Jesus as human sacrifice? Or Jesus as consecrating priest?

[sophiaserpentia]

Mel Gibson said in September, of his rendition of Jesus, "I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it."

So, what other one-eyed, spear-pierced deity hanged from a tree for the betterment of humankind comes to mind? :-O

Anselm, who changed Christianity forever by promoting the Christology of substitution atonement, was an 11th Century Archbishop of Canterbury. That he might have been influenced by Anglo-Saxon myths about Wodan is not far-fetched. The theory was first taken up after him by others (Abelard and Bernard) who also hail from northern Europe.

Human sacrifice appears to have been a widespread practice in northern Europe. Even if it was despised by northern-European theologians, they would have considered it thinkable that a human being would have to die to appease God.

This idea does not seem to have really entered Christianity prior to the northern influence. As noted in the essay I linked to, it was hinted at by thinkers like Origen who thought that perhaps Jesus was an atonement ransom to Satan (not God) based on the passage in Matthew about having to pay the jailor before one can be freed. This has Gnostic overtones; for example, in the Cosmic Ascension described in the Gnostic literature, due has to be paid to each ruling archon in the form of tokens before one can proceed to the next aionic sphere.

The net effect of the vicarious atonement doctrine is dehumanization; the separation from God is described as a fundamental nature of human existence, a deep chasm that separates the "sinner" from God and which can only be bridged by God. Nothing the human can do is sufficient. The net effect of this is not love but fear. "Oh, I am not worthy! What if my belief fails me, I will be destroyed!"

Writings to Jewish Christians dealing with "the blood of Jesus" appear to be theological legalism intended to end Jewish reliance on blood sacrifice in the Temple. They argue, for example, that Jesus' one-time sacrifice was superior to the yearly sacrifices that had to be conducted; that Jesus entered not a 'copy' of God's presence (an insult to the asserted holiness of the Temple in Jerusalem) but entered heaven itself. Jesus, as a priest in the order of Melchizedek (who preceeded Aaron!) conducted a sacrifice of himself in the "heavenly temple." This was not done for atonement of sin but in consecration of the heavenly temple (the cosmos), in consecration of the new, superior covenant. Not, in other words, as ransom, but instead to imbue the "heavenly temple" and the new covenant with the substance of life.

[Hebrews 9:19] When Moses had proclaimed every commandment of the law to all the people, he took the blood of calves, together with water, scarlet wool and branches of hyssop, and sprinkled the scroll and all the people.
[20] He said, "This is the blood of the covenant, which God has commanded you to keep."
[21] In the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tabernacle and everything used in its ceremonies.
[22] In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
[23] It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.
[24] For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence.
[25] Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own.
[26] Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.
[27] Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,
[28] so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

crossposting to my journal and crossposting to challenging_god

Comments

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

I am confused. The passage you quote seems to undermine your earlier premise - that being that the concept of Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice only origniated with the Celts. But perhaps I am just completely misunderstanding you.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

There are many different reasons one might offer sacrifice.

One reason is to keep a god from being angry at you. The thinking there is that if someone is mad at you, you offer something to appease him.

Another reason is to make a place or thing holy. The thinking there is that life is sacred, and the substance of life, blood, bears that sacredness. Therefore shedding blood to consecrate a place has nothing to do with God's anger.

What I cited is the strongest passage I know of in the New Testament that deals with Christ as a blood sacrifice. It deals not with God's anger but with consecration.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

It seems to be more wordplay to me than anything else. If you must consecrate something, the reason you must consecrate it is to appease God, right? Because he won't accept some dirty impure unconsecrated thing? The only reason you would have to consecrate something would be because without consecration it is considered unworthy or impure, which is in and of itself places the idea of a gap between "man" and "god".

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

The idea isn't that things are unworthy without a sacrifice, it is that they are better with a sacrifice.

A sacrifice binds the worshipper to a tool or temple with the substance of life. It is about awareness of interconnectedness, vitality, even mortality. It binds you to the place, to the moment, to the memory.

Anger or unworthiness doesn't enter into it anywhere.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure where you are coming from I guess. I see the Bible as being filled with descriptions of an angry God who who declares everyone born to be unworthy unless they make sacrifices to him.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I think the NT authors were trying to move away from the idea of sacrifice as atonement, towards the idea of sacrifice as consecration. I'm not sure how else to explain how it could have taken 1000 years for the idea of sacrifice as atonement to work its way back into Christian doctrine.

Maybe I'm wrong, though.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

Romans 5?

