Mark Heim Saved From Sacrifice
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
Mark Helm, Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, Massachusetts, last year published his book, “Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross”. Using insights from Rene Girard, Heim focuses his thesis on the concept of scapegoating, suggesting that God used the human sinful practice of scapegoating to end that paradigm.
Heim begins by outlining the indictments against the doctrine of substitutionary atonement that focuses on the cross as punishment for our sins. The concept of sacrifice is no longer current in most cultures. The cross has been used as the keystone of Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. Critics point out that the death of Jesus stands alongside many other accounts of dying and rising in other cultures. “The theology of the cross is indicted for ignorant parochialism and spiritual immaturity”. Traditional understandings of the cross are criticized for painting God as a transactional ogre who must find violent means to bring about forgiveness. Heim points to the growing number of critics who connect atonement doctrines with validation of guilt, retribution and violence.
“The critiques of atonement theology are like magnets run over the biblical texts. They attract and lift out a whole range of problematic portions about which the church generally practices discreet avoidance”.
Heim says that the significance of the cross stands out with particular clarity when seen in the light of scapegoating violence that encompasses both the individual and society. With Girard he explores the treatment of violence in the Hebrew scriptures, both in descriptions of sacrificial and scapegoating practices, and in narratives (such as Job) that explore the involvement of God in human suffering.
Heim summarises Rene Girard’s approach to scapegoating in the Old and New Testaments. Sacrifice was a real solution to communal violence. For people to buy into the myth of sacrifice, the violent nature needed to be obscured. Religion provided a way for this to happen. The voice of the scapegoat had to be silenced. Scapegoats were chosen from marginalized groups, powerless people. Further, the murder of the scapegoat must not be portrayed as divinely sanctioned sacrifice rather than murder or abuse. The scapegoating mechanism must be exposed to save us from this collective sin.
Jesus, the resurrected victim, speaks out as the murdered one, challenging the powers that have chosen him as scapegoat. Through the resurrection we discover that God has stood by the victim and not the perpetrators. God has not punished or abandoned Jesus. The vindicated Jesus, in turn, does not condemn his killers.
Heim, along with Girard, explores the letters of Paul and the letter to the Hebrews to test this out. Paul uses the sacrificial theme but focuses on the role of faith in the one who has been unjustly murdered. The letter to the Hebrews begins with the ritual sacrifices written up in the Hebrew Scriptures but concludes with the assertion that the sacrifice of Jesus has made all sacrifices unnecessary.
Heim finishes by engaging with Anselm’s theology of atonement. He cannot agree with Anselm’s premise that Jesus offered unmerited suffering to pay the price of our punishment. He would rather say that God suffered the effects of our sin as God rescued us from it. He says “the passion is a divine act revealing, reversing, and replacing our redemptive violence, which we so long and tenaciously hid from ourselves in the very name of the sacred.”
“The God who paid the cost of the cross was not the one who charged it. We are saved from sacrifice because God suffered it. To be reconciled with God is to recognize victims when we see them, to convert from the crowd that gathers around them, and to be reconciled with each other without them.”
Saved From Sacrifice at Amazon.com
See Richard Beck’s summary of Saved From Sacrifice on his blog, Experimental Theology.
