The Soulful Eye

I’m thinking a lot these days about what the sacrificial system was actually about, not just the Israelite tradition but ritual blood sacrifice in general.  Here’s one of the texts I’m reading if you’re interested.  The ‘right’ traditional church answer (at least for the past couple of hundred years)  is probably something about how it pre-figured the death of Jesus.  That doesn’t really say anything though about what actual psychological work was supposedly being done when a sinner took an animal to have its throat slit and its blood spilled all over the place.

I’m just thinking out loud here … seriously, just thinking out loud.  This is going to get rambly so quit now if that bothers you.  (i’ve added some additional thoughts for clarification*)

If, as the story goes, animal death was a pre-figuration of the death of Jesus in a prototypical penal substitutionary kind of way then wouldn’t that necessarily mean that animals were important enough spiritually to stand in for humans?   How can they be so close to us as to be able to serve as our equals when the whole thing was put in place,  but yet are considered spiritually irrelevant (the current assertion) at the same time?  I’m just saying that either animal death was supposed to be important, painful, personally and spiritually costly or penal substitutionary thinking seems pretty shaky.  (How about that for broad sweeping generalization.) I think it’s shaky for other reasons but this certainly doesn’t help.

Seriously, what is all the imagery of Jesus’ death on the cross supposed to do for us psychologically?  If we’re supposed to look at that and feel guilty … then is penal substitutionary theory saying that the guilt inducing aspect of sacrifice only began with Jesus, and the day before that blood sacrifice was just an economic inconvenience?  I’ve heard someone say that the priests were “like chefs”.  How does that pre-figure the death of Jesus?  Seriously.  How similar does something have to be to be considered a ‘type’?   There’s a cross-over there when we say both that animal sacrifice was a pre-figuration of the death of Jesus and that animal death itself didn’t really matter then, ergo it doesn’t really matter now.  See what I’m saying?

Do we really buy the idea that by placing our hands on the animal our guilt is actually transfered to an animal?  (We can’t imagine that we were claiming responsibility for its death – we’ve built an entire theology around absolving ourselves from that guilt.)  Animal life is irrelevant except when we do some kind of magical transfer of guilt?  They’re just empty flesh vessels waiting for our sin? Not to mention the fact that it can’t be magical transfer because magic is forbidden; except when we need it to somehow make an animal our spiritual equal so as to satisfy the Almighty’s All Knowing wrath?

*Here’s the analogy.  Have you ever heard of going through an exercise where you write all your problems down on a piece of paper and then wad it up and throw it away  or rip it up or burn it or something … whatever … you symbolically destroy your problems.  It’s related to the way that anxiety is reduced by making a to-do list.  You’re getting anxiety “out” of yourself and sort of conceptually putting the anxiety causing items on paper.   You are, in that moment, doing the exact same thing as scapegoat rituals.  Reducing internal distress and increasing a positive sense of control; think of To-Do lists as modern day exorcism-lite.    So, the question is, when you do these behaviors do you imagine that you are Really, Literally, Actually Magically Transferring your sin/demons onto the paper or do you understand it to be a symbolic act, a psychological prop?  If you understand that then you understand the basic psychological mechanism of scapegoat rituals, and of “sacrificial” rituals that serve that function.  Now you’re onto something.

If penal substitution is about getting us off the hook, then there is no real punishment of our sin, just the unwarranted punishment of an undeserving victim. I have yet to come to an understanding of how punishment of an unworthy victim has anything to do with the words ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ as we understand them.  Scapegoat, absolutely, but not justice.

The scapegoat in the Israelite tradition was the one that was not actually killed, just sent out of the community as a sin sponge/carrier.  If we talk about Jesus as the one who “takes away” sin and claim to be linking to the actual Israelite ritual then that doesn’t explain why He was brutally killed, because the scapegoat wasn’t killed – it was beaten, spat upon, cursed, etc. but specifically not killed.  The sacrifice was pure, completely unblemished … He couldn’t have taken all our sin into/onto Himself because then He wouldn’t be suitable for sacrifice according to the rules of the tradition we’re supposedly basing this on.  So if he was the scapegoat then there was no reason for Him to be killed, if He was the sacrifice there was no reason, in fact, no way for Him to have taken sin into/onto Himself.  For a concise but full treatment of these distinctions consider first Finlan, “Problems with Atonement“, and maybe his follow up book “Options on Atonement in Christian Thought”. Or the book linked to above on religious blood sacrifice in general.

If however, the penal in penal substitution was about making the sinner face the price of his sin, and feel the full horrific weight of it then that strengthens the fact that animal death was supposed to be spiritually costly to the sinner who caused it.  In which case, haven’t we totally falsified the relevance and severity of animal death in our subsequent lives and theology?  Just throwing this out there, but perhaps we are those people who walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Phil. 3:17 Brothers, be imitators together of me, and note those who walk this way, even as you have us for an example.  18 For many walk, of whom I told you often, and now tell you even weeping, as the enemies of the cross of Christ,  19 whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who think about earthly things.  20 For our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ;  21 who will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working by which he is able even to subject all things to himself. 