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Romans 5:11. Good one! I'm afraid that if blood atonement as described by Leviticus 17:11 has become not a part of Christian teachings, that's further evidence to me that Christianity is the work of Satan. :-D

[badsede.livejournal.com]

When I look at Eucharistic theology through the catholic tradition, i have to think that you are. I think that the simlutaneous consecration/atonement nature of the sacrifice of Christ has always been well established .. at least in my tradition. The problem is that the Western world is currently flooded with Luther/Calvin readings of Paul and the more Peter/Clement/Ireneaus/Athanasius reading is often lost.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Imagine that you are thinking about spending some time with two friends of yours. One of them says "No way, you suck! I'll only hang out with you if you pay me to." The other says "Sure, come on over any time!" but lives on the other side of town, so you have to take a cab to get there.

In either case, you end up paying some money to hang out. Nonetheless, I think these two relationships are not the same.

Same deal here.

The Old Testament is definitely filled with descriptions of a very angry god. The New Testament definitely tries to get away from that; and one of the things going on here is theologians wrestling with the idea of why/how this could change.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

The New Testament definitely tries to get away from that

Are you kidding? Have you read Revelation lately? Or the Olivet Discourse? Or Paul's reference to the "children of wrath"?

An angry god is an "old" and "new" concept.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

Um. Revelations seems as angry as anything in the OT to me.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Subtitutionary Atonement - Reason #42 driving me towards Orthodoxy.

Jesus as human sacrifical victim

[beowulf1723.livejournal.com]

One doesn't have to drag in Odhinn and medieval theologians like Abelard and Bernard for a human sacrifice reading of the execution of Jesus. John hits you in the face with it in his gospel.

In the Exodus story, lambs were sacrificed and their blood spread on the doors of the Hebrews so that the Angel of Death won't kill their first-born sons, as happens to those of the Egyptians. In making Jesus the "Lamb of God", John is actually taking several steps backward to earlier Canaanite practice, which had long been rejected by the Jews, but is reflected in the Exodus story. (The "Binding of Isaac" story (Gen. 22) can be read as a specific rejection of the practice of sacrifice of the first-born son.)

As far as Jesus' "sacrifice" replacing the Temple sacrifices, I would argue that the Temple services were, to some degree, already obsolete on some level for the Jews. If they weren't, Judaism wouldn't have survived the sacking of Jerusalem by Titus.

Recommended reading:

W. F. Albright. Yahweh and the Gods of Cannaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1968.

Patrick Tierney. The Highest Altar : the Story of Human Sacrifice. (New York : Viking, 1989.) This book has a discussion of "foundational sacrifices," which seems to be what you're talking about in the paragraph before the quote from Hebrews.

Re: Jesus as human sacrifical victim

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

One doesn't have to drag in Odhinn

The parallel just screamed out at me. But in rethinking this entry, it may have been a mistake to combine that thought and the other thought in the rest of my entry. I'm not sure that Odin demanded sacrifice for appeasement and it may have been more for consecration.


John hits you in the face with it in his gospel.

John's idea of the sacrifice of Jesus is very bizarre.

First, there is the notion that he gives his life so that we may eat his flesh and drink his blood. I think this is a graphic way of trying to get across the idea that Jesus became a personal spiritual presence who's body was spread out among everyone in the church. See my entries dealing with Paul's description of the pneumatic body, eg. http://www.livejournal.com/users/sophiaserpentia/163363.html

Secondly, the passion and death of Jesus is shown in this Gospel as a religious drama or pageant, with every single move or word scripted out.

Thirdly, John was a dualist who believed that taking on flesh was a great debasement for God's spiritual presence.


As far as Jesus' "sacrifice" replacing the Temple sacrifices, I would argue that the Temple services were, to some degree, already obsolete on some level for the Jews. If they weren't, Judaism wouldn't have survived the sacking of Jerusalem by Titus.

I think that what the Christians were proposing was a survival measure. "Ah, you didn't need that lousy ol' Temple anyway. The cosmos is the real temple."

Re: Jesus as human sacrifical victim

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

"The parallel just screamed out at me."

Maybe it's one of those perennialist, univeral archetype things! :O

Odhinn's sacrifice vs. Jesus'

[beowulf1723.livejournal.com]

"One doesn't have to drag in Odhinn"

"The parallel just screamed out at me. But in rethinking this entry, it may have been a mistake to combine that thought and the other thought in the rest of my entry. I'm not sure that Odin demanded sacrifice for appeasement and it may have been more for consecration."

