliferation of closed symbolically defined spaces that characterizes the nations, tribes and religions of the pre-Christian world.  The second ritual symbolism, exclusively manifested in Eucharist and its Hebrew covenantal antecedents (alluded to briefly above), constitutes an anti-sacrificial, non-spatializing symbolism – the whole purpose of which is to resist the first kind.

For the Eucharist is not one more particular cult:  it has a unique and extraordinary structure. …  It is a cult against cult, a sacrifice against sacrifice, but still necessary, for resistance to exclusive cults needs itself to be enculturated.[48]

Milbank appears to suggest here that, but for the first kind of ritual symbolism, there would be no need for the second: that there would have been no ritual symbolism at all in the prelapsarian era.  But in a post-lapsarian world, where the default is to the sacrificial and spatializing kind of ritual symbolism, the maintenance of the creative expressivity and universal inclusivity of the pre-lapsarian gift (which is the aim of Judaeo-Christian culture), requires the reinforcement of an alternative (i.e. anti-spatial) ritual symbolism – a kind of protective symbolic armature – if it not to slip back into sacrifice and spatialization. This second and counteractive kind of symbolism – this ‘symbolism against symbolism’ – belongs exclusively to the Judaeo-Christian era, and reflects the socially and politically redemptive operation of the divine Word in history.  In order to distinguish it from normal ritual symbolism, Milbank consistently uses the term liturgical.  The first kind of symbolism is by contrast variously referred to as sacrificial, spatial, or sometimes, spectacular.

How, then, should we describe, in positive terms, the ritual practice associated with this liturgical kind of symbolism, and the form(s) of society thereby reproduced?  The practice consists in the act of faith in God’s goodness whereby we surrender everything to God, in order that He may restore it to us, transformed. The revealed paradigm of this act of faith, subsequently enacted in the Eucharist, is the redemptive offering of Christ himself; its everyday expression is found in the practice of the ecstatic gift: secure in God’s bountiful goodness the Christian is free to respond to every encounter in the appropriate way (think of the Good Samaritain ministering to his ‘neighbour’ on the road to Jericho).  This giving is not properly sacrificial (even in Jesus’s case) because ‘our self-giving involves no real self-loss, but is rather a new reception of being which consists fundamentally in orientation to the Other’. (Theology and Social Theory (TST), p. 395)  The Church which is reproduced by such practice is characterized by Milbank as ‘temporal’ or ‘transcendental’ as opposed to ‘spatial’; ‘it arrives endlessly, in passing’.  Its defining characteristic, however, is the negative one of non-spatiality – by which is meant primarily that it is without boundaries.  As such, it is evidently ‘not a real society’,[49] nor ‘primarily an institution at all’ but rather ‘a dissemination of love’.[50]  For, while the Eucharist which gives the Church is performed at particular sites, what eventuates there as ‘Church’, constitutes the symbolic basis of a real-life social phenomenon that has no location, but encompasses all instantiations of properly ‘human’ relationality.

The Church is emphatically not, on a theological conception, a kind of ‘extra’ religious organization which some people happen to belong to; it is, rather, the sine qua non for the existence of human society as such: nulla humanitas extra ecclesiam. (Beyond Secular Order [2014], p. 240)

So Milbank’s particular way of reconciling an anti-sacrificial position with an orthodox view of the centrality of Eucharist is to oppose sacrifice and sacrament in the shape of a sharp distinction between the normal kind of ritual symbolism (which establishes community boundaries), and a specifically Judaeo-Christian liturgical kind (which dissolves them).  The Eucharist is symbolic; but it does not establish social and political boundaries – which is the effect that Milbank, as indeed most social anthropologists, attributes to normal socio-symbolism.  Perhaps, then, we might, with least risk of confusion, characterize Milbank’s concept of the Eucharist as symbolic but not socio-symbolic.

                How adequate is the non-spatial understanding of Church that emerges from this distinction?  What seems most striking is what it leaves out.  For, along with the idea of boundaries, it effectively excludes the whole business of establishing ‘communion and exclusion in social terms, and about how community is to be organized’ –[51] what Christ himself seems to refer to as the privilege of ‘binding and loosing’.   We will search the Milbankian corpus in vain for any hint of the idea that the Church is a defined real-life social group, or network of groups that includes some and excludes others (such as those who do not want to belong).  And, without that, of course, there can hardly be the possibility of modelling for the benefit of outsiders an alternative mode of sociality to their own – for that would require that there be outsiders.  Any tendency of the Church in such a direction is branded by Milbank as Protestant ‘heterodoxy’. 

This leaves an ecclesial concept that is well designed to address the concerns of postmodern critics of discursal hegemonism, but strains credibility as a representation of the Church as it has always existed, with its rituals of incorporation and communion, and, as a Christian ideal, seems strangely etiolated.  A real-life instantiation of Milbank’s non-spatial concept would, I suspect, resemble, less the historical reality of the Church of Augustine’s or Aquinas’ day, than it would the Church of England of an earlier age when many English people identifying as Christian, and recognizing their conduct in relation to their fellows to be broadly governed by Christian principles, felt no need to belong to any sect-like Christian organization.  This is what Christians of a more Evangelical persuasion would disparagingly refer to as ‘cultural Christianity’.  Nowadays, it has become a fast-vanishing middle-ground between, on the one hand, a consciously secular majority, and, on the other, an outspokenly Christian, and increasingly Evangelical minority that views itself, understandably, as ‘counter-cultural’.  Regarding the definition of Church entertained by the latter group, there is no doubt that it is strongly spatialized – but in that respect it would not differ from the understanding that the Church has had of itself at various points in its long history.  One theological problem of Milbank’s anti-sacrificial position, then, is that it imposes an ecclesiology that excludes as ‘heterodox’ much of what would seem historically to have passed for Church over the centuries – including what is certainly now the dominant and most active elements of contemporary British Christianity.

                Another related problem concerns the strange kind of relation into which the Church’s distinctive non-spatiality places it with respect to the ‘wider community’ (i.e. the less than properly ecclesial ‘community’ within which the Church is at work).  Milbank helpfully speaks, in this regard, of Augustine’s ‘third city’ – additional to the city of God and the city of this world –  which is the partly Christianized and Christianizing polity represented for Augustine by the imperium of the Christian emperors. (Beyond Secular Order, pp. 228-236)  So what precisely is the relationship between a non-spatial Church and the ‘third city’, or Christendom? In one passage, Milbank remarks that ‘Christianity is Christendom’, (p. 233) and I think it no exaggeration to state that he does not believe that, in the present world, Church is capable of existing independently of Christendom.  This is what it is for the Church to be boundary-less, and is well conveyed by a metaphor that Milbank uses in another context: that of a parasite within its host (though the image of a virus within a host cell might have been even more appropriate).[52]  Signified here is the lack of the means of independent subsistence manifested in the absence from the ecclesial organism of certain organs and functions that would otherwise be necessary to life.  Also signified is that the work of the ecclesial organism is largely directed to an effect that will be manifested at the level of the host body/cell (whose functioning will be redirected so that it fulfils the ends of the invading organism), not to an effect on the level of the organism itself.

The implications of this state of affairs is best considered from the perspective of how it differs from the alternative ‘Protestant’ and ‘heterodox’ state of ecclesial external relations.  From this perspective, there is a (relatively) demarcated space outside the boundary belonging to those whose relationships, interdividual and institutional, do not espouse the Christian ideal, and in regard to whose status of non-belonging, those within and without the ecclesial boundary are agreed.  Correspondingly, the Church can accept that standards held in the wider community may not correspond to the norm that it upholds for its own members, and it does not demand the imposition of those standards outside its own sphere.  However, it seeks to model within the ecclesial boundary a model of sociality that constitutes a real alternative to the forms of sociality prevailing outside – in the hope, of course, that non-members will one day choose to transfer within the boundary: in other words, that there will be for them a moment of conversion. 

To all of this, point for point, Milbank’s non-spatial ecclesial idea is diametrically opposed.  Because there is no clearly demarcated space outside the ecclesial boundary, there is not necessarily a shared perception regarding the status of non-belonging of those who seek to place themselves beyond its influence.  Broadly, a boundary-less church is doomed to perceive as an encroachment on itself the sacrificially maintained boundaries of socio-symbolic structures that constitute the de facto limits of its own zone of influence.  Nor will it accept the non-ecclesial self-definition of those who want to place themselves in that ‘outside’ zone.  Accordingly, like the virus whose work is directed to an effect at the level of the host-organism, the Church will not acquiesce in the adoption by the environing community of different standards from its own; indeed, it whole effort will be directed towards transforming those standards.  So far as concerns those who would not consider themselves Christian, what it would seek is not so much a ‘conversion’ (which requires a transfer from outside to inside status), but a recognition of the belonging which they would have seen as properly already theirs, had they only read their own story aright.  The programme of theological action imposed by this non-spatial ecclesial concept is evident in Milbank’s own work: it is politically strongly polemical to the extent that its primary objective is to transform the wider community from which it does not regard its own existence as at all separable; and it is rather intellectualist in that this transformation is seen, to such an extent, as, first foremost, a transformation of the self-definition of that wider community. 

                The problem of this ecclesiologically orientated theology is not so much that it is necessarily unorthodox, but that it is contrained to turn the ecclesiological differences identified above under Milbank’s own terminology of ‘orthodox’ and ‘Protestant’ into its principal criterion of orthodoxy – thereby relegating to the realms of ‘unorthodox’ or ‘heterodox’ much of what more open-minded Christians (including Anglican ones) might consider a part of their tradition.

Turning now to the case of Tanner – the problem with the embodiment of Christian community in the shape of the economy of grace is not, as with Milbank or Girard, that it lacks an institutional dimension, since Tanner’s whole point is that its realization requires political as well as personal ethical action.  And, if the economy of grace does not involve actions that seek to be relational, then this in itself tends to suggest, by contrast, the institutional dimension of its enactment.  The problem is rather that this institutionality is not thought of as belonging to Christianity itself.  Indeed, Christianity is apparently not understood by Tanner in institutional or socio-political terms at all – at least in EG.  Instead, it consists largely in a religiously motivated personal ethical imperative that, because it requires institutional action in order to achieve actualization, must seek outside itself for a socio-political vehicle – in practice, it would seem, the existing polity.  That institutional means continues to be considered, needless to say, as independent of the religious paradigm to which it is called upon to give expression.  Altogether absent from such a perspective (and it is here that we light upon something that unites Tanner’s thinking with that of Milbank and the Girard-based theologians) is the idea of an institutional, and a fortiori socio-symbolic, dimension of Christianity itself – the kind of thing that traditionalist sacrificial theology equates with the Church. 

                So it is very curious to encounter, in a paper published only a year before EG, the following statement in reference to sacrifice – here employed in a generic sense evidently not intended to preclude its particular instantiation in Christianity:[53]

Sacrifice is all about the establishment of communion and exclusion in social terms, and about how community is to be organized.  […] The socio-political ramifications of sacrifice need to be brought more centrally into the discussion of what it might mean to say that Jesus’ death is itself sacrificial: what forms of exclusion, community and social organization are implied by it? (ICS, p. 50)

This statement is not only compatible with a sacramental understanding of Christian community, it is indicative of a position that seems practically indistinguishable from that of the revisionist sacrificial theologies considered in the next chapter.  I am at a loss to see how this formulation can possibly be reconciled with the notion of the economy of grace set out a year later in EG.  Maybe we should conclude that Tanner has changed her mind about sacrifice.  What we do not find in EG, however, is any recognition of the need to relate the understanding of sacrifice implied in that book by her conceptualization of the Christian aneconomic to the view of sacrifice she expressed in the earlier publication.  It seems more likely that she simply fails to pursue the implications for sacrifice of her later argument on the gift to the point of appreciating the inconsistency – a failure that is the more understandable because the focus of discussion differs in the two publications, and the understanding of sacrifice is scarcely even a side-issue for the argument of EG.  We observed a comparable failure on the part of Daly (though in this case within the compass of a single volume) to relate his understanding of sacrifice in the early Church to his understand of the same phenomenon in contemporary Catholicism. 

The impact of gift theology on the conceptualization of sacrifice

It will be evident from the foregoing sections that the characterization of sacrifice is not among the foremost concerns of gift theology.  What is essential to it, by contrast, is a postmodern and sociological characterization of Christian orthodoxy that locates the primary vocation of the latter in the challenge it opposes to economism as manifested, above all, in contemporary practices and social/political structures – as well as, paradoxically, in decadent traditionalist forms of Christianity.  So the Christian gift tends to be defined, above all, in its opposition to modern forms of social and political organization and the traditionalist doctrine of atonement. 

However, the issue of its implications for archaic (i.e. non-Christian) practices and structures remains ultimately inescapeable.  To understand why, we need to remember how, for Christian gift theory, the advent of the gift is a historical development associated with a divine revelation occurring at a particular point in place and time.  When we also remember that the Christian gift is something sociologically defined in terms of real-life practices and structures, it becomes evident that the pre-Christian socio-political context of the advent of the Christian gift cannot be disregarded.  That socio-political context, through its resistance to – and subsequent transformation by – the Christian gift, becomes part of the Christian story itself, hence part of the revelation of what the Christian gift means.  And it is, of course, the same Christian gift, as defined by Christian story and revelation, that, for gift theology, opposes the economicism of contemporary social and political practices and structures.  If there were no common ground between the socio-political context of the gift’s first emergence and the situation of today, then, given the social political nature of its activity, it would be hard to justify gift theology’s claims, on the one hand, that the Christian revelation has relevance today, and, on the other, that gift theology’s prescription for society is genuinely rooted in the Christian relevation.  Gift theology is thus obliged to demonstrate that its conception of gift is capable of bearing the meaning what it does both for the biblical world in relation to which this meaning was paradigmatically expressed, and for the modern world in relation to which that meaning is now relevant.