A few things that strike me about this passage.

1) Their blood was given for atonement, and God himself has released them from that burden.  If, because of Jesus’ death on the cross, God no longer requires animal sacrifice and we continue to do it anyway then we are sacrificing animals to ourselves, just to eat. Our god is our belly.    And for those who think I’m stretching the language … I flipped through a book that was offered for sale in my church a while ago  - it was on applying Christianity to life in the suburbs or some such thing, a recent evangelical publication at any rate – anyway … in the section on food it was talking about chickens … the actual words were that we are “not to pity the animal but thank it for its sacrifice”.  There you have it.  ”Thank it for its sacrifice”.  In 2008 a trendy Christian author uses the language of sacrifice when we kill chickens.  Who’s stretching the language?

2) It will make us enemies of the cross because the cross ended one paradigm of sacrifice (killing something outside of ourselves) and begins the work of reconciliation between Jesus and the world (via the self-sacrifice of His people).  Jesus is reconciling all things, the earth, animals, and humans towards a time when “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yahweh, as the waters cover the sea.” Isa. 11:9.

3)Animal sacrifices were an external sign of sin, our shame.  If we make killing animals ‘glorious’ then … our glory is our shame, we glorify the thing that was supposed to signify  the costliness of our sin.  I’m just sayin’.

“The cult is dead, long live the cult!”¹

Way back when, eating meat was a rarity.  Animals were more important alive (milk, wool, etc.) than dead (they were helpers, not disposable trash, imagine that).   This is the context in which animal sacrifice began.   Domestication (mutual dependence) and then sacrifice.  How could we possibly say with a straight face that the Creator of the Universe is somehow satisfied by the death of an ox?  How can we embrace the prophetic critique of ritual killing and turn around and use the mechanism of ritual killing as the foundation for a theology? It vexes me.  I suppose the people who accept the mechanism of ritual killing don’t accept that there is any prophetic critique of the cult so that wouldn’t be an issue.

It’s like in the movies when somebody wants to manipulate the hero … he doesn’t just threaten to kill the hero, that would be easy.  Heroes don’t mind getting killed.  If you want to hurt the good guy you put him in a position of hurting another innocent victim.  That would be a worse fate than death for the hero which is why it always works.  Assuming, of course that the hero is really a hero and cares about not killing an innocent victim.  If the hero doesn’t care then there’s no leverage.  That, I believe, was the fate of the Israelite sacrificial system.  The hero didn’t care anymore about killing the innocent victim, and in fact, came to enjoy it.  There was no longer anything punishing about it.  It was an excuse to get a good meal.  They feed on the sin of my people … Hos 4:8.

So either there isn’t as much spiritual difference between people and animals as we now assume and we don’t acknowledge it anymore (not that we’re the same but our greater value does not imply they are of no value), or there is/always was a difference and we can trick God into not seeing it, or of course maybe we’re saying that our God of Love, Justice, and Righteousness was ok just kicking the dog when he was really mad at the kid?  I swear that’s what penal substitution sounds like to me. We’re saying the cosmic dad has no responsibility for, and no other way of dealing with, his anger than displacing it onto the dog (innocent victim).

*I know Jesus (son/self of God) is said to have volunteered but that’s not the point.  The problem is the underlying assumption … why he was there in the first place, at least according to penal substitution.  He was there because his Father, the Omnipotent God of the Universe, was mad at the creatures he created to be capable of sin in the first place, and HAD to vent his wrath onto an innocent victim.  Really?   I get that as a dysfunctional, immature feature of human psychology  but to say that’s how the tri-omni God of the the Universe works does more (for me) to reinforce  the notion of God as projection of human psychology into the sky than anything else.  Kind of like people in the desert catching rain water on the roof of their houses and projecting that into the sky and thinking that’s how the earth gets its rain, from the occasional opening of the windows in the firmament to let the collection of water down.  Anyway.  So God punished … Himself.  And couldn’t do it any other way than with the big bloody human spectacle?  Who’s the spectacle really for?  Us or God?  If you say, for us, then you’re back to the scapegoat paper ball exercise and ready to read some Girard. Start with this.

If animal death doesn’t matter at all to God, or to the humans who had to kill them, then what exactly is pre-figurative, or penal about the sacrificial system?  I don’t get that.  But that’s ok.   I don’t worship penal substitution theory.  I worship Jesus who had the power to save before He was brutalized by the powers and principalities of his day.

For your consideration … from a post titled “May This Chicken Atone For Your Sins“.  Now that’s a catchy title.

Earlier this month, tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews waved live chickens over their heads in a ritual known as kapparot, or “atonements.” They chanted solemnly:  ”This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to its death and I shall proceed to a good long life and peace.”

————–

Stephan Finlan, Problems with Atonement (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2005), 83.

*updated 03/10