Sacrifice and the Body

Biblical Anthropology and Christian Self-Understanding

John Dunnill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317060123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is sacrifice? For many people today the word has negative overtones, suggesting loss, or death, or violence. But in religions, ancient and modern, the word is linked primarily to joyous feasting which puts people in touch with the deepest realities. How has that change of meaning come about? What effect does it have on the way we think about Christianity? How does it affect the way Christian believers think about themselves and God? John Dunnill's study focuses on sacrifice as a physical event uniting worshippers to deity. Bringing together insights from social anthropology, biblical studies and Trinitarian theology, Dunnill links to debates in sociology and cultural studies, as well as the study of liturgy. Through a positive view of sacrifice, Dunnill contributes to contemporary Christian debates on atonement and salvation.

Chapter 1
Why Sacrifice? Why the Body?

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: “I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!”¹

1. Talking about Sacrifice

Sacrifice is not an easy subject to discuss these days. Very few people in ‘Western’ societies have ever experienced an actual sacrifice – the offering of an animal or of vegetable matter to a deity, and its destruction by fire or other means in a ritual context. Such an action may strike us as strange or pointless, fascinating or disgusting.

Yet in most societies that we know of throughout history, and in many also today, ‘sacrifice’ is virtually equivalent to ‘religion’ and taken for granted as the usual means of communicating with the deity or the spiritual world. Religion in this sense is a set of actions to perform: the devout Muslim praying five times daily towards Mecca; Balinese women weaving baskets out of leaves to fill with flowers and rice and deposit at a temple or outside a home or shop; African tribesmen killing a calf and eating it with men from a neighbouring village to settle a dispute. Such actions may be simple or complex but are seldom reflected on.

This may come as a surprise, if like most moderns we think of religion as primarily a matter of belief. This very ‘Western’ concept of religion really comes out of the accident that the Jewish people, as a result of their troubled history, developed two forms for their religion. Alongside the older sacrificial system based in the Temple in Jerusalem, at least from the time of the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE) there developed a weekly or daily practice of verbal praise and law-obedience, modelled on the holy writings of the Torah and the Prophets and practised in the synagogue. These two co-existed in harmony for several centuries, but after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Judaism survived as a religion of the Law and the Book. This happened at the very time that the Christian church was separating itself from Israel and defining itself over against Israel as a rival, non-sacrificing, religion.

From these developments we derive the modern idea of a religion as an ‘-ism’, fundamentally a set of beliefs expressed in words, and also leading to certain practices. This of course fits some religions better than others. Hindus resist the idea that they are followers of an abstraction called ‘Hinduism’ which is really an invention of Western scholarship. What used to be called ‘Mohammedanism’ is now rightly referred to as ‘Islam’ – not belief in Mohammed or his teachings but the practice of ‘submission’.

For most people at most times, then, sacrifice has been virtually equivalent to religion, and has not seemed strange but familiar, although other people’s modes of sacrifice might seem questionable. In any case, as the example above indicates, it is not a matter to discuss or reflect on but to do.

Is it possible to understand sacrifice? If it is true that sacrifice is a practice, and that we learn a practice (like a language) by practising it, this may indeed be difficult. Take the religion of a modern tribal culture. Perhaps we can only understand it by taking part in it, and doing so with the assumption (usually never questioned) that this is how divinity is dealt with and life fulfilled. Even with a living sacrificing culture, there is no way we can participate except as an outsider, with an outsider’s interest and questions and distance. Perhaps then we cannot in the fullest sense understand their religion and the closest we can get is through the exercise of imagination. This is still an exercise worth attempting. In particular what would the world be like if these sacrifices did not seem strange or repulsive but natural and normal and life-giving?

There are three main obstacles to understanding sacrifice today. Firstly, it appears to be wholly outlandish and obscure, for the reasons given above. Secondly, the word ‘sacrifice’ carries almost entirely negative connotations, to do with death and blood. Lurid images of human sacrifice spring immediately to mind, connecting sacrifice to a world of violence and cruelty which is naturally repulsive. Such things do happen, but if we start from this extreme exception we shall not see what is really going on, and even animal sacrifices are relatively uncommon in most religions – and therefore described as special and significant. Sacrifice is not ‘about’ violence or cruelty, and sacrifices flourish in societies that are not necessarily more (and often much less) violent that our own.

The negative perception also takes another, more moderate and less exotic form. In the Western world where sacrifices are not practised, ‘sacrifice’ is usually applied in a moral sense, ‘self-sacrifice’, meaning the cost involved in pursuing some worthy or necessary goal, especially a vision or commitment. This can occasionally be regarded as admirable – such as the ‘sacrifice’ commemorated on war memorials, or the ‘sacrificial’ lives of Mother Teresa and her sisters, with their selfless care for the poor – but generally, and as applied to ourselves, it has the character of an unwelcome demand. Any kind of ‘self-denial’ is in conflict with our culture’s emphasis on ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-fulfilment’. Once again there is a mistake here. Sacrificing cultures do not generally emphasize the element of loss and pain, which for us is the primary meaning of the word, but rather the benefits and blessings which are expected to flow.