                What it is precisely about (at least) some archaic (i.e. non-Christian) practices and structures that renders them economicist in the same sense as contemporary ones – how, in other words, those practices and structures are so characterized as to demonstrate their similiarity to modern economicism and their opposition to Christian gift – turns out to be a relatively complex matter, and will be the topic of this section.  For our thesis, it raises the question of the degree to which the anti-sacrificial bias of the theology has influenced its characterization of archaic practices in a manner that is consistent with the ethnography.  With regard to gift theology as a whole, the most generalized tendency of this kind derives from postmodernism itself, and hardly requires further investigation: namely, the characterization of sacrifice as economicist and transactional.  For Milbank, however, the archaic expression of this economism is traceable in particular socio-political practices and structures that he claims to be distinctive of the archaic (as opposed to the Christian or modern) world.  Far from simply ignoring the charge of anachronism that might otherwise be incurred by his assumption of the economicist basis for all non-Christian systems, Milbank takes the historically revealed character of the anti-sacrificial message with a seriousness that compels him at various points to offer a relatively rich account of those practices and structures in relation to which the Christian gift is expressed.  This more detailed characterization of sacrifice goes well beyond the bare attribution of economicism, and invites serious consideration as regards its anthropological plausibility.  So, when Tanner subsequently seeks to reject Milbank’s characterization of the Christian gift in favour of an alternative (postmodern and sociological) characterization, she is forced to take issue with the reading of archaic ethnography in which that characterization is rooted.  While the result of this anthropological critique falls far short of an alternative account of archaic practices and structures (since Tanner takes altogether less seriously than Milbank the historically contingent nature of Christian revelation), nevertheless it does commit her to a characteristically anti-sacrificial position on certain key anthropological issues – a position that proves comparable to Milbank’s in respect to its common rejection of the contrasting postulates of a sacrificial position.

                This section will be entirely concerned, therefore, with passages in which our authors (particularly Milbank) justify their anti-economicist understanding of Christian gift through an interpretation of Christian archaic texts and contexts that roots this understanding in antiquity.  The task that our authors undertake is to show that a recognizable form of economism already pervades the socio-political practices and structures that the Christian gift finds ranged against it.  Those texts and contexts concern: the Augustinian ‘city of God’ in its relation to the Roman imperium; the Old Testament Hebrew covenant in relation to the surrounding sacrificial cults (Milbank, CGG, pp. 144-147; Tanner, EG, pp. 49-57); the Church as defined by the Gospel accounts of the Christ event in relation to the Roman Empire and the Jewish tribal kingdom (Milbank, BR, pp. 76-104); the Church as defined by St Paul’s account of Grace and the law in relation to the antique polis (Paul’s New Moment, pp. 21-73).  In the latter four cases the relevant discussion is confined within single passages; regarding the first, we have to do with a fundamental, but rather general, postulate of Milbank’s thought that emerges in numerous contexts throughout his oeuvre.

Sacrificial polity in Augustine

The very basis of Milbank’s ‘Augustinian critical postmodernism’ is the supposition that a common ground exists between the ancient and the modern political world in the shape of that socio-political strategy that ‘tries to secure peace’ by ‘drawing boundaries around “the same” and excluding “the other”’. (p. 342)  That, according to postmodernism, has always been the strategy of all hegemonic discourses, including those that institute socio-political structures; and that, according to Milbank’s Augustine, is also the strategy to which the ‘peaceful community’ of the ‘heavenly city’ stands in contrast.  The difference in the immediate political objectives presupposed by the contrasted ‘ontologies’ of sacrificial and ecclesial modes of sociality is between buying a provisional respite from an imagined ongoing cosmological war, and holding out in faith for the future realization of cosmological peace.  The defining characteristic of the city of this world is sacrifice and its imposition of socio-political boundaries.  That is the characteristic of the socio-political world that the Church and its antecedents finds itself ranged against – and Milbank, following Catherine Pickstock,[54] sums it up in the term spatialization. For Milbank, therefore (and he certainly differs from other gift theorists in this respect), economism, as experienced on the political level, is virtually synonymous with spatialized socio-political structures. 

The sacrificial polity in the Old Testament and contemporary social anthropology

Beyond its broad characterization as ‘spatialized’, sacrificial sociality receives a more precise, and socio-anthropological definition, as already indicated, in ‘Can a Gift be Given?’ (CGG), where the need to give a response to Derrida’s argument in Given Time obliges Milbank to engage with Mauss, and, in so doing, allows him to develop his concept of sacrificial gift in the context of archaic ritual exchange.  The relevance of this discussion is not immediately apparent since Milbank himself chooses to speak here of ‘impure’ rather than the ‘sacrificial’ nature of the gift.  But impurity is synonymous with sacrifice in this context, as we have already argued – and as the discussion of CGG below will further confirm.

                To an extent unique to this text (and another paper produced about this time, ‘Stories of Sacrifice’),[55]  Milbank’s focus is on the archaic (i.e. pre-Christian) and on the nature of paradigmatic ritual practice.  As already indicated, that practice, according to Milbank, tends towards exact, circular repetition (as opposed to the asymmetrical repetition of pure gift exchange) and towards the delimitation of social space.  Milbank’s engagement with recent socio-anthropological accounts of archaic communities, no doubt prompted here by his concern with Maussian reciprocity, allows him to give some concrete ethnographic content to his characterization of paradigmatic archaic ritual practice (i.e. circular repetition), as he elaborates it in opposition to the notion of a paradigm of pure reciprocity that he describes as embodied in the practice of the covenantal ritual of the Old Testament.  The impure/sacrificial gift, according to Milbank, ‘establishes a single space’ through a ‘hypostatized contract with a power possessing absolute rights’, whereas the blood-covenant which, by ‘the “cutting” of a thing, establishes respective shares’, ‘carries gift-norms over into the realm of exchange with the alien’, while somehow ‘ensuring through its contractual character, the intrusion of considerations of justice and appropriateness’. (CGG, p. 146)  The ‘legal fiction of blood’ that is traditionally associated with ‘hypostatized contract’ with the higher power’ finds itself, in the Jewish covenantal context, uniquely transformed to the end of establishing ‘relationship with other’. 

                What Milbank means here by the ‘legal fiction of blood’ representing a ‘hypostatized contract with a power possessing absolute rights’ is evidently crucial, both to our understanding of sacrifice, and of the covenantal practice to which it is opposed.  It is exemplified in passages where Milbank gives some further substantial socio-anthropological content to his definition of archaic ritual practice as exact circular repetition (p. 145). 

Since the human creditor can only have achieved his status by initially becoming indebted and subordinate, that is to say by receiving a gift in order to acquire wealth (unless he acquires this through production and not exchange), the more ideal creditor is the god/ancestor with unlimited access to productive abundance who was never first in debt.  Hence the primacy of human debt, intrinsic to the gift economy, is only fully established by way of the always inherited debt of the ancestors.  […] recent research on gift exchange has tended to stress the crucial significance of the inclusion of sacrifice to gods/ancestors within the exchanging cycle.

The ‘recent research on gift exchange’ invoked here and elsewhere in CGG is that of social anthropologists like Annette Weiner, Roy Wagner and Frederick Damon.  Broadly, this work has tended to emphasize the collective over the interdividual dimension of archaic exchanges.  Ceremonial giving, for all its practical implications for the rise and fall of individual wealth and status, has increasingly come to be seen by social anthropology as a shared symbolic work of reproducing collective socio-religious identities in which the participants take roles.  As we shall see in Chapter Four – and as Milbank himself explains in this passage – this effectively makes exchange with the gods in these archaic societies (i.e., what Milbank elsewhere terms sacrifice) fundamental to the gift between individuals.  Indeed, the particular relationship between the divine and the human circuit of exchange alluded to here, is described by another social anthropologist, Maurice Godelier, more or less as by Milbank here, in terms of a collective enchainment of moral debt which, like the bank loans in a capitalist economy, must be guaranteed through a form of collateral consisting in the debt to ancestor gods. [56]  So the ‘power possessing absolute rights’ turns out to be that of the gods, and the ‘legal fiction of blood’ representing a ‘hypostatized’ contract with the power can only be the myth underlying practices of sacrifice.

                It follows that Milbank accepts grosso modo the ethnographic descriptions of these recent social anthropologists as a representation of what constitutes the lived reality of reciprocity and the implications of reciprocity in the pre-Christian post-lapsarian world – including, it must be supposed, the polities surrounding the exceptional polity uniquely instituted through the alternative, anti-sacrificial, symbolism of covenant.  I see no indication in works of the socio-anthropologists he cites that they share Milbank’s view that this lived pre-Christian reality constitutes the degraded form of a prelapsarian exchange more closely resembling what Christian and modern thinkers understand by the gift.  Milbank nevertheless resorts to their ethnographic descriptions of pre-Christian polities as a means of giving empirical content to the idea of the spatialized – i.e., closed, or inwardly curving – nature of the social space instituted by socio-symbolism in the post-lapsarian age prior to Christianization.  Equally – though this is not a key theme of CGG – Milbank shows, through these empirical accounts, how the spatializing nature of pre-Christian communities is a consequence of their involvement with sacrificial symbolism – i.e., the ‘legal fiction of blood’.   

                For the Milbank of CGG, this symbolism of sacrifice is, above all, the symbolism of those Near Eastern polities to which the alternative symbolism of the Hebrew covenant, described in the pages of the Old Testament, stands opposed. Spatializating sacrifice is thus characterized in opposition to the covenantal symbolism of ‘cutting’ and ‘separation’. 

The latter defines the proper human relationship to the divine in terms of the relationship of Israel to the God who constitutes her divine Other – who is not, as in most cultures, the tutelary ancestor of the tribe, but the stranger-God who encounters His people in the wilderness.  Crucially, this paradigm implies the separation of the parties (God and Israel) and a certain security in their independence from each other that enables relationship without absorption.  It allows that the one party – God, in the paradigmatic instance – may give all, but without any hint of sacrifice:  not because the gift can somehow escape the logic of debt (which would take us in the direction of Tanner’s unilateralism), but because God’s will, as expressed in the covenantal paradigm itself, ultimately guarantees the individual against all loss of identity.  As we have already seen, the everyday outworking of the paradigm may be seen in our capacity to respond creatively to every eventuality and every encounter without fear of loss and in the most appropriate way, even where it concerns a total stranger. 

What, then, can we say about the sacrificial paradigm that emerges in opposition to this notion of covenant – at least insofar as the archaic world is concerned?  As the antithesis of covenant, that paradigm can only take the form of a conctractual relationship that merges the human party into the identity of the tutelary ancestor, in such a way that the ancestor belongs to them, and they to the tutelary ancestor.  In other words, the sacrificial paradigm as opposed to the convenantal, is one of absorption, and institutes a single spatialized social entity, in which all our significant and public relationships as individuals, to each other, pass via the divine party that constitutes the symbolic centre.  Iit results in the uniformization of the content of public giving and the tendency to suppress social creativity in favour of an ‘agonism’ that inevitably results where the difference between one gift and another becomes largely a matter of quantity rather than quality.

                In CGG Milbank attempts to show us, through ethnographically based description, what spatialization means for antique sociality.  The term which seems to sum up most comprehensively the bundle of features that characterize spatialized sociality and distinguish it from the anti-spatial relationality associated with covenant is the idea of a ‘single’ social space – with its implications not only of boundedness, but also of centralization and uniformity.  The importance of this concept, however, and the real stakes of the argument of CGG, concern primarily what Milbank is trying to say about the contemporary relevance of Christianity.  It is because he sees the impact of Christian faith today in terms of the resistance that it offers to the otherwise inevitable tendency of post-lapsarian sociality to form a space that is ‘single’ in much the sense we have attributed to antique socio-symbolic ritual that he needs to show that this message of resistance could also have been meaningfully articulated in the world of the Christian (and in this case Judaeo-Christian) narrative – that he needs, in other words, to anchor that contemporary meaning in a plausible reading of the biblical narrative.  To understand the contemporary form of the ‘single space’ whose historicity is at issue in CGG, we need to refer to other texts.  The concept itself is central to Milbank’s thinking and present at some level throughout his oeuvre; however, its contemporary manifestations are explored in later work – particularly Beyond Secular Order (BSO).  Needless to say, the concept in its fuller development seems entirely consistent with the little that is said in CGG.

                In its modern – as in its antique – guise the concept of single space is the result of a restriction of human creativity, as shown in social relationships. (BSO, pp. 206-214) Whereas, in the former case, social space is grounded in the symbolic uniformization of gift-acts which themselves generate a collectivity in the form of a genuinely collaborative fiction; in the latter, the single space is not grounded in relationships at all, but instead in individuals who are considered the only reality.  Here, there is no real collaboration – certainly not at the imaginative level – but, instead, an alienation of individual wills to an entirely contentless and abstract collective entity that is not rooted in real relationships and whose sole function is to guarantee means of common political action between potentially warring individual wills.  Whereas, in the former case, social imagination is restricted, here it is completely sidelined; gift-acts cease to have more than strictly private significance.  Milbank uses the term representation to describe both the generation of a single space through collective ritual symbolism and its generation in the contemporary world through political and economic mechanisms (the ‘state’ and the ‘market’). (BSO, pp. 214-215)  The archaic kind of representation generates what Milbank describes as a ‘real inhabited fiction’. (p. 220) This is the case of the relationship of the Church and Christ, whose body the Church actually is through ritual participation.  Modern representation, on the other hand, generates a fiction that is neither ‘real’ nor ‘inhabited’. Think of the political leadership that subsititutes for its electorate and whose continued relationship to that electorate after its election remains entirely problematic.[57]  In the terminology adopted at an earlier point in this thesis (2.1) the difference comes down to the distinction we made earlier between ‘symbol’ and ‘metaphor’.  It is the latter kind of simple space – as manifested in such relatively modern developments as Enlightenment despotism and, more importantly today, the liberal capitalist state that constitutes the principal target of Milbank’s critique.  Its supposed foreshadowing by the archaic sacrificial polity matters to Milbank largely to the extent that the existence of the latter within the biblical narrative means that he can claim biblical sanction for his own polemic against the liberal capitalist state. 

