The Cross That Said It All | The Atonement – Part 2

I have been trying to find meaning in the cross for some time now, and none of the theories we have discussed quite make sense to me. However, in the past few years I have stumbled upon the Scapegoat Theory which was pioneered by the French theologian and philosopher, Rene Girard. This theory, in essence, proposes that Jesus died as a result of collective human violence, in an act of scapegoating that was intended to bring peace to the community, rather than a divine act of punishment. It sees scapegoating as a tool which has been used throughout human history, as a way of cleansing a community and bringing peace to it. However, time and time again, history has shown that this kind of peace is only ever temporary, and can only be kept by further scapegoating. The death and resurrection of Jesus reveals this failure of the scapegoating mechanism, and effectively puts an end to it, by exposing the violence within that system.

 

This admittedly doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this is how I begin to understand this theory. Girard’s work is quite academic, and by academic, I mean confusing and impenetrable. Academics…

 

Jesus’s death was the ultimate sacrifice for humanity, and it’s linked to the scapegoat sacrifice described in Leviticus 16. This sacrifice was a ritual that God gave to the people of Israel, whereby they could atone for their sins, and in performing the ritual, they could know that they had been forgiven. The death of Jesus serves as the ultimate scapegoat sacrifice, which puts an end to the scapegoating ritual, and to the scapegoating done by humans on a societal level. This theory shifts away from the view we often have of ritual blood sacrifices, that blood is required by God, so that forgiveness can be granted. God does not require the spilling of blood in order to forgive sins, but recognises that humans needed the ritual of sacrifice in order to know that they were forgiven. Jesus’s death serves as the perfect atonement sacrifice and it puts an end to the sacrificial system that was being practiced. It sees sacrifice as something that we need, but it’s not something that God requires, or to put it another way, we are not saved through sacrifice, but we are saved from sacrificing.

 

This still might be hard for us to understand, after all, didn’t God command people in the Old Testament to make sacrifices? If they weren’t for God, then why did God command them? In order to get a better understanding of this, it might be helpful to go back a bit.

 

The first example we have of sacrifice in the Bible is in Genesis, when Abel, the son of Adam and Eve, made a sacrifice of some of his animals to God. God had not commanded Abel to do this, but it was evidently part of a culture where people made sacrifices to the gods they believed in. The Old Testament is full of references to people making sacrifices to these gods, and in making these sacrifices, people hoped to appease the gods or win favour with them. If you were blessed then you would make an offering, perhaps of some of the animals that had been successfully reared, or of some of the grain that you had harvested, as a way of showing gratitude to the gods. If things didn’t go well for you though, people thought maybe they had displeased the gods in some way, and so they would make further sacrifices to try and appease them. Sometimes they would even show their devotion to the gods by making human sacrifice, and they might even sacrifice their own children. This was something that happened in ancient civilizations across the world.

 

Later on in Genesis we hear about Abraham and his encounter with God. God promised Abraham a son, who he named Isaac, and one day God told Abraham to sacrifice him. Abraham obeyed God and took Isaac and went on his merry way to sacrifice him. No questions were asked, no arguments took place, and no instructions were given to Abraham, because this was just what people did. However, as Abraham was about to kill Isaac, God called out and told him to stop, and then provided a ram for him to sacrifice instead. We usually take this story as an example of Abraham’s obedience, and that he was so dutiful he was willing to kill his own son, at God’s request, but I don’t think that is the full picture. Yes, Abraham showed how obedient he was and God praised him for this, but through this event, God was also showing Abraham that he was a God who would never require human sacrifices. It was God saying that there was a different way to approach sacrificial offerings.

 

If we skip on a bit through biblical history, Isaac grew up and had sons of his own, Jacob and Esau. They had a spectacular sibling rivalry, which they eventually got over, and then they settled down with their own families. Jacob was renamed Israel, and had twelve sons, including one named Joseph, who he gave an amazing technicolour dreamcoat. After a lot of drama and great storytelling, Jacob and his family ended up living in Egypt. The descendants of Israel multiplied and eventually the Egyptians became so afraid of them, that they enslaved the Israelites for 400 years, and then Moses came along. God met Moses and promised to deliver the Israelites from slavery, they escaped into the wilderness and then they wandered around for a bit, and that is where we find the Israelites in the book of Leviticus.

 

After the Israelites were rescued from slavery, God gave them instructions about how they should live, in the form of the Law. After spending hundreds of years living as slaves in a different culture, God wanted to rehabilitate them. They were set apart as God’s people and were forbidden from adopting the cultural practices of the surrounding peoples, including how they made sacrifices. God gave them specific instructions of how they were to conduct sacrifices, so that their way of worshipping would be distinct. As we have seen, making sacrifices was a normal part of life, it is what made sense to people and it was how they understood the world. So, they were given different instructions for different types of sacrifices, including ritual sacrifices to cleanse the community of their sins. This is the sacrifice we see described in Leviticus 16, where once a year the people of Israel were to perform sin offerings on Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. On this day the people would pray and fast, then they would offer sacrifices. Two goats would be taken, one would be a blood sacrifice that would be killed and the other was to be the scapegoat. All the sins of the community would be placed onto the scapegoat and then that goat would be taken into the wilderness. This ritual was given by God for the people to complete, not because God needed them to do it, but because it was what they needed to do, because they needed rituals. God had no need for rituals and said as much in the psalms and prophets. For example, Hosea 6:6, Psalm 51:16, Jeremiah 7:21-23, Isaiah 1:11-17.

