Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross

by Mark S. Heim

(I think particularly of Rene Girard's I See Satan Fall like Lightning and James Williams's The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred)

Blood is not acceptable to God as a means of uniting human community or a price for God's favor.

Redemptive violence is our equation. Jesus didn't volunteer to get into God's justice machine. God volunteered to get into ours.

And the result, uneven but real, is that victims of such acts become harder to hide. They look too much like Jesus.

The challenge, all too often failed, is to build another basis for peace than unity in violence. That is what the gathering around the communion table attempts to do.

But this can hardly be true, for one major stream of Christianity managed without such a teaching for all of its history, and all of Christianity managed without it for a large part of its history.

How do victims become visible? To put it another way, where do our antisacrificial sensibilities come from?

Far from being a rationalization of redemptive violence, the passion accounts definitively undermine it.

"Even if aspects of Girard's overall thesis fail to convince, his understanding of mimetic rivalry and conflict and of the scapegoat are among the most profound intellectual discoveries of our time, and will remain permanent contributions to our understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion."11

Campbell believes that first there was myth, using the metaphor of dying and rising to describe nature, and then people started to actually act out the metaphor in ritual.

But Girard contends that first there was actual violent scapegoating, and then comes the mythologizing of this practice, using themes like the agricultural cycle to make human violence as natural and unexceptionable as the seasons.

Girard's argument is that sacrifice endured because it had real social effects, not just because people couldn't catch on that it had no ...

All the social functions of sacrifice are seen by Campbell as somehow analogies from nature. But to Girard, the overlay of analogies to nature is secondary to the primary social origins and function of sacrifice.

Spellbound by myth, we don't register the violence in front of us. The symbols are real. The "little couple" isn't.

Girard says founding myths are not imaginary things presented in the misleading guise of historical or literal narrative. They reflect a very literal history, veiled...

much modern self-congratulatory critical study swallows the lie as much as...

What distinguishes Girard's view is the conviction that sacrifice is a real sol...

Our ancestors saw sacrifice as the pillar that literally supported the world. If it was not actually supporting anything, then it need not concern us that it has become rotten. But if it actually was holding up our social world, it is no small matter to ask how we will do that job without it.

Scapegoating sacrifice is a shape-shifting dynamic.

Myth and the passion narratives are both stories, but myth doesn't appear to be about scapegoating, while the passion definitely is.

the enduring significance of sacrifice is based on a real connection between collective violence and social reconciliation,

its effectiveness depends on the fact that people who practiced scapegoating sacrifice systematically misrepresented that ...

myth reflects a reality different from what it di...

the truth behind both ritual sacrifice and certain founding myths is a fact that looks uncannily like Jesus' death - the exclusion and execution of a sca...

There is a profound relation between Jesus' death and mythical sacrifice, but it is the reverse of what is usually supposed. The issue is not to interpret Jesus' death in terms drawn from the practice of cultic, ritu...

Rather the point is to interpret both of those things from the perspective of the reality ofJesus' death. To understand the cross the Gospels insistently present to us in Jerusalem, we have to look by its light at the landscape beyond. The connection to the world of sacrifice and myth is the invisible victim behind both, the cross nobody sees. What lies behind both the pract...

To know this, let alone to change it, required something special t...

The sacrificial dynamic is most effective where it is most invisible.

"There is plenty of violence in biblical literature. These are obviously troubled texts, but what troubles them is the truth. Myths exist to spare us the trouble."7

The Bible, the faith that it expresses, and the God that it describes are all entangled in the dynamics of mythical sacrifice.

the Bible insists that the true origin is a nonviolent one. An ontology of peace is more fundamental than the reality of conflict.

the true nature of sacrifice, in which violence fends off violence.

There is no foundational violence in God or God's creation of the world.

God breaks out in violence ... against violence.

Caught up in a mimetic rivalry they attribute to God, humans then conceive God as the mirror image of their own escalating conflict.

In contrast with the idea that the guilt of a few can contaminate and pollute an entire community and bring divine destruction on it (a classic scapegoating assumption), an alternative idea is introduced suggesting a positive contagion, a good pollution, in which the virtues of a minority can save a corrupt community.

the sacrificial killing is linked explicitly to the prohibitions whose purpose is to prevent the escalation of retribution, the problem that sacrifice has to solve.

"An eye for an eye" is a standard to limit violence by balancing it with an imitated violence of exactly the same dimension and so ending its exchange. But where such laws fail, the community will have to resort to communal unity against a scapegoat to restore peace. For that case a more majestic charge than "not obeying the eye for an eye rule" is needed, and blasphemy against the Name will serve.

Israel has its own extensive ritual sacrificial practice, in many ways similar to the ritual practice ubiquitous in human history.

the blood of victims can unite the community; and the blood of the victim must be "on" (the responsibility of) all without exception.

the Bible breaks down the dynamics that lead to scapegoating in clear, small-scale terms we can readily grasp, rather than clouding them in mystical misapprehension.

"Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today"

Jacob's preference for the younger brother Joseph (and especially the fact that this preference upsets the settled differentiation of children by age) awakens rivalry among the brothers, who overcome this dissension by collectively turning against him.

We see the reality that unanimity has to be manufactured. We see the agreement on a cover story that removes all responsibility for the act of violence (it was a natural event, an "act of God").Joseph is the cause of the problem (in the brothers' eyes), but the scriptural account makes it clear that his primary crime was to be an occasion for resentment. With Abel and J...

And there could hardly be a more straightforward expression of the actual meaning of animal sacrifice: it is a replacement for human sacrifice.

This plea for deliverance seeks relief from an oddly specific kind of evil: conspiracy of a whole community or crowd against a weak and abandoned one,

What we have in the book of job is an interview with a scapegoat.

Sacrifice was always about the crushing of scapegoats with unquestioned divine approval.

Job challenges God to a direct confrontation, a kind of cosmic courtroom argument, where he will make his case. He cries out that he needs and believes there must be a vindicator who will defend him against God.

At times job clearly calls out for an advocate over against God. At others he contends that the true God must not be his persecutor.