 The response of Tanner

We come now to the third of the passages relevant to the question of sacrifice in gift theology – this one from the work Tanner.  As in the case of the previous text, what is at issue here is whether the case can be made for including ritual sacrifice among what gift theology regards as the manifestations of economic relationality.

                Tanner shares with Milbank the same fundamental schema of an opposition between aneconomic and economic social behaviours which, like him, she has inherited from postmodernism.  She also shares, to some degree, his engagement with the ethnographic literature, developing her own anthropology through a critique of his, while at the same time, enlarging his sphere of ethnographic reference in some areas.  The distinctiveness her own anthropology – deriving from the different orientation of her theology – lies in her association of the opposition, fundamental to all gift theology, between the (Christian) aneconomic and (non-Christian) economic with an opposition, on the sociological level, between unilateral and reciprocal patterns of social behaviour. Accordingly, the aneconomic is made to coincide with absolutely unilateral patterns, while the economic sphere is constituted by those behaviours that fall away into reciprocity.  (An anthropology that could be viewed as inverting Milbank’s to the extent that the latter views unilateral behaviours as a delusional parody of the genuine social ecstasis which is reciprocal.)               

                Though Tanner makes even fewer explicit references to sacrifice than Milbank does, her absolute, one-to-one, identification of the Christian aneconomic with unilateralism has important anthropological consequences which we can begin to explore by asking how the practice of (non-Christian) ritual sacrifice would fit into her anthropology.  We might assume that it belongs wholly in the economic and reciprocal sphere.  After all, the social practices described by Mauss, which constitute the focus of her and Milbank’s analysis, evidently include forms of sacrificial behaviour.  Tanner argues strongly against Milbank’s view that these could embody some measure of the aneconomic, and even makes the case for them having much in common with the transactions of modern Western commodity exchange.  Insofar, then, as sacrifice remains identified with non-Christian forms of ritual phenomena, its inherently economic and transactional character would seem to go without saying. 

There remains, however, the possibility that the unilateral behaviour that she associates with the Christian aneconomic could turn out to be sacrificial.  It would seem, on the face of it, natural enough to understand unilateralism in terms of the accumulation of unpaid, and potentially unpayable, debts – rather, indeed, as the human:divine relation is construed by traditionalist Atonement theology.  In that case, sacrifice would have to be considered a phenomenon capable of assuming either an economic or else an aneconomic form.  It is highly significant from our perspective, therefore, that, as we saw in the previous section, Tanner pronounces herself resolutely against such an interpretation of unilateralism as wholly inconsistent with the Christian aneconomic, with which it is exclusively identified.  She is adamant that the unilateralism of the social practice of almsgiving has nothing whatsoever to do with sacrifice.  This has two important implications. On the one hand, it consigns sacrifice to the economic and transactional sphere, no less than Milbank’s gift theology does.  On the other hand – and here we touch on the most interesting aspect of Tanner’s theory from the perspective of our evaluation of its consistency with adjacent disciplines – it effectively separates, not just Christianity, but the social practice of almsgiving itself, from ritual sacrifice in a manner that will prove, as we shall see in Chapter 5, very hard to reconcile with some current anthropological understandings of almsgiving.

                I conclude from the above, therefore, that ritual sacrifice is regarded by the gift theology version of the antisacrificial position as inherently economic and transactionalist – very much as it is regarded by the Girard-based version as violent and instinctual.  Here again – in gift theology as in Girard-based theology – we will discover in Chapter 3 that sacrificial revisionist theology takes a diametrically opposed view: namely, that the Christian salvation event and ‘history of religions’ sacrifice do not stand opposed to each on the basis of economism and transactionality, any more than of violence and non-intentionalism.  So, here again – as with the sacrifice as metaphor and the Girard-based positions – we will need to evaluate the relative plausibility of opposing characterizations of ritual sacrifice in the light of the evidence of non-theological disciplines.  In the former case, it is the violent and instinctual character of ritual sacrifice that it will be at issue – in the case of gift theology, its economcism and transactionality. 

In addition, however, there emerges, in relation specifically to Tanner’s version of gift theology, another question that can be resolved only through a broader examination of the non-theological evidence: namely, whether the Christian practice of almsgiving can claim, on the basis of its unilateralism, to the absolutely unique status that EG attributes to it.  It is absolutely indispensable to the sustainability of Tanner’s theological position that this claim can be upheld: that is to say, that Christianity, and Christianity alone, should be the source of that unilateralness that constitutes the basis of the economy of grace.  This is because such unilateralism lies at the heart, not only of Christian society, but of her conception of Trinitarian relations.  The discovery of a practice of unilateral gift emerging independently in other faith traditions would require her, either to revise this theology, or else to attribute an implicitly Trinitarian inspiration to its origin in other faith traditions.      

Biopolitics in the Gospel

The texts of Milbank considered hitherto – those on which the reaction of Tanner is based – develop a critique of sacrifice and spatialized social structures in relation to archaic polities as represented both by Augustine and contemporary anthropological writing.  The anti-symbolism of the Eucharist is frequently discussed. But if we want to see how that critique is articulated, not just ritually, but through the historical narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection, then it is to the 2003 text, Being Reconciled (pp. 76-104), that we must go.   The hermeneutic framework applied to the Gospel narrative – which Milbank derives from the political theorist, Giorgio Agamben, and from his own reading of Aquinas – is explored in a number of contexts; their application to the historical narrative itself is not, to my knowledge, made anywhere else. 

                According to Agamben, the subjection to political control which incorporates us into the life of the state (political life or bios) – what he terms biopolitics – is predicated on the establishment of the power to constitute a ‘state of exception’ (bare life or zoe) with a view to transforming bare life into political life.  What is meant by ‘state of exception’ here, and its importance for his bio-political state, is epitomized in the fate of an obscure figure of Roman Law – the homo sacer – to which Agamben gives an important place in his argument.  The homo sacer was one whose citizenship rights had been revoked so that he could be killed by anyone.  For Agamben, the existence of this figure within the juridical order attests in a shadowy way the necessity of exclusion that underlies the bio-political order – the bare life which is ‘included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, in its capacity to be killed)’.[58]  

Milbank accepts this bio-political definition of the individual’s relationship to the state – but only as a formulation of the state of humanity in the ‘post-fall emergency economy’, not of political life per se.   In opposition to Agamben’s picture he draws on Aquinas in evoking an alternative conception of the individual’s relationship to the polity implied in the notion of the human as a ‘trans-organism’. (BSO, p. 241) For Agamben, the animal life (zoe) of the individual exists prior to the political life (bios) imposed upon it, and is consequently formally separable from it – which is why a human individual can in principle be reduced to ‘bare life’.  Milbank elaborates an alternative account of the human ‘animale sociale’ as an ‘integral hybrid’ of nature and culture. (p. 136)  In a manner suggested by Aquinas’ idea of the ‘proper accident’ whereby ‘a seemingly semi-accidental second act can rise ontologically above the first act and even come to define a thing’s essence beyond its essence, in a super-essential way’,[59] the dual elements of the animale sociale are seen as indissociable from each other, so that sociality constitutes the very nature of the human animal. This means, amongst other things, that there is no real-life basis for the notion of an antecedent state of ‘bare life’, and that political life is not something that must be ‘imposed’.

We come now to the narrative to which Milbank applies this double hermeneutic.  The Gospel recounts a sequence of historical events in which the non-biopolitical and – as Milbank would see it – fuller state of sociality representing humanity’s proper aspiration becomes once again visible, and consequently reappropriable. These events characterize Christ as a real-life homo sacer.  His expulsion from the ‘whole summed-up history of human polity – the tribe, the universal absolute state, the democratic consensus’, (BR, p. 96) when vindicated by God himself at the resurrection, becomes the inaugurating moment of ‘a counter-polity exercising a counter-sovereignty’,(p. 105) namely the Church.  Agamben’s shadowy obverse of statehood, bare life, as embodied in the fate of the homo sacer, now takes centre stage, in the shape of  a Church nourished upon ‘sovereign victimhood’.  God’s identification in Christ with bare life reverses the perspective of the spatialized state in order to affirm the trans-organic status of the integral hybrid that is the human individual – the destruction of which constitutes the fundamental condition of the exercise of the interests of absolute political power. 

 What then do we learn from this about Milbank’s conception of sacrificial and spatialized structures?  As with his discussion of the ‘single space’, Milbank’s primary concern – as indeed Agamben’s – tends to be with the manifestation of these phenomena in contemporary life, and the relevance of the Church’s mission in opposing them.  Here, it can be said that, to the extent that contemporary political structures escape Christian influence, Milbank characterizes them in Agamben’s terms.  Hence those structures, in addition to being bounded, uniform, and centralized, are shown to obey a logic predicated on the – at least virtual – existence of a state of exception and the assumption of a state of ‘bare life’ to which a human individual may be reduced.  The example frequently given is that of recent US imperialism, which differs from many of its more genuinely Christian antecedents in the sense of ideological legitimation it enjoys for pursuing a ‘partisan warfare’ that effectively de-humanizes its opponents, reducing them to the state of vermin to be eradicated (BSO, p. 260), a view, incidentally that seems to be supported in the recent empirical study by Marvin & Ingle.  The ‘war against terror’ is evidently much in Milbank’s mind, and the curiously status-less status of the denizens of Guantanamo Bay.

It is, above all, Milbank’s Christian critique of these phenomena of imperialist globalization that is the real stake of his adaptation of the theory of Agamben, and justifies the contemporary relevance of the Christian message.  At the same time, if this Christian critique is to be regarded as the genuine outcome of an orthodox reading of the Gospel text, then the notion of Church as a resistance to the politics of the ‘reduction to bare life’ must also be shown to be meaningful within the context of the Gospel narrative.  In this respect, Milbank needs to go further than Agamben in justifying his interpretation of ancient political institutions.  For Agamben, after all, the notion of the homo sacer operates at the level of a theoretical principle; Milbank is claiming – indeed it is crucial to his argument – that this principle is paradigmatically embodied in a specific sequence of historical events.  He needs to demonstrate that the biopolitical principles of the contemporary polity are those that the Gospel narrative shows to be at work in the worldly polity’s expulsion of Christ as the ultimate homo sacer.  For Milbank, then, the archaic sacrificial polity is biopolitical in Agamben’s sense of the term; its spatializing institution of a ‘single’ space necessarily involves the predication of a state of exception and the potential reduction of the individual to ‘bare life’.  It is therefore intrinsically violent.  In this respect, and in its dependency on a state of exception embodied in the homo sacer, Milbank’s account of the ancient sacrificial polity comes to bare a remarkable resemblance to Girard’s. 

Biopolitics in St Paul

Milbank returns to the archaic polity in his 2008 essay ‘Paul against biopolitics’. (Paul’s New Moment (PNM), pp. 21-73)  A somewhat more broadly-based, but essentially similar, notion of the biopolitical is at issue; but the biblical context in which it emerges is not, this time, the Gospel narrative, but, instead, the theology of the Pauline epistles.  There is no longer any reference to the homo sacer.  This time the forcible imposition of the political life on an antecedent state of bare animality is equated with the rule of that law – nomos – of which St Paul preaches the supersession by grace.  This involves Milbank in arguing that, when he speaks of ‘law’, Paul is referring, not so much to Torah specifically, but ‘in characteristically Hellenistic Jewish fashion’ to ‘nomos as such and hence to Roman and Greek as well as Jewish law’. (PNM, p. 48) The very Pauline association of law with the power of death echoes for Milbank the way that the self-defensive posture of biopolitical spatialization rests on presuppositions of violence and scarcity.  Paul’s ‘scandalous institution of a polity founded wholly on the counterfactual’ (p. 53) –  i.e. Christ’s overcoming of death – is accordingly interpreted in the sense of a transcendence of antique biopolitics through the restitution of a sociality based on ‘trust’ (i.e. faith/pistis) as opposed to law.

                As with his interpretation of the Gospel narrative in terms of the homo sacer, Milbank has a great deal more to say in his essay about contemporary biopolitics and about Paul’s Christian alternative than he does about the particular biopolitics of the archaic state to which the new ecclesial counter-polity is specifically contrasted in the Pauline texts.  However, there is a short section (pp. 33-42) apparently devoted to this topic.  The biopolitical imposition of political on animal life is briefly evoked in terms of a characterization of the Aristotelean zoon politikon as constituted through the domination of higher intellectual over animal life – a  structure mirrored on the socio-political level in the governing role possessed by free adult males over animals, slaves, women and children. (pp. 36-37)   But, from here on, the discussion seems dominated more by the concern to distinguish the ancient from the modern forms of biopolitics than to justify the assertion of their common ground qua biopolitics.  In fact, Milbank proceeds to characterize ‘pre-modern’ agency – specifically within the context of the antique state – as having largely the character of the ‘gift’.  Biopolitical ‘tensions’ are attributed to the interference in this basic pattern of reciprocity, or ‘mutuality’, by a practice of disinterested welfare which Milbank attributes, here as in BR, (p. 160) to the more despotic traditions of Eastern empires. (PNM, p. 41)  Thus he concludes that ‘the equivalent to the modern biopolitical tension between pure life and contract/law lies, in antique politics, between a one-way gift that may intervene equitably on behalf of the vagaries of life and a gift-exchange that concerns a more regular and egalitarian game of balance between those whom life has relatively well-blessed’. (p. 42)      

3 THE SACRIFICIAL REVISIONIST POSITION

We come now to a theological position so radically different from the theological positions discussed in the previous chapter – both as regards the notion of sacrifice implied and its relation to the salvation event – as to merit a chapter of its own.  It is a position which represents a viable alternative to non-sacrificial positions for those who, on ethical grounds, cannot be satisfied with the traditionalist position.  It is a position which, in the view of this study, has not received adequate consideration, but is in urgent need of re-assessment. 