This leads to the third obstacle to understanding, which is this: whereas in modern English to ‘sacrifice’ something is to ‘give it up’, in the languages of cultures where it is a living reality (from Ancient Israel and Greece to modern Africa) it means to ‘give’. The emphasis falls, not on my loss, but on the relationship between humanity and deity mediated by a gift or other ritual gesture and bringing benefits of various kinds. Interestingly, the English phase ‘give up’ does contain a trace of an upward, heavenly motion (like ‘offer up’), but it is seldom used with any idea of ‘giving’, or to connote an upward motion towards some ‘higher’ person or being who might receive the gift. Generally it simply means to ‘cease’ doing something difficult in order to do something else more pleasurable (as one might give up going to church on Sunday morning in order to play football). Even when, for explicitly religious purposes, one ‘gives up’ something pleasurable (such as abstaining from eating chocolate in Lent) and even if the resulting savings are ‘given away’ to benefit others, there is no concept that some deity might be receiving the gift.

Christian dislike of sacrifice is almost as old as Christian faith. Like the intellectuals of ancient Greece, Christians were glad from the start to distance themselves from the bloodiness and obscurity of traditional religious practices, and have bequeathed to the culture of today – for both Christians and non-Christians – a sense of sacrifice as something primitive, oppressive and disgusting. Why would we even wish to discuss it?

Yet because Christianity was a reinterpretation of Judaism, even though it began as a system of beliefs and practices without any actual sacrifices, its writings (like those of the Jewish rabbis) made abundant use of Israel’s scriptures, including a range of sacrificial ideas and images drawn from Israel’s practice (‘the lamb of God’, ‘a living sacrifice’). To step aside from sacrifice is not so easy. To regard as a matter of distaste and incomprehension what Isaiah and St Paul thought normal and natural puts a barrier between them and us which intrudes itself at every point. We need to enter into their understanding of sacrifice if we want to understand what they meant when they wrote about God, sin, salvation or godly living. The topic will not go away just because we want it to.

Although it is a subject seldom discussed except among specialists, it is interesting to note some recent changes. There is a widespread interest in the writings of René Girard, who propounds an anti-sacrificial theory which maximizes the negative perception of sacrifice as the source of all violence and all our woe.² In much contemporary feminist writing, ‘sacrifice’ stands for oppressive gender relations: the violence that men inflict on women, and the violence they persuade them to inflict on themselves.³ By contrast, conservative Protestant defenders of Christian ‘orthodoxy’ often argue that an objective account of salvation (‘Atonement’) must centre on the ‘sacrifice’ of the cross, interpreting Jesus’ death positively as a beneficial act of divine punishment suffered by Jesus on our behalf.⁴

As I shall argue later, all these represent distortions and misunderstandings of sacrifice. But such distortion and misunderstanding is nothing new. Christianity has in fact misunderstood sacrifice from the beginning, and has misunderstood it more as it has progressively distanced itself from sacrificial practices. It may therefore be natural and inevitable, but this misunderstanding has had and continues to have profound consequences. It has led to a misunderstanding of the roots of Christian faith and practice in the worship of Israel, and of the character of Israel as an ongoing religious community; it has led to a misunderstanding of Christian redemption insofar as that has been expounded in terms of sacrifice, and necessarily it has led to a misunderstanding of Christ when he is named in sacrificial terms as redeemer, high priest and final victim.

I shall argue, in contrast, that sacrifice, although easily distorted and misconstrued, needs to be understood as a positive feature of religious practice. To do this, I shall seek to bring critical understanding of sacrifice, particularly in Israel, into relation with reflection on the body, to develop an alternative perspective with implications for Christian thinking about creation, redemption and Christology. I shall try to show that a positive appreciation of sacrifice is necessary for a Christian theological anthropology and for an adequate philosophy of the body.

2. What is Sacrifice?

What, then, is sacrifice? It need hardly be emphasized that there is no single thing, in all the many religions and cultures of the world, that constitutes sacrifice; nor is there a single ‘essence’ underlying the multiplicity of appearances. Particular religious cultures vary enormously in the ethos they present, and the roles performed in them by sacrificial actions. Likewise, the forms of sacrifice themselves, considered as individual religious practices, can of course be very varied. Among them we shall note especially gifts, meals, expiations and cosmogonic rites, but these by no means cover the whole field.

By ‘sacrifice’ I understand those varied aspects of religious behaviour which have the following characteristics. Seven elements of sacrifice:⁵

1. Action. A sacrifice is a thing done, and therefore necessarily external and material.

2. Ritual. The action is ritualized, that is, it requires some index of difference, either in the materials used, or the personnel, or the mode of sacrificing, or in the understanding of what occurs. Abnormal things are done, or normal things done differently.

3. Transcendence. A sacrifice is a ritual action mediating relations with a power of another order, in some sense ‘divine’ or ‘sacred’.

4. Exchange. In sacrifice some thing is handed over to the god, with some sense of something else received: some physical, social or spiritual benefit or ‘blessing’; or the offering is made in response to a prior divine gift received.

5. Transformation. Both as action and as exchange, a successful sacrifice is understood to involve a change (whether in the god, or the material or the sacrificer) through access to transcendent power.

6. Solidarity. The actions and materials used are always closely related to the life circumstances (the habitat, economy, social structures and concerns) of the sacrificers, which by being brought into relation with the divinity unite the god also to their life.

7. Cosmology. While individual sacrifices may be routine or trivial, the system or set of practices (insofar as they can be perceived as a whole) may be understood to represent the totality of life (biological, social, existential) for the sacrificing group.

These are very general characteristics. For example a flask of wine may be brought to a shrine as a libation, a gift offering, and poured over the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Explorations
• Recapitulation
• Part II: Dialogues
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Concise Index of Biblical and other Ancient Sources
• Index of Names and Subjects