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The Cross of Christ, Sacrifice and Sacred Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Peter Phillips
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A witness to the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem in the early first century would not have been able to identify any aspect of what was going on as sacrifice. Here was merely a judicial murder performed with some cynicism by the Roman administration of a difficult province. For the Temple administration Jesus’s death was understood as a matter of an expediency pointedly ironised by the author of John’s Gospel: ‘You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50). There seems little doubt, on the other hand, that the gospels, as well as Paul, place the death of Jesus firmly within a hermeneutical framework provided by the sacrifice of Passover; this, in turn, leads to the early claim that Christ’s death is to be understood in relation to the forgiveness of sins. This theme is already present in the primitive credal statement preserved in I Cor. 15.3, which Paul seems to have inherited from Palestinian Christians and most probably from the Jerusalem church itself.

Such a reading of the New Testament material has been challenged by René Girard in a body of work which represents one of the most profound of recent attempts to explore the meaning of sacrifice in the roots of human society. At the danger of oversimplifying the complexity of Girard’s argument, he suggests, in a series of powerful studies, that human society is born in violence.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 81 , Issue 953-954 , July 2000 , pp. 256 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Hengel, Martin, The Atonement, SCM, London, 1981, pp 37–39Google Scholar.

2 Notably La Violence el le sacré, 1972, trans, by Patrick Gregory as Violence and the Sacred, Athlone Press, London, 1995; Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, (1978) trans, by Bann, Stephen & Metteer, Michael as Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Athlone Press, 1987Google Scholar; Le Bouc émissaire, (1982) trans, by Yvonne Freccero as The Scapegoat. Athlone Press, 1986Google Scholar. The major texts are usefully presented in The Girard Reader, ed. Williams, J G, Crossroad Press, New York, 1996Google Scholar.

3 Mary Douglas offers a very different, and considerably more benign, interpretation of the Biblical ritual of the scapegoat in Leviticus as Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999, pp247–151Google Scholar.

4 Schillebeeckx, Edward, Interim Report on the Book Jesus and Christ, SCM, London, 1980, p 133Google Scholar.

5 See Kearney, Richard, “Myths and Scapegoats: the case of René Girard”, Theory Culture and Society, vol. 12, 4, (1995) pp 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fergus Kerr, ‘Revealing the Scapegoat Mechanism: Christianity after Girard’, in Philosophy. Religion and the Spiritual Life (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 32), ed. M. McGhee, 1992, pp 161–175; Milbank, John, “Stories of Sacrifice: Wellhausen to Girard”, in Theory Culture and Society, vol. 12, 4, (1995) pp 15–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 But it is important to give weight to John Bossy's suggestion that there is ‘a good deal to be said for envisaging the mass of the closing middle ages as a locus for the extrapolation of social violence, whether we see it from the point of view of the people sacrificing, or, as would be fairly conventional, from that of Christ the expiatory victim’ ('The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700', Past and Present, 100, Aug 1983, pp 29–61).

7 Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo, Faber, London, 1969, p 365Google Scholar.

8 Davies, Douglas, “An Interpretation of Sacrifice in Leviticus”, Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 89, 3, (1977), p 395CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Durkheim, Emil, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, George Allen & Unwin, London. 1976. p. 417Google Scholar.

10 Leach, Edmund, Culture and Communication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976. p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See especially, Evans‐Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1940Google Scholar; Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer, Oxford, 1951Google Scholar; Nuer Religion, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1956, reprinted 1977Google Scholar.

12 H. Hubert and M. Mauss ‘Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function’, L' Année Sociologique, 1898. Reprinted 1964.

13 Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Word, Polysemy, Metaphor’, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Valdes, Mario J. Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hemel Hempstead, 1991, p 85Google Scholar. I was alerted to this reference by Dr Tina Beattie.

14 Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consumation of Philosophy, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, pp 176–7 and p 218Google Scholar.

15 ibid., 242–243.

16 This was a position I accepted all too readily in my article, ‘Schillebeeckx’ Soteriological Agnosticism, New Blackfriars, February 1997, p 81.

17 Douglas, Mary, Leviticus as Literature, Clarendon Press. Oxford, 1999, pp 18–25Google Scholar.

18 Mary Douglas comments, ‘microcosmic thinking uses analogies as a logical basis for a total metaphysical framework’ (Leviticus as Literature, p 25).

19 Leviticus as Literature, p 134. See also Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, Penguin, Middlesex, 1970, pp 54–77Google Scholar, where Professor Douglas spells out in some detail what seems to be going on in Leviticus 11 and concludes, If the proposed interpretation of the forbidden animals is correct, the dietary laws would have been like signs which at every turn inspired meditation on the oneness, purity and completeness of God. By rules of avoidance, holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal. Observance of the dietary rules would thus have been a meaningful part of the great liturgical act of recognition and worship which culminated in the sacrifice of the Temple (p 72).

20 See my development of this theme in ‘Schillebeeckx's Soteriological Agnosticism’, New Blackfriars, February 1998, pp 82–83.