The sacrificial revisionist position differs from other revisionist positions, on the one hand, in its  understanding of sacrifice, not as a major point of difference between Christian and non-Christian religions, but as a practice common to both.  The Christian salvation event becomes – at least in part – the specifically Christian inflexion of a universal religious phenomenon.  But it also differs, on the other hand, from other sacrificial positions, in not assuming a substitutionary concept of sacrifice.  Instead, it views the universality of the religious phenomenon as an invitation, first, to conceptualize sacrifice outside a traditionalist substitutionary frame, then to situate its specifically Christian form of sacrifice in relation to forms to be found elsewhere.  As a result, the topic of sacrifice tends to be foregrounded by sacrificial revisionist studies as it is not in studies that assume the culturally dominant model of substitutionary sacrifice.

Limitations of space do not allow me to give an account of all the studies that could be considered sacrificial revisionist, any more than I have been able to discuss all the studies that could be considered non-sacrificial revisionist.   I have chosen, therefore, to focus primarily on F.C.N. Hicks’ The Fullness of Sacrifice [1930].  This I consider to be exemplary of sacrificial revisionist theology on account of the adequacy of Hicks’ response to two fundamental problems that confront all attempts at a theology of this kind.

                The first problem concerns the relevance of sacrifice.  How does the apparently obsolete notion of sacrifice come to be integral to the redemptive message of the Gospel?  It seems, on the face of it, a farsimpler thing to argue, with non-sacrificial theology, that the uniqueness of Christianity consists in its repudiation of the sacrificial idea than to contend, with the sacrificial revisionists, that the full comprehension of salvation event requires the believer to make an arduous detour via ritual sacrifice.  To adopt the sacrificial revisionist position seems tantamount to placing intellectual obstacles in the path to Christian belief.  It is no surprise that a number of its proponents appear to share the concerns of biblical studies rather than Christian apologetics. 

Of the theologians who could be placed in the sacrificial revisionist camp, a number – especially the biblical scholars and historians – respond to the question of relevance on a purely historical level.  They argue that Christianity speaks the language of sacrifice because the biblical record, reflecting the social and cultural conditions of its time and place of origin, speaks that language.  There is no doubt about this; yet, as a response to anyone whose interest in Christianity goes beyond the historical, it is hardly adequate.  It leaves unanswered a profounder and more speculative question: namely, why – if the salvation event was to be a means of salvation for all mankind, including that increasing number of cultures no longer possessed of a sacrificial worldview – Christianity should have been condemned, by God and history, to speak a language which ordinary people would find increasingly difficult to understand.  What, then, is so special about sacrifice that a message of universal salvation should have had to be expressed in terms of it?

                The second problem is the issue of the Christian differentia.  This is more pressing for sacrificial revisionists than for non-sacrificial revisionists for two reasons.  First, because the differentia of the Christian paradigm is not already defined – as it is for the anti-sacrificialposition – by its oppositional relation to the sacrificial paradigms of other religions and cultures.  Once the phenomenon of generic sacrifice has been accurately conceptualized there remains the task of distinguishing the Christian form of that phenomenon from the forms characteristic of other religions; thus what non-sacrificial theology accomplishes in a single step now requires two.  Second, because sacrificial revisionist theology, by using a general anthropological concept of sacrifice to challenge the culturally-specific theological concept of the traditionalists, opens up the theological debate to comparative perspectives.   Identifying the differentia of the Christian paradigm becomes a matter of situating that paradigm in relation to other religious paradigms, and tracing similarities and differences between them.

                Among the sacrificial revisionists, it is, above all, Hicks, Dunnill, Bradley and Moses who seek to respond to the question of the relevance of sacrifice at the deeper theological level, while Young and Ashby seem relatively content to remain at the level of cultural history.[60]  As for the problem of the Christian differentia, this is not always squarely addressed by sacrificial revisionists, even it cannot ultimately be evaded[61]  – and it is, once again, Hicks’ study that comes closest to offering a serious response.  So, for both reasons, I shall focus in what follows on the work of Hicks.

F.C.N. Hicks

As to the why of sacrifice, Hick’s response is, broadly, that sacrifice is at the heart of ‘society’, and that the Gospel speaks of sacrifice because it speaks both to, and of, society.  In fact, he comes very close to identifying religion and society, claiming of religion that ‘the key to its development is the development of society, and citing Robertson-Smith’s memorable dictum that religion is ‘just part of a social order that encompasses both gods and men’ (p.34).[62]  This resembles the understanding of sacrificial religion we find in Girard or Milbank; but Hicks differs, of course, in seeing all religion, and not just pagan religion, as sacrificial, and consequently viewing Christianity, not as an escape from sacrificial religion, but as a manifestation of it. 

Despite his early date, Hicks, like Girard or Milbank, owes this fundamental perception of the inseparability of religion and society to influences ultimately traceable to social anthropology.  W. Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites [1889] – to which Hicks shows his indebtedness in numerous footnotes –[63] precedes the development of the discipline as it is known today.  Yet Robertson-Smith’s impact on Hicks’ work seems to mark the dawning of the fundamental intuition that Mary Douglas places at the origin of modern social anthropology: that, in the words of Émile Durkheim, ‘religion is an eminently social thing’.[64]  In line with this, Hicks’ Christian community takes its place, as a ritually and symbolically instituted social phenomenon, alongside other socio-religious phenomena such as the clan, the tribe or the archaic kingdom, differing from the latter, above all, in its aspiration to universality.

                  The main difficulty of this sociological perspective, so far as theology is concerned, is, as Douglas herself admits (p. xiii), its potential for a kind of reductionism.  Certainly, for Durkheim, the sociological account of religion implies a kind of demystification – as though the social scientist were offering a natural and scientific explanation of something (i.e. religion) for which we might otherwise be tempted to seek a supernatural one.  Yet, as Douglas also points out, the secularism of Durkheim’s own approach is not an inevitable outcome of the anthropologist’s apperception of the unity of religious and social phenomena.  If religion is eminently social, it may also be the case, she argues (p. xv), that society is eminently religious.  Such a possibility is well exemplified by the views of Hicks, who, like Robertson-Smith, combines this anthropological apperception with a personal Christian faith that defies the charge of reductionism.  For Hicks, society is inherently religious, not just because it is reproduced through ritual action, but because all ritual action in every society aspires, of its very nature, to the perfect act of sacrificial return to the source and giver of life we see represented in the life and death of Christ.  The same could no doubt be claimed of Robertson-Smith.  For all that, the latter is not himself a sacrificial revisionist, because he associates the requirement of ritual expression with a single phase in the development of religious truth that Christianity, in its fully-orbed development, ultimately outgrows.  Thus Robertson-Smith’s position, for all its influence on that of Hicks, remains a non-sacrificial one.[65]  

                The continuity presupposed by Hicks’ anthropological perspective between the ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’ and pre-existing or contemporary forms of religion is combined with a belief in the pre-eminence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the fullest expression of human social and religious aspiration.  This imposes an evolutionary and teleological perspective of the kind that is not calculated to appeal to modern anthropological sensibilities, but at least avoids condemning other traditions as violent and transactional, or else ignoring them as irrelevant to salvation – which is what non-sacrificial positions effectively do.  In Hicks, Christian sacrifice and community are represented as the culmination of a process of socio-religious development that begins with the clan, the tribe, and the archaic kingdom, and embodies the same socio-religious aspirations.  Because Christian sacrifice and community are viewed as developments of pre-existing forms of sacrifice and community, the normal two stages of the theological exposition of sacrifice, in the course of which the phenomenon is examined, first, in world religions, then, in specific relation to Christianity, end up revolving around a single socio-religious phenomenon, seen now (with paganism) in its limited and imperfect, now (with Christianity) in its perfect and fully realized form.  At the first stage (where we are offered an explanation of ‘West Semitic sacrifice’ largely derived from Robertson-Smith), Hicks tends to examine sacrifice from a sociological perspective; at the second (where the Judaeo-Christian tradition is at issue), he introduces in addition the perspective of religious meaning.  Both perspectives are seen as relevant to every expression of religion:  the sociological, because the effects of sacrifice are essentially the same in both the Christian and the non-Christian case; the perspective of Christian religious meaning, because, from Hicks’ point of view, it constitutes the perception of meaning associated with the truest expression of the sacrificial phenomenon – as demonstrated, he argues, by the realization of sociological telos (universal community) that is trammelled in all other religions (see below).

                In this section, I shall discuss the sociological perspective, leaving the aspect of religious meaning to be addressed in the evaluation of the implications of Hicks’ approach for the conceptualization of the salvation event. 

Sacrifice (in Hicks’ sense) is a kind of human action distinguished from other kinds by what it acts upon: namely what Hicks terms life.  Sacrifice, he argues, is an action serving to produce and reproduce life through ‘giving’, ‘transforming’ and ‘sharing’ it.  The life that is the object of these ritual operations is not, of course, biological life;  it is, as Hicks puts it, ‘life in society’, and includes both human bodies and human social structures, such as the family, clan or kingdom.  Sacrificial action in Hicks’ sense constitutes the essence of ceremonial occasions which, despite their basis in the sustenance of biological life, serve also to reproduce social structures.  In such contexts, the distinction between the biological and the social bodies tends to break down. 

It follows as an intriguing and very significant consequence of this that the process by which life is produced and reproduced (i.e. sacrifice) possesses an active and purposive character.  Unlike mere feeding and copulation, the ritual events that produce and reproduce this life involve concerted actions of a social and cultural nature.  This means, that, even where social bonds are spoken of as ‘natural’ (as with the family, for example), the ‘nature’ that they presuppose is one that human agents actively participate in constructing.  Dunnill, who in his chapter on ‘generative’ sacrifice strongly corroborates this position, offers, amongst a number of examples, the case of Isaac, Abraham’s firstborn, whose natural birth must be sacrificially re-enacted so that he may be constituted his father’s successor; like all firstborn, he belongs to God,and hence owes his continued physical existence to a sacrificial subterfuge. (p. 108) There is something very disconcerting about the way this undercuts the distinction we like to draw between the kinship and ‘elective’ relations of kinship.  The former we distinguish from the latter on the grounds that they are ‘natural’, as being the result of biological as opposed to cultural processes.  Hicks’s understanding of life, however, attributes the givenness and irrevocability that we associate with biological processes – seen as ‘natural’ – to ritual practices in which humans play an active and participatory role.  Natural relations of kinship are regarded as produceable and reproduceable through cultural processes, and this ultimately blurs the absolute and qualitative distinction we like to make between ‘family’ and sacrificially instituted community. 

We find this manifested, above all, in Hicks’ characterization of the symbol, and of the symbol of blood in particular.[66]  On the one hand, blood is seen as conferring life and kinship, in something of the sense we nowadays attribute to genes and chromosomes.   For the West Semitic clan, Hicks argues, blood – both of humans and their domestic animals – constitutes the common life of the clan which is god-given and irreplaceable (pp. 34-7).  The same idea is manifested in the biblical notion that ‘the life is in the blood’ (Leviticus 17.11). On the other hand, this ‘kinship substance’ – unlike genes and chromosomes (before modern genetic engineering) – is susceptible to ritual manipulation, as evidenced in Hebrew animal sacrifices in which the life substance, when released, can be put to socially reproductive uses.  This susceptibility indicates a capacity for ritual sacrifice to reproduce life and create kinship in a sense that includes, but goes beyond, mere physical reproduction.   Thus, for Hicks, there is no absolute qualitative distinction in the kind of engendering  that gives rise to the family bonds within the West Semitic clan and the kind that institutes covenantal community at the great sacrifice at Sinai, when Moses ‘dashes’ the sacrificial blood upon the people, who ‘beheld God, and ate and drank’ (Exodus 24.1-11, Hicks p. 24) – or, at the Last Supper, where, by a process that seems to elide the two stages of the Mosaic convenantal sacrifice, the sacrificial blood is itself a shared ritual sustenance that renders God visible in the midst of a new sacrificial community.  The kind of engendering in each of these cases is that of ritual action.  The recognition of its importance introduces a perspective from which the kinship bond of the West Semitic clan does not stand in opposition to the bond of Christian fellowship, on the grounds they pertain respectively to nature or culture, but in a kind of continuum with it.  Correspondingly, there is no absolute qualitative distinction between the social entities engendered through such symbolic operations: the West Semitic clan and the Christian covenantal community are both equally social entities reproduced through socio-symbolic actions involving the use of blood.

This leads inevitably to the second issue identified above: namely, what the differentia of Christianity consists in, if sacrifice and sacrificially reproduced forms of society – to name the obvious points of difference identified by anti-sacrificial theology – represent the common ground of all religion rather than anything that distinguishes Christianity specifically.

For Hicks, the Judaeo-Christian differentia turns upon its covenantal, monotheistic and piacular character (pp. 42-54). The importance of covenant, which is, for Hicks, the bedrock of that differentia (as it is for Milbank, Schwager and others), gives the divine fatherhood implicit in all sacrificial religion the distinctive character of a fatherhood by grace.  The idea of the absolute priority of divine initiative contained in that notion frees the Hebrew divinity to which it is applied from any prior qualitative determination of the kind reflected in a name or epithet (God is simply: ‘I AM THAT I AM’), as well as from the kind of restrictive ethnic determination implicit in a notion of fatherhood that is prior to, and conditions, that divine initiative (as, for instance, in the notion of God as a divine progenitor).  The development of monotheism is consequent upon the liberation of the divinity from qualitative determinations, and has socio-political corollaries, in that it pushes the notion of community implicit in the characterization of the divine in the direction of universalism.  Thus the increasingly ethical characterization of divinity, and of his demand upon his people, in terms of absolute ‘holiness’, goes along with a universalization of the notion of community – which progressively discards any attachment to territoriality or ethnicity and comes to resemble the confessional community we associate with the ‘body of Christ’ or the New Israel.  Finally, the piacular character of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, as seen in the growing importance of ‘Atonement sacrifices’,[67] arises as a  direct result of the heightening of the ethical demand implicit in the holiness of the monotheist God, and the resulting recognition of inevitable human failure.  Ultimately, the atoning sacrifice of Christ comes as the culmination of an evolution towards a recognition of the absolute ethical demand of holiness implicit in the characterization of the God who constitutes the divine vis-à-vis of the covenantal relation.     

