Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

David L. Weddle

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814762813
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

An examination of the practice and philosophy of sacrifice in three religious traditions In the book of Genesis, God tests the faith of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. Bound by common admiration for Abraham, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also promote the practice of giving up human and natural goods to attain religious ideals. Each tradition negotiates the moral dilemmas posed by Abraham’s story in different ways, while retaining the willingness to perform sacrifice as an identifying mark of religious commitment. This book considers the way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to “sacrifice”—not only as ritual offerings, but also as the donation of goods, discipline, suffering, and martyrdom. Weddle highlights objections to sacrifice within these traditions as well, presenting voices of dissent and protest in the name of ethical duty. Sacrifice forfeits concrete goods for abstract benefits, a utopian vision of human community, thereby sparking conflict with those who do not share the same ideals. Weddle places sacrifice in the larger context of the worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, using this nearly universal religious act as a means of examining similarities of practice and differences of meaning among these important world religions. This book takes the concept of sacrifice across these three religions, and offers a cross-cultural approach to understanding its place in history and deep-rooted traditions.

1

Common Features of Sacrifice

Sacrifice is pervasive in religions of Abraham. Instructions on sacrifice fill chapters of the Hebrew Bible read in synagogues. Christians celebrate the death of Jesus as a sacrifice for sins in the Roman Catholic Mass and in the passion plays of Protestant churches. Muslims put animals to death each year in obedience to divine command. Our broad view of sacrifice includes rituals of killing, imitative suffering, donation of possessions, ascetic discipline, loss of self in mystical states of consciousness, and martyrdom. We will consider each example in the larger context of the religious tradition in which it arises in the attempt to illumine similarities of practice and differences of meaning. In that sense, comparative analysis identifies ways in which religious people are alike without compromising ways in which they are different. The disparate forms of sacrifice arise as responses to a common demand across these traditions: to give up ordinary desires, to give away valuable goods, and to give over life itself. Every tradition requires its adherents to sacrifice as a condition of securing a relation with the sacred or transcendent.

Sacrifice as Signifier of Transcendence

Why is the way to salvation traced with suffering and loss? One answer is that sacrifices mark the difference between ordinary and transcendent reality by denying or subverting natural desires and reversing conventional values.

Now we should pause to explain what transcendence means as the goal of sacrifice. Beginning with etymology may be helpful. Transcend means to “move over or across,” just as ascend means to “move up” and descend means to “move down.” What transcends, then, is not necessarily “up there,” but “over there.” The shift in spatial metaphors is significant. Religious thinkers often describe the divine or absolute by the spatial metaphor “above” to indicate that it is greater than transitory events in nature and history which play out “below.” That recognition of difference between above and below parallels other basic distinctions in religious discourse, as between sacred and profane, divine and human, eternal and temporal, reality and illusion.

The seminal expression of metaphysical dualism between the one absolute “up there” and everything else “down here” is in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato (429–347 BCE). According to Plato, all that we know of ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness are only shadows of ideal forms, eternal abstractions that constitute the true nature of everything we experience. The forms are timeless in their immutable unity and are dimly reflected in imperfect and perishable beings on earth.1 When religious thinkers adopted Platonism, they conceived of God as possessing the absolute perfection of Platonic forms: timeless, immutable, and infallible. By contrast, humans are transient, fragile, and limited in power and knowledge.

Absolute difference between divine and human beings, however, poses problems: How could we know or experience something that is utterly different from us? How could such reality create or enlighten or love or regulate—or even be conscious of—the world? The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) was scandalized by the view of God as Absolute because it made God incapable of genuine relation to the world. For Kołakowski all forms of monotheism influenced by Plato entangle us in a “horrifying metaphysical snare.” He asks, “How can the Ultimum, thus defined, be the creator whose fiat called the universe into being, and how can goodness, love or benevolence be attributed to it in any recognizable sense? How could it be a person?”2 The problem is that if the Absolute cannot be affected by other beings, it cannot respond to attempts to relate to it, including sacrifices. No offering could move the Absolute to react to human need or desire.

In the face of such problems, some contemporary thinkers prefer to shift attention away from what is remotely “above” to what is “across,” imagining transcendence as infinitely greater than us but not so utterly different that we cannot relate to it.3 In fact, most religious people already think of the sacred in that way. Philosophical theologians may speak of God as “wholly other,” but those offering gifts or undergoing fasts do so with the hope of becoming familiar with transcendence—as alternative reality different from, yet alongside, human existence that the sincere seeker may enter with training and discipline. For believers in religions of Abraham, the way to cross over into transcendence is through sacrifice.