 

The sacrificial systems given in the Law were God’s way of showing the people how to be different, that they were to sacrifice in their own way and not follow the ways of their ungodly neighbours who did all manner of things to appease their false gods. These rituals were God’s way of getting the people on track, they weren’t rituals that God needed to be completed, but they were what the people needed. God was giving these instructions to people at that time, because it was a system that they understood and it was how people related to their gods. These people were steeped in ritual and superstition, and making sacrifices was how you lived. If God had simply told them that he didn’t need them to make sacrifices to atone for their sins, then would they have believed that they were forgiven? Could the people have been ready to believe that, in the time and place that they occupied?

 

I’m talking about all this in terms of ancient human civilisation, but we aren’t much different now. We still have these kinds of rituals. I’ve seen many bad romantic films where a guy upsets his wife in some way, he’s gotten drunk and puked on a brand-new carpet, slept with his secretary, or gambled away their life savings. The couple have a massive argument and then shortly after, the guy arrives home with a bunch of flowers and an apology. The flowers don’t mean anything by themselves, the wife doesn’t need flowers, she needs an industrial carpet cleaner, an appointment at an STD clinic, or a winning lottery ticket. However, if she accepts the flowers, then the husband knows that he has been forgiven, if she doesn’t accept them and throws them in the bin, then he knows that it’s over and she ends up moving on. He could’ve just said sorry, and she could perhaps forgive him through clenched teeth, but the giving of flowers is a similar kind of ritual. When the offering of flowers is accepted by the wife, the husband understands that he is forgiven.

 

So, coming back to the cross, did God need Jesus to die? No, because God does not require sacrifices. The death of Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, but only in respect of all the ritual sacrifices that people regularly made in the temple. Jesus died for us and because of us, but not because God required him to be punished so that the injustice of our sin might be balanced, not because we nailed him to the cross with our sins, and not for some other convoluted reason. Jesus died because he was the victim of human society and our need to scapegoat. He died for us, so through his death, we would know that the final sacrifice had been made, and that there was nothing further we needed to do to be reconciled to God. This is how people understood that sins were forgiven.

 

If you will allow me to return to kicking the tyre of PSA for a moment, early Christians wouldn’t have understood this theory, because that wasn’t how they understood atonement. When they performed the atonement ritual, God wasn’t angry with the goat. God didn’t put all the sins of the people onto the goat and then have it sacrificed, so that he would be appeased, or so his justice could be balanced. It was the exact opposite, the people put all their communal sins onto the goat, and that goat that was taken into the wilderness, and the community was cleansed. It was the other goat that was a blood sacrifice. The two just don’t add up to the same thing.

 

The above explanation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Scapegoat theory, and is a very basic overview, but it shows an atonement which makes a lot more sense, in my opinion. The scapegoat theory is by no means perfect and I am sure that there are many holes that could be picked in it, but it feels like a necessary step in understanding of God when it comes to atonement. PSA may have made beautiful and perfect sense to John Calvin and Martin Luther, according to the Middle Ages world in which they lived, but it doesn’t make sense now. We no longer live in a world where we issue fines for people who don’t go to church, imprison people who fall into debt, or behead criminals and display their heads on spikes for crowds to see. We would probably deem those things as unacceptable now, but they were acceptable back then. However, God brought us out of that understanding of justice, and continues to draw us towards truth. In five hundred years, there may be people challenging the Scapegoat theory of atonement with a different view which reveals an even deeper understanding of God. That is how faith is, it isn’t static, we don’t reach a final conclusion, it continues to grow, throughout our lives and within culture, long after we have passed away.

 

If we are looking for a diplomatic view of the cross, then rather than saying that all the different theories provide a whole and rounded view, I think a better alternative is to agree that the meaning of salvation through Jesus’s death, is a mystery, which can be understood a number of different ways, but which are all fallible. We don’t really know how the death of Jesus works in saving us. Each atonement theory begs its own questions, if you believe Ransom Theory then you’ll end up asking, how God can owe a debt to the devil? If you believe in the Satisfaction and Penal theories then you’ll end up asking, couldn’t God in his infinite love, just wipe away any debt that is supposedly owed, instead of punishing Jesus? If you believe in Christus Victor then you’ll end up asking how the death of Jesus defeats death, sin and Satan.

 

I know that this muddies the water and it confuses our understanding of the cross, but I don’t think that is a bad thing, because part of growing in faith is figuring out what we believe to be true for ourselves. As someone who tries to hold the mystery of God, I would love it if churches taught the different atonement theologies and explained the complexities of salvation. I know that we like things to be churchsplained to us, that we want to be told that something is absolute in its truth, but I think most people are able to think critically for themselves, and I think it’s important that we wrestle and get to grips with our faith, on our own terms.

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music