Hicks’ approach is, of course, hardly a fully comparative one.  True, the tribal religions out of which Judaism and Christianity are supposed to have evolved are, to some degree, comparators. They are not relegated to the realms of what is either irrelevant or superseded, as they are by non-sacrificial theologies.  Yet, these territorial religions hardly constitute the most relevant comparators for Judaism and Christianity.  Far more interesting, from a sacrificial revisionist perspective, would be the religions that have advanced further along the same socio-religious trajectory towards universalism (for example, Islam and Buddhism).  About the differentia of Christianity in regard to these – surely the decisive case for the validation or invalidation of Hicks’ characterization of Christian uniqueness – Hicks has nothing to say.  Nevertheless, the universality he attributes to sacrifice as a manifestation of the inescapably social nature of the religious phenomenon certainly leaves open the door to such comparisons. 

 

The impact of the sacrificial revisionistposition on the conceptualization of the salvation event

What Hicks says about the social functionality of sacrifice at a first stage of his analysis is complemented by what he says about its religious meaning at a second.  This religious meaning is that of every genuine act of religious sacrifice, but is fully expressed in the life and death of Christ, which is the paradigm of all religious sacrifice.  Thus, for Hicks, the conceptualization of the Christian salvation event and the explanation of the profoundest meaning of religious sacrifice are one and the same thing.

                So what, for Hicks, is the profoundest meaning of sacrifice that is exemplified in the Christian salvation event?  It is, above all, a perfect act of ‘oblation’ consisting in the ‘surrender’ and ‘offering’ of life back to its giver and source, and resulting in its ‘transformation’.  This action, addressed to God, and aiming at our union with him, is, simultaneously, an action of total ‘sharing’ of life with our fellow human beings and bringing about relationship with them.  Our understanding of the religious meaning of sacrifice is not complete without this relational, and inter-human, component – though, perhaps, its necessity is not, at first sight, self-evident.  To demonstrate the complementarity of the principles of surrender and offering, on the one hand, and sharing, on the other, Hicks refers to the case of ‘sacrificial’ meals such as the feeding of the five thousand, or the Lord’s Supper, which, like their Hebrew and pagan antecedents, glorify the Father in the process of nourishing his human children.  Behind all these, however, we discern the ultimate paradigm of Christ’s surrender and offering of his bodily life, which, as John’s Gospel informs us (John 16.5-7), are the indispensable means by which, with the coming of the Spirit, the life which has hitherto existed uniquely within the mutual relations of the Son and Father may come to be shared by the multitude of Jesus’ followers. 

                Such principles as surrender, offering and sharing appear to be derived from the sphere of ritual cult – which is indeed the domain in relation to which Hicks first elaborates them.  Yet, paradoxically, their fullest expression, Hicks claims, is in relation to the life and death of Christ.  Thus it is to the Synoptic Gospels (rather than the Epistles) to which Hicks turns in order to illustrate their fullest Christian meaning, though the Gospels have not generally been considered the most fruitful field for an investigation of the theme of sacrifice.  Nevertheless, Hicks begins by examining the principle of surrender from the perspective of its emergence as an attribute of the divine sacrificial agent in the parables of Jesus (the Good Shepherd, or the Prodigal Son), and offering and transformation from that of the sacrificial nature of divine action seen in healing and exorcisms, where contact with the unclean results in the apprehension of God’s holiness.  Only subsequently does he introduce the more explicitly cultic perspective introduced by the Last Supper – and, even here, the exemplification of sacrifice remains ethical to the extent that it involves a creative evocation of sacrificial principles in response to given historical circumstance, at least as much as an inauguration of a new ritual tradition. 

Ultimately, of course, the institution of the Eucharist results in the principles resuming something more of the appearance of ritual manipulations.  Yet, by this stage of Hicks’ analysis, the sacrificial principles of surrender, offering/transformation and sharing – for all their anchoring in Hebrew cultic, and ultimately in Christian eucharistic, notions – have become so permeated with ethical meanings that we can readily understand how it is, on Hicks’ reading, that, in early Christian writings, such as those of Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch and the Didache, it is hard to discern whether or not references to Christian sacrifice involve the ritual consecratory action over gifts of bread and wine.  Whereas, for the non-sacrificial Daly, this vagueness constitutes evidence of the absence of ritual action, for Hicks, it is the result of the breadth of the early Christian conception of Eucharist as a ‘sacrifice of prayer’ – a conception which he regards as encompassing both the breaking of bread and ‘the prayers, the thanksgivings, the alms […] and the contributions to the agape’.  The link between the Eucharist and the Lord’s Supper is supplied, according to Hicks, by the characterization of Christ’s instituting ‘sacrifice of prayer’ (i.e. his words of consecration) as a Passover Kiddush –[68]  a blessing that, in the manner of such prayers, may, like the consecratory prayers of early Christian liturgies, have ranged over creation, redemption, election and sanctification.  Hicks is thus fully in accord with Daly on the breadth of the sense to be attributed to the Christian ‘sacrifice of praise’, but wholly in disagreement in respect to the discontinuity of this ethicized phenomenon with the Hebrew cultus.  As a result, Hicks offers us, not a sacrifice purged of ritual association, but a sacrifice that extends simultaneously into the ethical and the ritual domain: ‘The Temple area must become the Kingdom – the scene of the life of the Divine commonwealth; and the Kingdom must become the Sanctuary.’ (p.225) 

Conclusions to Part I (A): on the implications of a sacrificial/non-sacrificial position for the conceptualization of Christian community

As with the various non-sacrificial positions considered in the previous chapter, we now reach the point, having described the theological implications of the sacrificial position, of evaluating those implications as against the theological implications of the positions already discussed.  Since the sacrificial revisionist position of Hicks represents the last in our series of theological options, the following paragraphs bring to a conclusion important aspects of the first arm of our investigation, which, it will be remembered, was to evaluate the non-sacrificial and sacrificial positions from the theological perspective. 

We have hitherto examined, for each of the positions considered, first the theological implications, then the implications for the conceptualization of sacrifice.  Our interest in both cases has, of course, been in the evaluation of options for Atonement theology; but whereas in the former case the discussion centres on issues that affect theology directly, in the latter we are concerned with issues that are relevant because they relate to the plausibility of the anthropological basis on which the theology rests.  The comparative evaluation of theological positions in respect to their anthropological implications – which, following the same order we adopted in the case of non-sacrificial positions, we will pursue in the next section – will not bring us to any definitive conclusions regarding the anthropological plausibility of the various positions.  That will require us to calibrate the various theological conceptualizations of sacrifice against the evidence of adjacent (i.e. non-theological) disciplines – which will be the primary task of Part II of this study.  But, so far as concerns the comparative evaluation of the theological implications – which we pursue in the present section – our discussion will lead to some definitive conclusions regarding some important aspects of the theological impact of the choice of either a non-sacrificial or a sacrificial revisionist position.  Other aspects of the theological impact, however, are hard to separate out from some of the anthropological implications to be further contextualized in Part II. 

The aspects about which we are already in a position to establish some final conclusions relate to the issues that have constituted our primary focus in sections which, like the present one, have been devoted to the theological implications of the various positions: first, and more briefly, the question of the metaphorical/real status of sacrificial language applied to the salvation event; second, and more extensively, the question of the nature and self-consistency of the account of relationality and community ascribed to Christianity by the different positions.  In Chapter 6 I shall argue that these two issues are related, and derive ultimately from a feature common to the sacrifice as metaphor and the anti-sacrificial positions.  For the present, it will suffice to outline the diverse theological implications of the non-sacrificial and sacrificial revisionist positions, and to evaluate those positions on that basis. 

As for the aspects of the theological impact that cannot easily be disengaged from the anthropological implications requiring further contextualization in Part II, these concern the characterization of the Christian differentia.  Chapter 1 argued that, in the case of anti-sacrificial positions (and to some extent other non-sacrificial positions), the oppositional nature of the relationship presupposed between ‘history of religions’ sacrifice and Christian salvation event meant that a characterization of the Christian differentia was already implied in the conceptualization of ‘history of religions’ sacrifice.  This simultaneous oppositional characterization of sacrifice and salvation event can be viewed both from a theological perspective (i.e., the relative plausibility of the resulting conceptualization of the salvation event as against conceptualizations arising in other positions) and an anthropological one (i.e., the compatibility of its conceptualization of sacrifice with the conceptualizations to be found in adjacent disciplines).  It follows from this that the sections of Chapter 2 dedicated to the conceptualization of sacrifice turn out to have relevance for the evaluation of aspects of the direct impact of the choice of position on theology.  WIth the sacrificial revisionist position, however, the situation is very different, since here the characterization of the Christian differentia will not be contained within the characterization of ‘history of religions’ sacrifice.  In this case (which concerns us now), discussion of the Christian differentia naturally falls within the section dedicated to the theological implications of the position (the present section), rather than the section dedicated to the implications for the conceptualization of sacrifice (the next section).  So I propose, in what follows, to take advantage of this situation in order to draw together – and attempt a preliminary comparative evaluation of – the characterization of the Christian differentia proposed by Hicks and the various characterizations implied by the oppositional definitions of ‘history of religions’ sacrifice discussed in the previous chapter. 

In respect to this aspect of the theological impact of the different positions, however, no final conclusions can yet be reached.  This is because the anti-sacrificial characterizations of Christian differentia have no more claim to anthropological plausibility than the conceptualizations of sacrifice with which they coincide, while Hicks’ own characterization (and indeed any conceivable sacrificial revisionist characterization) relies on a wider anthropological understanding of ‘history of religions’ sacrifice from which Christian sacrifice can be differentiated.  So here, as with the anthropogical impact of the choice of position, our final conclusion must await the contextualization of the theological options within the interdisciplinary discussion of sacrifice.

I begin, therefore, with those aspects of the theological impact of the choice of a non-sacrificial or sacrificial revisionist position about which we are already in a position to a reach a conclusion.  The first of these concerns the theological impact of attributing either a metaphorical (non-sacrificial) or a realist status to the notion of sacrifice in relation to the Christian salvation event.  As we argued in Chapter 2 (2.1), the adoption of the sacrifice as metaphor position leads to a generalized degradation in the referential capacity of the religious language that we apply to the salvation event.  At one level, this position, by making room for revisionist positions alongside the traditionalist one, might appear to be safeguarding the integrity of Christian tradition and thereby its capacity for reference; but anything that might be achieved on these lines is at once undermined by the generalized devaluation of all religious reference implicit in the position.  Needless to say, this overwhelming disadvantage is not shared by the position of Hicks, whose notion of the religious symbol, well illustrated be the example of blood that we explored in the previous section, is wholly incompatible with the kind of preliminary ontological dissociation of signifier and signified required for the properly metaphorical relation.  It is consistent with this view of ritual meaning that Hicks not only avoids employing metaphorical termology, but is quite explicit about why he feels its use to be wholly inappropriate in the religious context.  As regards the particular instance of religious language that is sacrifice, our exposition of Hicks’ views makes sufficiently plain that he entirely identifies the salvation event with sacrificial action.  There can be no question of the latter being a metaphor of the former; they are simply one and the same thing.  He thus avoids the de-actualizing impact of arguing, like sacrifice as metaphor, that the soteriological language of the Church and the NT is but a vague approximation at something which it defies the power of language to grasp.

The other aspect of the theological impact of the choice of position regards the resulting conceptualization of Christian ritual (Eucharist) and community (Church) – and, above all, its self-consistency.  All the anti-sacrificial positions considered in Chapter 2 are united in their repudiation of the idea of a distinctively Christian form of institutional relationality – a fortiori, of a Christian relationality of a socio-symbolic nature.   However, their ongoing attachment to traditional notions of sacrament and sacramental community leads, in some cases, to unconvincing attempts to frame notions of the sacramental in opposition to – or in disassociation from – institutional and socio-symbolic behaviour (designated by these positions ‘sacrificial’).  Even on the more plausible formulations of this kind (e.g. Schwager’s) there is a suggestion that non-Christian and Christian forms of ritual differ qualitatively at the level of their social function: that the reproduction of socio-symbolic community which these theologians associate with non-Christian ritual is replaced, in the case of Christianity, by an effect that is purely personal or interdividual.  Furthermore, this position responds to the evident existence of Christian forms of institutional sociality with the argument that what, in all other cases, represents an aim of symbolic ritual, in the case of Christianity alone represents an aberration of that aim.  This is both implausible and reductive – in that it appears, somewhat arbitrarily, to exclude from the sphere of what is redeemable through the Gospel uniquely that dimension of human life that consists in institutional relationships.

The sacrificial revisionism of Hicks gets over the problem of relating sacrifice and sacrament by the straightforward expedient of identifying them.  The Eucharist becomes a form of ritual sacrifice – indeed the perfect fulfilment of all ritual sacrifice.  The various stages of the old Hebrew ritual cultus, which are themselves typical of sacrificial cultus as practiced in all ages and cultures, find their consummate expression in the phases of that ultimate sacrifice that has its final moment in religious reality symbolized by the eucharistic communion:

The laying on of hands, in the Incarnation; the slaying of the Victim, on the Cross; the

use of the blood, in that heavenly pleading and ‘sprinkling’ of which the Epistle to the Hebrews (…) draws out the meaning; the transforming (of what is offered) (…) in Resurrection and Ascension; (…) and, finally, the indwelling of God in man, and of man in God, and the fellowship of man with man, in the meal … (p. 272)

This solves at a stroke the problems experienced by non-sacrificial positions of finding a role for socio-symbolic ritual and community within the Christian faith.  It also offers a far more plausible account of the apparently homologous role of ritual as between Christian and non-Christian religions, and its association in both cases with institutional structure.  And it avoids arbitrarily exempting an important dimension of all human life from the salvific influence of the Gospel of grace.  So far as the formal homology between Christian and non-Christian ritual is concerned, a number of passages in Hicks’ work make plain that it is not merely convergent with his view of sacrifice and Eucharist, but something he is very much aware of.  So, for example, in relation to the crucial NT text on the Eucharist that is I Corinthians 10, we find the proposition that ‘the Eucharist is treated as the parallel in Christianity to the sacrificial meals alike of Jewish and of pagan religion’ (pp. 234-5).  Hicks’ intention here is to argue on the basis of parallels in pagan religion that the communion – Passover or Eucharist – is an organic part of the whole action of sacrifice, which begins respectively, with the slaughter of Passover lambs and the death of Christ.  But, of course, the validity of the argument depends on the underlying conviction that pagan cultus and Christian salvation event are strictly analogous.

