Robert J. Daly's latest volume, Sacrifice Unveiled, is an apt culmination to the Jesuit theologian's career-long pursuit in revealing what he believes to be a more Christian construction of sacrifice. According to Daly, Christian sacrifice is, above all, the eminently interpersonal, Trinitarian act of ‘[humanity's] participation, through the Spirit, in the transcendently free and self-giving love of the Father and the Son’ (p. 1), all of which is initiated by the Father's giving of the Son. Sacrifice Unveiled explores the theological and liturgical implications of Daly's assertion, and the evidence for its Biblical and historical legitimacy.
The book is a chronological account of sacrifice's evolution, and is structured in three parts, connected by two bridges. In Part I, Daly begins to demarcate his Trinitarian redefinition of sacrifice by first rejecting traditional notions of transactional satisfaction. He suggests that these notions, at their essence, ‘disastrously… look to the religions of the world, and to the characteristics of sacrifice derived from them’ in defining Christian sacrifice, projecting onto Christianity categorically non-Christian notions of violent propitiation. Instead, Daly proposes, Christians must ‘look first to the Christ event, and primarily from the perspective of that Trinitarian event… to understand sacrifice’ (p. 10). From a Trinitarian perspective, sacrifice becomes foremost an act of ‘self-giving’ in which the Father, Son, and Christians, through the Spirit, intimately interrelate. In light of Trinitarian sacrifice, the ‘Sacrifice of the Mass’ should also be reinterpreted, now as the transformational, eschatological event through which the assembly becomes ‘more fully members of the Body of Christ’ (p. 19).
After establishing his theological and liturgical agenda, Daly surveys the evolution of Christian sacrifice in Bridge I, using the accounts from the historical witnesses of the Old and New Testaments and the works of the Church Fathers – from the Pentateuch to Augustine – ultimately collating three primary points of historical consensus. First, throughout Christian history, Daly notes that Christ's death is perennially assessed through the theological precedent of the Akedah, and is thus understood in sacrificial, albeit non-substitutionary, terms. Second, a push towards a spiritualization of sacrifice – moving it from the ritual to the internal realm – is consistently present throughout the textual witnesses. Finally, Christian sacrifice consistently places precedence on internal and ethical disposition over ritual practice. In light of these early Christian developments, however, a question arises: How did Christians come to embrace the inaccurate and wholly violent forms of sacrifice so prevalent throughout Church history?
Part II, appropriately titled ‘Atonement and Sacrifice: The Distorting Veils’, details the complex process in which both Atonement theory and Mass fell victim to influences of non-Christian sacrifice. Concerning Atonement theory, Daly writes, ‘Christian antiquity was still a time when sacrifice in the traditional history-of-religions sense of that word, that is, an eternal cultic act involving the destruction of a victim, was generally taken for granted as an essential part of religion’ (p. 197). This unfortunate presumption resulted in the systematization (most notably in the works of Anselm and Aquinas) of a God bound to anthropocentric categories of satisfaction. Daly identifies a similar misappropriation of sacrifice in both Protestant and Catholic Eucharistic theologies, the developments of which he traces from the Reformation to the contemporary Roman magisterium. Contra the Reformers, Daly demonstrates that, according to early Church liturgies, the Eucharist was indeed understood as sacrificial. However, contra the present Roman magisterium, and particularly the influences of Robert Bellarmine, elemental change or destruction of a victim is not required for a truly sacrificial Mass. Daly notes that both Protestant and Catholic Eucharistic theology, as with Atonement theory, make ‘the same fateful mistake of inductively analyzing the practice of sacrifice in the world's religions in order to establish a definition of sacrifice from which to examine the so-called Sacrifice of Mass’ (p. 166). What Daly calls for instead is an ecumenical and truer Trinitarian understanding of the Sacrificial Mass, amenable to both Catholic and Protestant concerns, in which the present assembly, through the Holy Spirit, directs its prayer to the Father, and where Christ presents himself in the elements for the transformation of the assembled.
In his second bridge, Daly traces Christian models of sacrifice from post-Reformation modernity to the present day. After critiquing penal substitutionary developments prevalent in modern Protestant dogma, calling them ‘deeply pagan’ constructs that make ‘a shambles of the central biblical self-revelation of… a God of love’ (p. 180), Daly posits that scholastic, moment-of-consecration Eucharistic theology continues to be similarly problematic, namely in its de-emphasis of the Trinitarian dynamic between the assembly, Christ, and the Father. After surveying these purported theological errors, Daly turns to unveil seeds of hope for the present Church. In addition to recent burgeoning ecumenical and liturgical renewal movements in both Protestantism and Catholicism, Daly suggests that René Girard's anthropological ‘mimetic theory’ provides a truer model of sacrificial origins through which Christians may come to terms with their ‘original sin’ (pp. 213–16) of innate violence. Through this understanding, Daly hopes Christians will come to ‘reject acquisitive and conflictive mimesis, and embrace receptive and transformative mimesis’ (p. 220), manifested through, and most accurately articulated in, Trinitarian formulations of sacrifice.
Part III concludes Daly's volume with a recapitulation of the preceding discussion told through an autobiographical lens, noting the profound influences of the North American Academy of Liturgy, René Girard, and most notably, the Trinitarianism of Edward J. Kilmartin, on Daly's own ‘sacrificial’ journey. It becomes clear that for Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled is more than scholastic exercise; rather, it is a fervent meditation and plea for a truer definition and practice of Christian sacrifice. In the hands of the neophyte, such a proposition may seem faddish or, worse yet, unconvincing. However, wielding a lifetime of scholarship and experience, Daly produces a truly ecumenical work that is commendable in mission, monolithic in scope, and abundant in theological perspicuity.