Sacrifice may be thought of as a gift given “without strings.” The metaphor suggests that a gift should not have a trailing cord by which the giver could retrieve it or pull the recipient into a reciprocal obligation. In an ideal sense of a sacrificial gift, the giver relinquishes all claim, with no expectation of return. In practice, however, a sacrifice may be given in loving generosity and also entail expectation of return—and, not surprisingly, the greater the deprivation the sacrifice requires, the more the gift costs, the greater the return expected. One gives up goods of this world in the hope of receiving benefit (personal, communal, or cosmic) this world cannot yield.

The intended exchange of what is for what one hopes will become, the concrete for the abstract, the actual for the imagined, can be offensive to non-believers. Among the most virulent critics of religious sacrifice was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who regarded the Christian ideal of self-denial as “hostile to life,” an unhealthy suppression of natural impulses that “takes God for the enemy of life. . . . The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate.”4 Nietzsche may have had in mind the Church father Origen (c. 185–254), who reportedly emasculated himself in order to fulfill Jesus’s words that “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can” (Matthew 19:12). Such extreme renunciation led Nietzsche to declare that “hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.”5

There is enough evidence of denigration of the body in Christian history to give the charge some force. But Nietzsche missed the point: Acts of sacrifice that deny, violate, or suspend natural desires are precisely the only gestures that could point to what is beyond nature. How else can one realize spiritual liberation except by cutting ties to the body and the world that sustains it? The clearest and most dramatic signifier of what lies across from human and natural orders of reality is what shatters both. The critical question is whether the transcendent benefit or purpose will be fulfilled—and that cannot be determined in the moment of sacrificial forfeiture. The one who sacrifices must leave the gift at the altar to be consumed, never again to be of use or profit, removed forever from one’s personal inventory and never to be retrieved. The gift may evoke divine favor or communal gratitude, even cosmic transformation, but no specific outcome can be assured when the offering is utterly abandoned: “Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later.”6 All is invested in the moment and at great risk.

Sacrifice as Offering in Suspense

It is generally acknowledged that sacrifice poses a dilemma in both religious and psychological terms, linked to the reasons and motives for giving: If one offers a gift with the expectation of a benefit, then is the gift an authentic sacrifice or merely a token in an economy of exchange? A donation that is given with the purpose of receiving some return, whether material or spiritual, seems not to be a genuine gift but more like a bargaining chip or even a bribe. At the least, it is a gift with strings firmly attached. In psychological terms, the dilemma is the problem of altruism: Is any act of giving ever entirely free from self-interest? Granted, people do set aside self-interest in moments of crisis (by jumping into the path of a car to save a child, for example), but rarely do they manage to form an intention to donate without some sideward glance at potential return. Fortunately, for most of us most of the time it does not matter whether our gifts come from mixed motives; they still bestow benefits on recipients who appropriately offer gratitude. In these cases the value of the gift does not depend on the reason for giving it.

In religious terms, however, reasons for giving are extremely important because in most traditions motive affects virtue. In Islam, for example, one must approach all exercises of devotion with right intention (niyya). Jesus located moral value in “the heart” wherein lies the source of anger and lust. The commands to be undivided in mind or pure in heart, however, are particularly difficult to honor when it comes to offering sacrifice. St. Paul mused, “I may dole out all I possess, or even give my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I am none the better” (1 Corinthians 13:3, New English Bible). But how is love for God to be measured if not by the ultimate act of giving oneself up? How can one be certain that even accepting martyrdom proceeds from selfless motive?

Ancient Romans, by contrast, rarely wasted time on torturous self-examination, preferring a practical approach to everything from road construction to religion. They addressed their gods in this straightforward fashion: do ut des, “I give so that you may give.” In a similar way, most forms of sacrifice take place within a religious economy, a system of exchange of value between humans and divine beings or sacred powers. In his classic study of gift giving in pre-industrial cultures, the sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) argued that “contract sacrifice” obligates deities to reciprocate with benefits.7 From the standpoint of the external observer, sacrificial actions seem to function within a system of mutual obligation, such that sacrifices properly offered yield remunerative benefits.

Yet we cannot avoid keeping open the question of whether, within the consciousness of the one offering the sacrifice there is a moment of uncertainty, in which one surrenders the gift as total loss with no expectation of return. Without such a moment, can the gift rightly be called a sacrifice? That is, if a sacrifice necessarily results in receiving paradise or forgiveness, then has human action compelled the transcendent benefit? Has the system of ritual exchange succeeded in containing the sacred within an order that reliably ensures reciprocity? For religions of Abraham, God commands respect precisely because the divine surpasses human control. The bestowal of God’s grace cannot be entirely regulated by human piety or discipline. No matter how indispensable such preparations may be, they cannot determine their own success.