Of course, the chief objection to identifying Eucharist with sacrifice like this has always been the danger of importing into our understanding of the Christan salvation event some very unsuitable notions of what constitutes ‘sacrifice’.  The traditional Roman Catholic understanding of the eucharistic rite as a means to appropriating the fruits of the Christ event through the action of the priest seems to be intimately connected with the idea that sacrifice involves the destruction of, or, at least, a change in, the offering – an notion going back to early Scholasticism and famously assumed by Thomas Aquinas (Kilmartin, pp. 127-129).  The result of such thinking has been a eucharistic theology concentrating almost exclusively on the moment of death enacted in the course of the rite, and highly prone to transactionalist deformations.  Protestantism, therefore, has tended to reject the understanding of Eucharist as sacrifice, albeit with wavering consistency (Dix, pp. 631-636; 674-678), or else to qualify it heavily (e.g. as ‘spiritual’) (Dix, p.633); some recent Roman Catholic eucharistic theology also challenges the prevailing ‘average Catholic theology of eucharistic sacrifice’ which it sees as rooted in a ‘moment of consecration theology’ that is no longer theologically defensible (Daly, pp. 181-184; Kilmartin, pp. 249-50).  None of these objections, however, properly apply to Hicks’ understanding of eucharistic sacrifice, since, as we saw in the previous section, the notion of sacrifice developed by his study is altogether broader than that of Aquinas – or, indeed, much recent sacrifice theory; indeed, it is at the very opposite extreme to the narrow definitions that restrict sacrifice to rites centring upon the destruction of a victim.  The question of whether such a broad definition of sacrifice is justified in the light of the ethnographical record will occupy us in Part II of this study.  What interests us at this point in our enquiry is the effect on Hicks’ understanding of the Eucharist.  And the important thing to say here is that it enables him to characterize the performative action of the rite as a ‘sharing of life’ – which is, in turn, considered the final phase of a divine action (recalled in the eucharistic prayer) that, far from fixating on the Cross (Hicks, p. 212), spans the entire Christian salvation event (what Kilmartin terms the ‘transitus of Christ’ (p. 370)).  This formulation of the meaning of eucharistic sacrifice is, for all intents and purposes, identical to that of Kilmartin (p.370) or Dix (p.247).      

Coming now to the question of differentia, let us begin by repeating that, for Hicks (as for Schwager and Milbank), the covenantal relation involves a conceptualization of the human:divine relationship as the encounter of humans with a divine stranger/partner rather than an atavistic bond with a tutelary ancestor.  That the former implies, by contrast with the latter, the initiatve of the divine partner; and that it influences the shape of the socio-functionalist dimension of religion through its liberation of the human:divine bond from all prior, and localized, determinations.  Thus far, our three most ethnographically informed interlocutors are all agreed.  What distinguishes the sacrificial as against the non-sacrificial interpretation of the emergence in Judaeo-Christian tradition of the covenantal relation relates to how far, and in what respect, the irruption of the covenantal God into human religion represents either the untramelling of an already existing potential, or else the invasion of something hitherto unknown. 

                Schwager is enough of a Girardian to characterize the status quo ante as the reign, in the shape of sacrifice, of the socially indispensable delusion.  The sacrificial nature of all prior religious forms condemns them to a role that is simultaneously socio-symbolic (i.e. reproductive of social institutions) and, qua socio-symbolic, cognitively empty.  Both aspects are conjured up in The Scapegoat by the image from Gilgamesh of the spectral presences gathering like birds around the sacrificial meats.  In contra-distinction to this, the divine vis-à-vis of the convenantal relation is represented as simultaneously ‘personal’ (as opposed to socio-symbolic) and ‘real’ (as opposed to empty).  It has also to be remembered that the theological task for which Schwager calls upon Girardian theory is essentially that of offering a convincing account of ‘original sin’.  The sinful idolatry of the socio-symbolic thus finds itself, at least at the first stage of Schwager’s analysis, starkly opposed to the personal truth of Christianity; and ‘personal’, in this context, can only suggest interdividual.  Schwager, then, takes a maximal view of the discontinuity in human religion introduced by the covenantal relation (as any Girardian must), and consequently arrives at a conception of sociality as existing in a purely individualized ‘spiritual’ sphere entirely beyond the socio-symbolic.  This causes difficulties for Schwager when, at a later point in his studies, he has to speak of Jesus’s basileia (Kingdom).  The latter evidently possesses a socio-political dimension – and, furthermore, a socio-political dimension that ultimately turns out to be associated in some way with ritual enactment; yet Schwager’s categorical refusal to trace its genealogy ‘through the sacrificial line’ forces us to conceptualize its nature as radically opposed to the socio-symbolic.  We are thus left, on the socio-functional level, with a sacramental entity that is implied to have nothing to do with socio-symbolism, and, on the exegetical level, with an understanding of the basileia that hangs free of the grand OT narrative of Temple and Kingdom.

                At the other extreme, Hicks views both the ‘primitive’ and ‘covenantal’ phase of human religion in terms of ritually reproduced socio-religious institutions.  The advent of the covenantal relation is here seen, not as a break with the socio-symbolic, but as a radical untramelling of the human:divine relation that is capable of unlocking the full Christian potential of all religion.  This occurs, as we have seen, through the replacement of ancestral gods by the divine stranger/partner of the covenantal relation.  In practice, the liberation of religion from all local determinants which this achieves enables both the ethical characterization of the divinity in terms of ‘holiness’ and the universalization of the associated notion of community; but it does not replace a socio-religious understanding of religion with a personal or interdividual understanding.  The notion of religion itself remains unaltered, and is essentially always socio-symbolic.  Even in ‘primitive’ societies it aspires to the fullness of that act of worship achieved in the life and death of Christ; while the realization of that goal of worship corresponds to the fullest achievement by religion of the socio-functionality that is the essential property of religion even in  its most ‘primitive’ forms.  So, in the case of Hicks, the relation of before and after is, at it were, that of the child, whose development were, for some reason, to have been miraculously arrested, to the adult it was destined to become, or that of a computer to an identical computer with an enormously enhanced memory capacity.  As a result, sacrifice becomes the leading thread of a grand narrative of historical development – that of Temple and Kingdom – into which the Christian salvation event and the Eucharist, which is the symbolic form of its expression, fit perfectly as the culminating stage.  Such an account seems to suffer none of the socio-functional or exegetical problems that beset Schwager’s.

                Milbank‘s theology represents a mid-point between Schwager’s and Hicks’.  On the one hand, Milbank is keen to insist, contra Schwager, that the emergence of the covenantal relation involves the recovery of an existing human capacity – that pure expressive relationality of asymmetrical repetition that underlies the existence of all social life.  To this extent it marks the return of humanity to itself, rather than the incorporation into it of some radically new element such as might prompt the question whether the human essence should be associated with the former or the latter phase of human development.  On the other hand, the advent of covenant marks an innovation in the symbolic sphere, since the covenant, as a symbolic expression of pure relationality, is sharply distinguished from sacrifice, which is the expression of the closed relationality of institutions.  The resulting view of human development resembles Hicks’, to the extent that it suggests an untramelling of human sociality from its previous limitations; but, whereas, in Millbank’s case, such limitations are identified with a tendency of human relationality towards self-closure and boundedness, for Hicks (who hardly seems to envisage sociality outside the bounds of socio-religious community, and, if he had, would probably not consider it relevant to religion), the limitations of pre-convenant sociality is simply a question of its localization in time, place and manner.  Consequently, whereas Milbank associates the promise of covenant with the transcendence of all social boundedness in the direction of an absolutely ‘open’ and decentred form of sociality, Hicks would associate it with the development of a community of ever expanding boundaries in the direction of a universal community/religion.  Thus, for Hicks, boundedness remains an unquestionable attribute of all religion and sociality, as it is not for Milbank.  Quite apart from the exegetical challenges of envisaging OT convenant independently of sacrifice, Milbank’s Christian community, as we have seen, is one condemned to experience its own identity as essentially defined by the de facto limits imposed on it by the encroachments of closed communities such as the ‘state’; it becomes an essentially contestatory idea – a machine de guerre deployed in a liberation struggle against the violent hegemony of the liberal capitalist state. 

This, of course, raises the question how Hicks sees his universal socio-symbolic institution relating to other more local forms – the family, the tribe, the nation.  Does Christian community take the place of these institutions?  Or does it purify or subsume them by aligning their practices and structures on its own?  Or does it remain in tension with them?  Hicks is vague on these matters.  However, the relation of Christian community to other social institutions is not, on Hicks’ view, determined by its embodiment of some radically opposed principle as it is for Schwager or Milbank.  There is, in other words, nothing in the character of social and political institutions per se that renders them incompatible with Christian community – in the way that Girard’s archaic religious community, or Milbank’s sacrificial state, stand in an inherently oppositional relation to Christian revelation.

The impact of the sacrificial revisionistposition on the conceptualization of the sacrifice

 

There are four crucial elements of Hicks’ sacrificial revisionist conceptualization of sacrifice. The first is an understanding of ethicized sacrifice – such as the sacrifice of the life offered in Romans 12.1 – as fully real and not metaphorical.  The second is the theory of a historical process of ethicization whereby ritual sacrifice evolves in an increasingly ethical direction.  The third is an implication of this development: namely, that sacrificial ritual, even in its early Jewish and pagan forms, carries, as the bearer of life, the signs of its ultimately Christian vocation – since it is a practice which is ethical, human, and the bearer of a good that is already active, even if still inchoate.  (Here, there is a sharp contrast with sacrifice as metaphor and Girard-based theology).  The fourth is another implication of ethicization: namely, that the fully ethical character of the practice does not prevent it from also being socio-symbolic – by which is implied that the ethical practice of religion is not contained in the individual or interdividual realm, but is constitutive of bounded social entities.  (Here, there is a sharp contrast with gift theory).

                Before considering the first of these points, I shall highlight some features of Hicks’ understanding of religion that simultaneously bear upon the question of the real vs. metaphorical status of sacrifice and point to the relevance of that issue to the other elements of his characterization of sacrifice just mentioned, namely its ethical, social, and socio-symbolic nature.

Hicks frequently applies the term sacrifice to relatively ordinary actions often involving nourishment in the form of food or drink – such, for example, as feasting or ceremonial meals, whether within a cultic setting or elsewhere.  These are actions whose symbolic function of conveying meanings and reproducing relationships may be hard to distinguish from their more prosaic aim of sustaining life in a more physical sense.  One is reminded of miraculous events in the Gospel that are charged with spiritual meanings, and yet apparently motivated by the everyday situations of material need.  

It is no doubt in line with this simultaneously symbolic and material reference that such actions often appear to address themselves simultaneously to God and fellow participants.  What is at issue at both levels is what Hicks terms life and its transmission in the form of spiritual and material sustenance between God and human and between humans.  In Hicks’ view, the Christian notion of ‘eternal life’ cannot be disengaged from the more general notion of life as something that constitutes the common heritage of the tribe or clan.  Both these senses are manifested in the symbolism of blood.  The shared life of the Church is therefore continuous with the shared patrimony of the West Semitic clan – or for that matter the blood shed in the sacrifices of the Hebrew cult.  And this shared symbolism allows life to be manipulated through religious actions in which human and god share some measure of agency.

                This sphere of physical actions which symbolize and communicate, and through which humans participate in the construction of their socio-religious world, is a sphere which Hicks believes Christianity shares with other, non-Judaeo-Christian, traditions – the sphere of religion.  In Christianity, he argues, such actions come to symbolize something more universal and more profoundly ethical than in tribal religion.  Perhaps, in Christianity, symbolic actions attain to the full dignity of their calling.  Nevertheless, for Hicks, this does not make them any less symbolic actions, nor alter the underlying modality of their symbolic function.  Human religion remains ineradicably human – and, qua human, ritually and socially grounded – even when it takes a Christian form.  

To come now to the first element of Hicks’ characterization of sacrifice, these general reflections cast a fresh light on what separates that position from that of sacrifice as metaphor.  Hicks is opposed – like other proponents of the sacrificial revisionist position – to every attempt to constitute a realm of religious or social concepts independent of the world of physical things and everyday actions, by prying apart the symbol from the symbolized – a process which he refers to as ‘abstraction’.  Abstraction, he argues, is a modern tendency that is inimical to religion, and which is at the heart of our inclination to distance religious ideas by considering them as metaphorical:

It is only when truth has been depersonalized and therefore in a measure de-Christianized and the possibility of conveying and apprehending truth confined to the mind as mechanical and abstracted from the rest of the functions of the living personality as a whole, that we feel that the language of eating and drinking has become inappropriate, and we have to apologize for its use by calling it a metaphor. (p. 114)

Sacrifice, on Hicks’ view, belongs in the realm of the social and the socio-symbolic – the realm of what he calls ‘religion’.  (This, it will be remembered, does not prevent it from being charged with an ethical significance).  Because sacrifice is not something that theology, given its history, can lightly dispense with, the tendency to abstraction goes along with drastic attempts to relocate the symbolized outside the social and socio-religious realm altogether.  In other words, the socio-symbolic action (e.g. eating or drinking) comes to be seen as referring beyond itself to another realm of reality (i.e. the spiritual).  On the linguistic level, this introduces the ontological break which allows the metaphor, in McFague’s terms, to accompany the affirmation ‘it is’ with the whisper ‘it is not’.  On the theological level, it constructs a notion of the symbolized by exiting the social in one of two directions.  On the one hand, it may construct the symbolized in the realm of the sub-social.  So, with Girard, the meaning of sacrifice is something that precedes society – a totally instinctive and mechanical action (scapegoating) that nevertheless lays the foundation of the social.  Alternatively, in the case of Milbank’s gift theology, the symbolized becomes a principle of political or economic reason, conceived of as a quasi-natural force of necessity that limits the freedom of genuinely ethical relations.  On the other hand, the symbolized may be relocated in the realm of the supra-social realm of an individualized existential relation with God, or individualist ethics, or interdividual relations of a private nature.  Either way, the social is expunged from the core of our religious ideas in order to become just a source of colourful imagery with which to designate, more often than not, the personal transcendent.