The two things to remember about Odinnn's sacrifice in the Havamalare (1) he sacrificed himself, and (2) he did it for knowledge. He was not sacrificed by any of the other gods (unlike Baldr), and it was not as any kind of atonement for himself or anyone else. Definitely not the same as any reading of the Christian sacrificial myth of Jesus I've seen.

Re: Odhinn's sacrifice vs. Jesus'

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Balder is a better parallel to what I'm trying to get at in terms of consecration, since his death became a nourishment for the world.

[yvesilena.livejournal.com]

I like this. It passes the Belovedist 'Does It Make Me Cry?' Test of Doctrinal Accuracy. :)

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

This is all extremely fascinating, Miss Sophia, and I always enjoy reading even the material I don't wholly agree with. I would STRONGLY urge you to take a look at the alternative to substitutionary atonement which was provided during the High Middle Ages by Duns Scotus. Scotus, one of the greatest Scholastic philosophers, whose system was eclipsed--I think unfortunately--by Aquinas's, believed that the Incarnation of God, in the form of the Messiah of the Jews, was fore-ordained from the moment of creation. He saw it as a genuine "At-one-ment" of God with man, and, now that I think of it, it sounds very much like this "non-substitutionary sacrifice" you're talking about. What Scotus describes is an "at-one-ment" for which God had FAR different intentions, originally, than what came to pass, and that the bloody nature of it was the accidental result of man's sinful history. The "blood atonement" folks, however, would be shocked to think, I presume, that God's Son would have come--had every intention of uniting Himself to man in history--whether there'd been a "fall" or not. These thoughts of non-substitutionary sacrifice, of the Incarnation itself as at-one-ment are, in my opinion, the emphases that can refurbish Christianity, making of it a vibrant religion for the "New Age"--re-establishing its relevance in dialogue with other world religions. You are doing good work here, sister!

I will go and try to find a little more than this...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Leading divines of the Church-Abelard, Bernard, Peter Lombard, Duns Scotus, and others-contemporaries of Anselm, or his close followers in time, were not all close followers of his "Cur Deus Homo."' Some diverged so widely as to propound really new theories. But Duns Scotus, the heretical Acceptilationist, really propounded no new theory in kind. He dissented from Anselm, not respecting the nature of an atonement in the meritorious obedience and suffering of Christ, and in satisfaction or payment of a divine claim-a claim arising out of the wrong which God had suffered on account of sin,-not on these determining facts, but respecting the amount of the debt and the relative value of the payment. With Anselm, the debt was infinite; with Duns, not strictly infinite. With the former, the payment was in full; with the latter, only in part; which, however, God graciously accepted in lieu of the whole, his acceptance also giving value to the sum paid. This is the Acceptilatio of Duns Scotus, as known in historical theology. His divergence was specially from a difference in Christology, or respecting the redemptive sufferings of Christ.

Re: I will go and try to find a little more than this...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Anselm and Scotus largely agree about "substitutionay atonement," except for THIS very subtle (and I think all-important) detail--which DOES profoundly affect their "Christologie":

The infinite value of the atonement likewise finds its explanation in the absolute will of God. Christ died as a man, and for that reason his merit of itself was not infinite. An angel, or a man, free from original sin, might have made efficient atonement if God had so willed. Nothing in the guilt of sin made it necessary for the Son of God to die. God determined to accept Christ’s obedience and, in view of it, to impart grace to the sinner. Duns follows closely Anselm’s theory, whose principles he carefully states.

Re: I will go and try to find a little more than this...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

A very narrowly sectarian Protestant view of Duns Scotus here:
http://www.gracealone.org/atonementmedchu.pdf

Re: I will go and try to find a little more than this...

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all this info... I will have to look into this, as it is new to me.

I think what I am doing, is that I am still, in many ways, trying to reconcile Christianity with my own observations and experiences. I threw my hands in the air with frustration over Romans 9 some time ago, but I keep getting called back to this, like there's an insistent voice in the back of my mind saying, "No, read it again, you'll get it." For some time now I have sensed a "sea change" in my understanding that is starting to reflect in my very rough entries of late... it will take a long time to spell all of this out.

[weishaupt.livejournal.com]

Having read some of the Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose about Jesus, this makes a lot of sense. I remember thinking when I was reading it how they're obviously substituting Jesus for the more familiar Woden in a fashion familiar to their audience. Also, some of the other stuff reads like Norse Sagas. Apostles running around in chainmail and spears, that sort of thing.