In every relation with the transcendent, humans are in a state of uncertainty—and that condition also prevails in the offering of sacrifices. Sacrifice requires a moment of suspense in the presence of the sacred, when the offering has been made or suffering endured or discipline practiced, and the goal is still unattained. While the logic of sacrifice plays out in different traditions with various intentions and expectations, the dialectic of exchange and suspense persists. The French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), described his Christian faith as fraught with the same uncertainty as a wager. The question whether God exists or not, let alone whether God will reward those who believe with everlasting happiness, Pascal could not answer by reason alone. “A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?”8 For Pascal the gamble was to sacrifice a finite life of pleasure for the possible gain of infinite happiness.

As in every wager, there is uncertainty about the outcome; but Pascal insists that it is reasonable to put up a finite stake against the chance of winning an infinite prize. The wager requires one to give up self-interest and follow the way of religious discipline (“taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.”) and moral virtue (“You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful”). Pascal argues, however, that these acts of self-denial will confirm the wisdom of betting on faith by increasing one’s confidence in winning the wager. He believes that “at each step you take on this road . . . you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.” Our interest in Pascal’s wager is not its persuasiveness as an argument for God’s existence, but its acknowledgment of uncertainty that lies at the heart of religious faith, the impossibility of affirming its claims with rational certitude. Believers can never know in this life whether their sacrifices will “pay off.” For many, that uncertainty is enough to convince them to pass on the bet that God is awaiting them at the end of a life of self-denial. They recognize that faith is inseparable from the sacrifices required to support religious communities and their institutions and rituals. So, as one commentator wrote, “To wager that God is not is to stop bothering about such things.”9

The converse is that betting on God sets the believer on a way of great bother. “Did you suppose,” Muhammad challenged his followers, “that you would go to Paradise untouched by the suffering which was endured by those before you? Affliction and adversity befell them; and so shaken were they that each apostle, and those who shared his faith, cried out: ‘When will God’s help come?’ God’s help is ever near” (Qur’an 2.214). This passage not only links suffering and faith, but also recognizes the uncertainty of divine deliverance in the anxious question: “When will God’s help come?” While the Qur’an provides the assurance that “God’s help is ever near,” the question of those facing death in battle reveals their faith in suspense, intensified by the revelation that God “alternate[s] these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the true believers and choose martyrs from among you” (Qur’an 3.140). Suffering defeat, then, may be the sacrifice God requires to test faith. But if there is no guarantee of deliverance from enemies in this life, how can one be certain that Paradise awaits those who sacrifice? Every believer following Muhammad into armed conflict in the formative years of the Islamic community proceeded on the basis of faith, wagering his life in this world against the promise of eternal life in Paradise.

The story of sacrifice offered in suspense that is honored in each of the traditions in this book is of Abraham obeying God’s command to offer his son as a “burnt offering.” The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) described Abraham’s state of mind as one marked by simultaneous movements of infinite resignation of Isaac to death and infinite hope for his restoration.10 There was no possibility of reconciling this opposition, but only the decision to risk all to obey the sacred command, the dangerous venture that Kierkegaard elsewhere called “the leap of faith.” Abraham could launch into the religious stage of life only by crossing the boundary of moral restraint, literally stepping over the dead body of his son. Abraham gives (up) his son by giving (away) his moral integrity in order to gain what Kierkegaard calls “an absolute relation to the absolute.” The Bible describes the deal in less abstract terms: God promises that Abraham will be the father of many nations and that his descendants will possess the land of Canaan forever. What interrupts either account of Abraham’s action as an exchange, however, is that he has no assurance that once he sacrifices Isaac he will receive the promised benefits. Nevertheless, Abraham raised the knife, and has been called blessed by Jews, Christians, and Muslims for doing so.

These examples illustrate another common feature of sacrifice: Access to the sacred requires sacrifice given in suspense. While many instances of sacrifice can be understood as taking place within a religious economy, every sacrifice entails a moment of uncertainty, in which one surrenders the gift as total loss with no assurance of reciprocity.

Sacrifice as Conditional Event

The uncertainty of success, however, is not only in the mind of the sacrificer. After all, we cannot base our view of sacrifice solely on speculations about the motives of people who offer sacrifices.11 While Kierkegaard was eloquent in giving poetic expression to what he imagined as Abraham’s inner agony, the fact is that the nineteenth-century philosopher in cosmopolitan Copenhagen had little clue about what went on in the mind of the Semitic chieftain who lived two millennia earlier and half a world away in desert wilderness. The private dispositions and calculations of religious people—let alone their “religious experiences”—are inaccessible to us. The best we can do is to be relentlessly aware of our emotions as we project them on the stories we read. Indeed, the category of suspense may reflect modern skepticism about transcendent reality as much as it illumines a consistent state of mind among believers as they offer sacrifices. Still, there is reason to think that, regardless of the subjectivity of those who sacrifice, there is something about the action itself that ent...