                There is a very real connection, therefore, between the virulently anti-metaphorical direction of sacrificial revisionist thinking and its espousal of a social and socio-symbolic understanding of sacrifice that is strongly opposed to concepts of sacrifice as non-social, or sub-social, on grounds of their being inherently violent, mechanistic or economicist.  Because these characterizations are specific to the Girardian (violent, mechanistic) and the gift-theology (economicist) perspectives respectively, I hope, in what follows, to be able to combine, on the one hand, the schema proposed above for an exposition of a sacrificial revisionist defence of sacrifice in positive terms – treating the questions of ethicization (2), and of the ethical (3), and the socio-symbolic (4) nature of Hicks’ sacrifice – with, on the other, an account of the response that it offers to more negative characterizations of sacrifice, as, respectively,  violent, mechanistic and economicist.  In this way, the conceptualization of sacrifice by sacrificial revisionist theology can be elucidated, both in its own terms, and in terms of the contrast it presents with the conceptualizations of non-sacrificial theology.  The characterizations of sacrifice as violent and mechanistic – epitomized by the Girardian position, but also evidenced in sacrifice as metaphor – can ultimately best be countered by exploring what sacrificial revisionist theology says about ethicization, and the implications of that for the sacrificial revisionist conceptualization of ritual sacrifice.  But before embarking on this, I propose to preface that argument with a few words about the Hicks’ non-violent characterization of sacrifice, which contrasts so starkly with the characterization of sacrifice to be found in all Girard-based theology.

                According to Hicks (and all sacrificial revisionists), the focus of OT sacrifice is not on the slaughter of an animal, but on the ritual operation which takes place using the blood that is thereby obtained.[69]  Of course, the slaughter is an indispensable preliminary to what follows; but it is not the primary object of the ritual operation.  Now this is an important distinction, because sacrifice has often been defined by social theorists as well as by theologians as a ritual centred upon the death or destruction of something (or someone).  While there is no necessity for such death/destruction to be understood as an act of violence, this is nevertheless how it has generally been interpreted – not least by traditionalist and Girard-based theology.  For traditionalists, the violence is that of a punitive God, or of his human agents; for Girard-based theology, it is that of a social mechanism that the Christian revelation serves to demystify and disable.  Sacrificial revisionisttheology, by contrast, shifts the focus of sacrifice away from the moment of death, and so re-defines the concept in a way that dissociates it from violence.  It is the interpretative framework derived from the non-violent understanding of OT ritual sacrifice that allows Hicks’ emphasis on Christ’s subjection to violence to be subsumed in a broader narrative, developing themes such as the dedication of a life to God and its sharing with our fellow beings.  

                A more fundamental issue, however, is how the characterization of sacrifice relates to the view that the theologian takes of the relationship between ritual and ethical religion (of which our example has been the sacrifice of the life offered which St Paul enjoins on Christians in Romans 12.1).  This, of course, is the issue of ethicization, which constitutes the second major point in respect to which the sacrificial revisionist position of Hicks differs from that of non-sacrificial theology.   In regard to this issue, the difference between Hicks and the anti-sacrificial position concerning the role of violence in sacrifice (already touched on in the previous paragraph) is closely allied to the difference between them in regard to its characterization as, respectively, purposive or mechanical.  The idea of sacrifice as instinctive and violent is consistent with the view of Girard-based and some sacrifice as metaphor theology that the meaning of sacrificial ritual is to be sought in an act that is pre- or sub-social – namely, in an act located in a space beyond the limits of social (let alone ethical) life.  Indeed, for Girard, the social  remains collusive with what precedes and negates it – and there is a sense in which our common life only becomes ethical to the extent that we benefit from a supernatural revelation that allows us to leave the social behind.  As the means of that collusion, ritual sacrifice cannot but be absolutely discontinuous with the ‘ethical religion’ that enables us to escape the social.  It is difficult to exaggerate what separates this view of human religious history from the notion of a continuity of development within religion and society from more ritual to more ethical manifestations of sacrifice – from what, in other words, we have termed ethicization, and illustrated by means of Hicks’ study.  Particularly important, I would contend, is the absence from the latter view of any notion of a possibie space beyond the limits of social humanity, and consequently of any need for a supra-social intervention that would rescue us from collusion with its sub-social influence.   For Hicks, as we have seen, the domain of religion and society seems co-extensive with what he terms life, and has no need to be transcended in order to become ethical.  Yet within that unified domain he distinguishes a development whereby the ethical aspirations that are already incipient in sacrificial rituals of archaic society come to achieve their perfect manifestation in a fullly ethical and universal religion – that of the Christian life offered – without losing their symbolic and socially embodied character. 

                Where the Judaeo-Christian tradition itself is concerned, that continuity with archaic ritual could scarcely be plainer.  All the elements of the ethical sacrifice that Hicks finds exemplified in the life and death of Christ are already present at some level in the various actions of the temple cult – the dedication of life to God, the transforming and sharing of life, and even Atonement.  The very notion – if not the actuality – of a kingdom of God is inaugurated, not with the Church, but with the Old Israel, which had its own means of Atonement whereby sins could be forgiven and God continue to maintain his presence among his people. 

Yet this continuity of the salvation event with archaic ritual is not limited to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but also discernable in the religious and social aspirations embodied in the sacrificial institutions of pagan kingdoms, tribes, and clans. These too, according to Hicks, were concerned with the dedication, the transformation and the sharing of life.  Indeed, given the inseparability of the the religion and the society, the very existence of societies implied a participation in the aspirations of religion. This, of course, is why Hicks sees the basis of the Judaeo-Christian differentia, not as a qualitative change in the character of religion, but a new understanding of God and his relationship to humanity (i.e. the covenantal relation), enabling, as we have seen, an enormous enlargement and deepening of religion.  Religion itself – i.e. what we find enlarged and deepened through the covenantal relation – consists in what the Judaeo-Christian tradition receives from the past – and ‘What Christianity receives from the past’: 

… is life as lived in society.  […] That life was only known in the society – clan, tribe, nation, kingdom, Church – whatever the names by which we are able to classify its various forms and stages. (p. 111)

In other words, social entities (both clan and Church) and symbolic processes (both ritual and ethical sacrifice) constitute an essential ‘given’ of the human condition that is transformed as a result of the Judaeo-Christian revelation.  There is therefore a post-covenantal form of the entities and processes thereby transformed – not simply an abrogation of those entities and processes in favour of a non-socio-symbolic Christianity of purely personal faith and interdividual relationships.  This, for Hicks, would be tantamount to an abrogation of the conditions of human life itself. 

                The third major element of difference between Hicks’ position and that of non-sacrificial theology follows from their divergence over the notion of ethicization set out out above.  For if archaic ritual sacrifice (Hebrew and pagan) constitutes an earlier stage in a development that will culminate in the Christian salvation event, then archaic ritual sacrifice, and the community of clan and tribe that it serves to reproduce, have to be seen as containing at least the germ of what will one day evolve from them, and Christian revelation must be seen as acting within the archaic forms of sacrifice in order to transform them, rather than simply sloughing off those forms in order to attain a more socially-disembodied, and more purely spiritual, realm. To this extent, the ethical dimension that we attribute to the Christian sacrifice to which St Paul enjoins us cannot be altogether alien to the sacrificial rituals through which archaic communities are reproduced, and the aspiration to offer fit worship to the source of their being cannot be altogether absent from the motivations that inspired those rituals and communities.   

                Hence a position on sacrifice that presupposes ethicization such as Hicks’ inevitably finds itself committed to an understanding of sacrifice that is incompatible with that of non-sacrificial theology.  Some element of violence will not necessarily be irreconcilable with a view of archaic sacrifice as incorporating a genuinely ethical and spiritual aspiration.  But a sacrificial revisionist position presupposing ethicization cannot be compatible with the understanding of archaic sacrifice as a practice committed to the miscognition of the past and exclusive of true insight.  According to Hicks, there is every possibility that one who sacrifices is acting consciously and purposively.  This does not mean that such actions are necessarily free or unconstrained; but it does mean that they implicate responsible human agents, rather than the mere dupes and victims of gods or society.

The above paragraphs have dealt with the second and third points of our analysis of Hicks’s position – its implication of a historical development of ethicization linking ethical and ritual manifestations of sacrifice, and the resulting characterization of religious behaviour, both in the OT and in non-Judaeo-Christian cultures, as incorporating an ethical dimension: also with the response this delivers to Girard-based theological positions.  We come now to the fourth point of Hicks’ position: which is that religious actions are no less socio-symbolic where they assume an ethicized form.  What I mean by this emerges in the use that theology makes of the concepts of sacrifice and gift, and in the antithetical positions adopted by Hicks and gift theology on this point.  It will be remembered that the opposition that Milbank and Tanner both establish between gift and sacrifice safeguards, for the Christian gift of grace, a function that is entirely set apart from socio-symbolism, and thereby characterizes Christian ‘community’ (if it can be so described) as entirely disengaged from the kind of social relations that are instituted through symbolic action. 

What we find, by contrast, in Hicks is a tendency for the notions of sacrifice and gift to converge – to the point indeed that the terms become practically interchangeable.  As regards sacrifice, this involves an expansion of the concept well beyond its traditional restriction to ritual operations requiring the destruction of the offering, and entails a reinterpretation of the operations that do require the destruction of a victim as not inherentily violent.  As a result, the concept of sacrifice becomes indistinguishable from that of the offering.  More relevant in the present context, however, are the implications of this convergence for the concept of gift. This latter comes to be identified with the entirety of operations traditionally regarded as sacrificial, now, however, reinterpreted as non-violent.  There is no reason to suppose that Hicks would exclude operations of a demonstrably interdividual character from his definition of the gift; but he displays no particular interest them – no doubt because he would not see them as relevant to religion or society.  But he differs from the gift theologians in his inclination to identify a socio-symbolic dimension in the case of operations that the latter would prefer to see as tending towards a purely relational or economic importance.  Every action of giving that Hicks chooses to describe tends to be viewed from the perspective of its instantiation of a socio-symbolic paradigm and its role in reproduction of social relationships.  The gifts that humans make to each other turn out not to be easily distinguishable from the gifts they make to the deities – and even the gifts the deities make to them – because of the paradigmatic or exemplary status of the religious gift that makes it the model for the relationships humans entertain with each other.  At a textual level, we find in the place of the generalized vocabulary of gift characteristic of gift theology a more varied language of sharing, offering, sanctifying, etc., which reflects the symbolic dimension that Hicks assigns to these operations.       

                To return to the fourth point in our characterization of Hicks’ concept of sacrifice, his refusal to conceptualize the religious gift independently of socio-symbolic ritual closes the door on the non-socio-symbolic conceptualization of covenant and grace that we find in gift theology.  Ethics and ritual, gift and sacrifice, remain inextricably linked.  For Hicks, all religious gifts have a ritual and sacrificial (i.e. socio-symbolic) dimension, even where, as in Christianity, they assume a strongly ethicized character – just as, conversely, all sacrifices embody an ethical and relational aspiration (as gift or offering) even where, as in the archaic religion of the West Semitic clan, they are highly ritualized.  Thus even the fully-orbed manifestation of sacrifice which is the Christian salvation event never becomes disembodied from socio-symbolic structures and processes, institutions and rituals – because those things constitute – every bit as much as the biological apparatus of our physical existence – a ‘given’ of the human condition.  Other sacrificial revisionists might not insist to this extent on the inescapeability of the embodied condition, but would concur at least with Davies’ view that religion, at least, tends to presuppose such ‘embodiment’. (Anthropology and Theology, pp. 19-51) In this regard, it is evident that sacrificial revisionism diverges from gift theology; for the latter conceptualizes the Christian gift of grace as a manifestation of the aneconomic that stands opposed to sacrificial operations as manifested in archaic ritual or traditional atonement doctrine on the grounds that the latter are economic and transactional.  For Hicks, the aneconomic gift, non-sacrificial and non-socio-symbolic, would, if it existed (and, of course, Hicks expresses no opinion on the matter), be irrelevant to religion, hence also to Christianity.  Consequently, he is not inclined to view archaic religion as economic or transactional, and indeed the nature of his understanding of archaic religion and its relationship to covenant and salvation event, as we have already shown, positively excludes such a characterization. 

Conclusions to Part I (B) and transition to Part II: on the implications of a sacrificial/non-sacrificial position for the conceptualization of sacrifice

The foregoing analysis seeks, not only to characterize the implications of Hicks’ sacrificial revisionist position, but, in so doing, to specify the key points of opposition between the contrasting anthropological implications (i.e. the implications for the conceptualization of sacrifice) of Hicks’ position, on the one hand, and the non-sacrificial position, on the other.  Those key points are, as we have seen, essentially two – of which the first we have dealt with through an examination of what separates Hicks’ position from that of Girard-based theology, and the second, through our examination what what separates it from the position of the gift theology of Milbank and Tanner.  The first point – to summarize – concerns the relationship between ritual sacrifice and the kind of religious ethic expressed in Romans 12.1: namely, whether these forms of religious practice are two manifestations of a single more encompassing phenomenon of sacrifice, and thus continuous with each other (sacrificial position) – or whether they constitute two essentially unrelated phemonena, proceeding out of very contrasting motivations – in which case their common designation as ‘sacrifice’ represents only a terminological convenience (Girardian position).  The second point concerns the relationship between sacrifice and gift: namely, whether sacrifice and gift, where they occur in a religious context, constitute contrasting facettes of a single socio-religious

phenomenon (sacrificial position) – or whether they are two essentially discrete social practices serving independent social functions (gift theology position). 

