In comments here Rick Ritchie and I were discussing the ways in which the Christian story may or may not subvert or transform conventional notions of “sacrifice.”

Part of what I find so appealing about Christianity is the way it turns upside-down our “natural” expectations about the meanings of things like power, glory, love, etc. Instead of a God who lords it over us from a distant heaven above, we’re shown a God who comes down to us in the form of a “suffering servant.” Sometimes we forget what a radical concept that is and try to shoehorn this story into more conventional “religious” categories. This is what I at any rate understand Luther to be getting at when he talks about the “theology of the cross.”

Anyway, my thinking and reading on the matter has led me to the same conclusion when it comes to the question of “sacrifice.” The “religious” idea of sacrifice is that we humans provide something satisfying to God in order to get into his good graces. This can be understood in “primitive” terms (literal sacrifices – human or animal) or in more “refined” ethical terms (we’re good so God rewards us).

But Christianity turns this on its head in a number of ways: God initiates the sacrifice by coming to rescue us from our sin and folly, much like the gracious father who rushes out to embrace his prodigal son. And God, rather than demanding sacrifice from us as the “price of admission” to his love, actually sacrifices himself. He “takes our place.” Rather than insisting that sinners be made into saints before entering into fellowship with them, he enters into fellowship with them resulting in their sanctification (Anders Nygren says this is the essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, but I’m sure that’s not entirely fair), paying the price for creating the possibility of fellowship himself.

Now, clearly certain Christians have tried to apply the standard “religious” idea of sacrifice to what happens in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is, God is pictured as requiring a sacrifice before he can forgive our sins, and this sacrifice is provided by the death of Jesus. But, as many have pointed out, since this sacrifice originates in the will of God and in God’s love for us, it’s far from clear it was “required” in the sense of a prerequisite for forgiveness.

Moreover, is this “religious” view of sacrifice sufficiently radical in appreciating what God does? I’ve been meaning for a while to dig into the work of Catholic theologian James Alison. He came up again in a sermon I heard this weekend, and yesterday I finally sat down and read his article “Some thoughts on the Atonement.” Alison, building on the thought of Rene Girard, contends that God’s work in Christ subverts and explodes what he calls the “Aztec” view of sacrifice (i.e. what I’ve been calling the standard “religious” view), and that this radical reconfiguring of sacrifice is presaged in the rite of Atonement from Leviticus.

I can’t do justice to Alison’s argument, but I think what he’s getting at, if I understand him, does capture some of the radical topsy-turvyness that I’ve been talking about. Alison talks about the story of David handing over the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be executed as an expiation for their father’s sins against that people. He continues:

The interesting thing about [this story] is that it reminds us of what we often forget: the language of expiation. Here King David is expiating something, offering propitiation to the Gibeonites. In other words, the Gibeonites have a right to demand vengeance. Can you remember where this passage comes into the NT? St Paul seems to know about this: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32) Do you see what St Paul is playing with there? St Paul is saying that God, unlike King David, did not seek someone else as a stand-in sacrifice to placate us, but gave his own son to be the expiation, putting forth the propitiation.

In that text, who is propitiating whom? King David is propitiating the Gibeonites by means of Saul’s sons. God is propitiating us. In other words, who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. That is the purpose of the atonement. We are the angry divinity. We are the ones inclined to dwell in wrath and think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again. This turns on its head the Aztec understanding of the atonement. In fact it turns on its head what has passed as our penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which always presupposes that it is us satisfying God, that God needs satisfying, that there is vengeance in God. Whereas it is quite clear from the NT that what was really exciting to Paul was that it was quite clear from Jesus’ self-giving, and the “out-pouring of Jesus’ blood”, that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

I’m not sure I’d go all the way with Alison’s Girardian analysis here, but this is the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote that “I wonder how much of that language [of sacrifice, expiation, etc.] has its meaning radically subverted by the event of God becoming incarnate and suffering? For instance, sacrifice is usually understood as humans offering something to God in order to assuage the divine anger. But here God provides the sacrifice, which seems to at least call into question the transactional connotations that the language of sacrifice often carries.”