                These two points distill the essence of the contrasting generalizable tendencies of the sacrificial and the non-sacrificial position in theology.  It now remains to determine, in Part II of this study, which of these two sets of opposed tendencies in the characterization of sacrifice corresponds more closely to the characterizations of sacrifice we find in the literature of non-theological disciplines.  In other words, how the relationship of ritual sacrifice to ethical religion, and to religious gift, tends to be conceptualized outside theology and in relation to a broader range of religious traditions – and whether the conceptualization of ritual sacrifice arrived at by non-theologians is more supportive of a non-sacrificial or a sacrificial understanding of the Christian salvation event in theology.

                It will emerge in the course of the ensuing chapters that, whereas our examination of the second of these points – the relation of sacrifice and gift – involves an enormous range of social institutions ranging from Melanesian micro-polities to state ideologies, our investigation of the first – the relation of ritual sacrifice and ethical religion – involves only the relatively late evolution of so-called ‘confessional’ religions, like Christianity or Buddhism.  Not only, then, does a chronologically ordered treatment of the relevant ethnology reverse the order in which these two points have hitherto been addressed by our study, but our own discussion of the phenomenon of ethicized religion will inevitably presuppose considerations emerging from our discussion of the more fundamental issue of gift and sacrifice.  I propose, therefore, to begin by treating the question of the relationship of sacrifice and gift – i.e. our second point – in Chapter 4, before going on to deal with the question of the relationship of sacrifice and ethical religion – i.e. our first point – in Chapter 5. 

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[1] Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled (T. & T. Clarke, 2009)

[2] My own classification is based on that of Michael Kirwan, ‘Eucharist and Sacrifice’, New Blackfriars (1988), pp. 213-37. 

[3] See John Stott, Basic Christianity (Leicester: IVP, 1958), pp. 83, 92

[4] For the dominance of substitutionary interpretations in Protestantism, see Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance (Cambridge: CUP, 1996).  Similarly substitionary interpretations in Roman Catholicism are described in Daly, op.cit., pp.176-180

[5] Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1985), pp. 21-33; Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence (Baltimore: John Hopkins U. P., 2008), pp 164-166

[6] Clear instances of the sacrifice as metaphor position are: Joel B. Green & Mark D. Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000); Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999); Options on Atonement in Christian Thought (Liturgical Press, 2007).  A ‘half-way house’ position between sacrifice as metaphor and traditionalist – where the terminology of metaphor is used, but with something closer to the sense of ‘model’ or ‘theory’ – is represented by: Colin Gunton [1988], The Actuality of Atonement (T.& T. Clark, 2003);  Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1989); Gerald O’Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer (Oxford: OUP, 2007).

[7] The Girardian version of the anti-sacrificial position is represented by: René Girard [1972], Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (John Hopkins U. P., 1979); theological work by his disciples, inter alios: Raymund.Schwager [1996], Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, trans. by James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1999); James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong (Crossroad, 1998); Anthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes (London: T.& T. Clarke, 2001); S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

[8] Studies advocating the gift theology version of the anti-sacrificial position include: John Milbank, ‘Can a Gift be Given?’, Modern Theology, 11.1 (1995), pp. 191-161; ‘Stories of Sacrifice’, Modern Theology 12.1 (1996), pp. 27-56; Kathryn Tanner, ‘Incarnation, Cross and Sacrifice’, Anglican Theological Review, 86.1 (2004), pp. 35-56; Economy of grace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); Risto Saarinen, God and the Gift (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005); Miroslav Volk, Free of Charge (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2005); R. Kevin Seasoltz, God’s Gift Giving (New York: Continuum, 2007);  Jan-Olav Henriksen, Desire, Gift and Recognition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

[9] Frederick Cyril Nugent Hicks [1930], The Fullness of Sacrifice (London: SPCK, 1953); John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Frances M. Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Purpose (London: SCM Press, 1988); John Moses, The Sacrifice of God (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1992); Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995); Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus (University Park: Pennsylvania State U.P., 1992).

[10] E.g. Stott, p. 91

[11] For examples of this kind of interpretation, see p. 61, n. 46.

[12] For a summary, see: Gorringe, op.cit.; Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement, op.cit.; Denny Weaver, J., The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001, pp. 99-178; Daly, pp. 99-168.

[13] I.A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric [1937] (Oxford: OUP, 1965); Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 55 (1954-5), pp. 273-94

[14] Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, [1944], in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 9, ed. Godzich and Schulte-Sasse (Manchester: Manchester U.P, 1984), pp. 11-76, p. 53

[15] Schwager, pp. 182-3; John Milbank, Being Reconciled (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 100-2; Denny J. Weaver, op.cit., pp. 61-6; A. N. Chester, ‘Hebrews: the Final Sacrifice’, in Sacrifice and Redemption, ed. by S. W. Sykes (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), pp. 57-72; I. U. Dalferth, ‘Christ Died for Us’ in Sacrifice and Redemption, pp. 299-325

[16] Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology (London: SCM, 1983), pp. 4-7

[17] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)

[18] Douglas [1970], Natural Symbols (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003); Bell, Ritual Theory; Ritual Practice (New York: OUP, 1992); Davies, Anthropology and Theology (Oxford: Berg, 2002)

[19] Gordon D. Fee, ‘Paul and the Metaphors for Salvation’, in The Redemption, ed. by Stepen T. Davis and others (Oxford: OUP, p. 204)

[20] John Goldingay, ‘Old Testament Sacrifice and the Death of Christ’, in Atonement Today, ed. by John Goldingay (London: SPCK, 1995)

[21] Respectively, René Girard [1961], Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins U. P., 1965); [72], Violence and the Sacred, op.cit.

[22] Raymund Schwager [1978], Must there be Scapegoats? trans. by Maria L. Assad (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987)

[23] There is, for example, an about-face in Girard’s attitude to sacrifice, and its place in Christianity, as we see in: Rebecca Adams and René Girard, ‘Violence, Difference and Sacrifice’, Religion and Literature, 25.2 (Summer 1993), pp. 9-33, pp. 26-30; René Girard, Evolution and Conversion (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 215-18

[24] Respectively, Girard [1978], Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stamford: Stamford University Press, 1987); [1982], The Scapegoat, trans. by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins U. P., 1986); [1999], I See Satan Fall Like Lightening, trans. by James G. Williams (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001)

[25] Respectively, Evolution and Conversion, p. 222; Battling to the End [2007], trans. by Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State U. P., 2010)

[26] For an alternative view, see P. Duff, ‘The Sacrificial Character of Earlier Christianity’, Religion, 27, 1997, pp. 245-8

[27] Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West (Liturgical Press: Collegeville, 1998)

[28] Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945)

[29] de Heusch, pp. 16-7

[30] Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford, Can We Survive Our Origins? (East Lansing: Michigan State U. P., 2015)

[31] René Girard, Sacrifice, trans. by Matthew Pattillo (East Lansing: Michigan State U. P., 2011); Brian Collins, The Head Beneath the Altar (East Lansing: Michigan State U. P., 2014)

[32] Sigmund Freud [1913], Totem and Tabou, trans. by James Strachey (London: Routledge, 1960)

[33] Verdier, Raymond, and others, La Vengeance, vol. 1 (of 4) (Paris: Cujas, 1981)

[34] Jacques Derrida [1991], Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. by Peggy Kamul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); [1992], The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

[35] The trajectory of gift studies is well established by Christian theologians (e.g. Risto Saarinen, op.cit..  It begins with Jacques Derrida (Given Time [1991]; The Gift of Death [1995]), then passes to Jean-Luc Marion (‘Esquisse d y 1996), pp. 236-44; David Moss, ‘Costly Giving’, New Blackfriars, 74 (September 1993), pp. 393-99); Todd’un Concept’ [1992]; Étant donné  [1997]), before arriving at John Milbank (‘Can a Gift be Given’ [1996]) and Kathryn Tanner (Economy of grace [2005]).  Most surveys place Mauss, Lévy-Strauss, and Bataille somewhere in the background to Derrida, and the phenomenological tradition, especially Heidegger, in the background to Marion. Discussion of gift theory in the journal literature has centred on the triumvirate of Marion, Milbank and Tanner: John Martis, ‘Postmodernism and God as Giver’, The Way, 36 (Jul Billings, ‘John Milbank’s Theology of the ‘Gift’’, Modern Theology, 21.1 (January 2005), pp. 87-105; David Albertson, ‘On the Gift in Tanner’s Theology’, Modern Theology, 21.1 (January 2005), pp. 108-17; Scott Dolff, ‘The Obligation to Give’, Modern Theology, 21.1 (January 2005), pp. 119-39

[36] ‘Post Modern Critical Augustinianism’ [1991], in John Milbank, The Future of Love (London: SCM, 2009), pp. 337-352, p. 337

[37] John Milbank, ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’, First Things (March 1999), http://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/03/004-the-ethics-of-self-sacrifice [accessed 31st August, 2015]; Being Reconciled, op.cit., pp. 138-161

[38] Milbank, Being Reconciled (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 138-161

[39] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)

[40] Mark C. Taylor, ‘Capitalizing (on) Gifting’, in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, ed. by Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux (New York:Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 50-73

[41] Jacques Derrida [1967], ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 251-77

[42] See Georges Bataille [1949], The Accursed Share: Volume 1, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991)

[43] Marcel Mauss [1922], The Gift, trans. by W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990)

[44] When we come to analyse Derrida’s use of the terms on the textual level, we find a dichotomy in the meaning of sacrifice.  In some contexts the term becomes practically a synonym of gift, and as such, an expression of the aneconomic (‘Such an economic calculation integrates absolute loss’ (Gift of Death, p. 102)); elsewhere, it appears to designate the very antithesis of gift, becoming synonymous with the economic (‘sacrificielle ou économique’ (Given Time, p. 23 [p. 38]); ‘la surenchère sacrificielle’ (Given Time, p. 24 [p. 39])).  The dichotomous structure of Derrida’s concept seems to derive ultimately from the paradoxical nature of the aneconomic as both ethical necessity and impossible practice. When Derrida means to broach the aneconomic from the angle of its ideal possibility (as an economic calculation that ‘integrates loss’) he sometimes reaches for the language of sacrifice, and here sacrifice becomes an expression of the aneconomic ; elsewhere, when he speaks of the aneconomic in terms of its practical impossibility, he invariably employs the language of gift, and sacrifice is left to designate the antithetical sphere of the economic.

[45] James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities (London: Routledge, 1995)

[46] Milbank, Beyond Secular Order (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 157-160

[47] Milbank, The Word made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 198

[48] Milbank, ‘On Theological Transgression’ [1995] in The Future of Love, op.cit., p. 167

[49] ‘Enclaves or Where is the Church?’ [1991] in The Future of Love, op.cit., p. 133)

[50] ‘The Theological Trangression’ [1995], in The Future of Love, p. 166

[51] Tanner, ‘Incarnational, Cross and Sacrifice’,  Anglican Theological Review, 86.1 (2004), pp. 35-56

[52] ‘Paul Against Biopolitics’ in ed. John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment (Michigan: Brazos Press, 2010), p. 47

[53] Kathryn Tanner, ‘Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice’, Anglican Theological Review, 86.1 (Winter 2004), pp. 35-56, p. 50

[54] The Word Made Strange [1997], op.cit., p. 44; Being Reconciled [2003], op.cit., pp. 170-172;

[55] Milbank, ‘Stories of Sacrifice’, Modern Theology, 12.1 (1996), pp. 27-56

[56] Maurice Godelier [1996], The Enigma of the Gift, trans., by Nora Scott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 38

[57] But see below (p. 225) on an alternative understanding of modern representation that more closely resembles archaic representation, developed by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle in their study, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (Cambridge: CUP, 1999)

[58] Giorgio Agamben [1995], Homo Sacer, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1998), p. 8

[59] John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 12

[60] Ashby and the historical section (chapters 1-5) of Young’s study both argue that soon after the NT period a world which ‘assumed’ sacrifice was abruptly displaced by a world that ‘did not understand it’. Evidently, this confines sacrifice to a specific, and long-past, phase of history (Ashby pp. 49-50; Young, pp. 101-103).  Bradley (p. 97), on the other hand, tends to make a distinction between the increasingly obsolescent cultic offering and sacrifice, which he sees as a wider phenomenon.

[61] Young, like Roland de Vaux [1958-1960] (Ancient Israel, trans. by John McHugh (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961), p. 447) contrasts the Hebrew form of each of the sacrificial types (‘holocaust’ etc.) against pagan forms (pp. 29-30).  Ashby’s line (implausible, in my view) is that it is the divine addressee, not the rite itself which differs between Christianity and paganism (p. 29)).  Bradley appears to view Christian sacrifice as distinctive because it takes the sacrificial idea to the limit (p. 17).  Also, like Hicks, he stresses that, in Christianity, sacrifice is ‘a gift of God to mankind, rather than a gift of mankind to God’ (pp. 89, 150).  But the issue of differentia is never dealt with head on.  Dunnill does not address the issue at all.

[62] The original source of these words is William Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (RS) (London: A.&C. Black, 1927), p. 32

[63] Hicks, pp. 25-42

[64] Émile Durkheim [1912], Elementary Forms of Religious Life, ed. by Mark S. Cladis (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 11.  On Durkheim’s intuition: Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. ix-xxi  

[65] See Religion of the Semites, p. 439

[66] The symbolism of blood receives extensive discussion in other sacrificial revisionists: Dunnill, pp. 72-78; Ashby, pp. 40-1, citing Stanislas Lyonnet and Léopold Sabourin (Sin, Redemption and Sacrifice (Rome: Pontifical Press 1970, p. 172)); Bradley, p. 91; Young, pp. 70-1; Moses, p. 171

[67] Young, p. 27; Ashby, pp. 35-6; Moses, p. 75

[68] Theologians disagree over whether the Lord’s Supper was itself a celebration of the Passover (Ashby, Hicks, Giraudo) or just a chaburah (Dix, Chilton), in which case the traditional thanksgiving (berakah) would have taken the place of the Passover Kiddush as the occasion of Christ’s words over the cup.

[69] Young, p. 22; Ashby, p. 40; Bradley, p. 91