God as Sacrificial Love: A Systematic Exploration of a Controversial Notion 9780567678645, 9780567678676, 9780567678652

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T&T CLARK STUDIES IN SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY Edited by Ian A. McFarland, Ivor J. Davidson, Philip G. Ziegler, John Webster†

GOD AS SACRIFICIAL LOVE

A Systematic Exploration of a Controversial Notion

Asle Eikrem

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Asle Eikrem, 2018 Asle Eikrem has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7964-5 PB: 978-0-5676-8947-4 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7865-2 eBook: 978-0-5676-7966-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Introduction

vii

1

Chapter 2 Theologies of Sacrifice – A Historical Overview 2.1 Theologies of Sacrifice in Early Christian Literature 2.2 Theologies of Sacrifice in the Middle Ages 2.3 Theologies of Sacrifice in the Modern Era

9 9 19 38

Chapter 3 Modern Critiques, Recent Developments and Prevailing Challenges 3.1 Recent Responses and New Developments 3.2 The Challenges Theologies of Sacrifice Face Today

49 53 56

Chapter 4 Sacrificial Love and the Problem of Sacred Violence 4.1 What is Violence? 4.2 Sacred Bloodshed – The Problem Explicated 4.3 The ‘Tübinger Antithese’ – A Partially Failed Counter-critique

Chapter 5 God and Sacred Bloodshed 5.1 Sacred Bloodshed and Self-sacrifice – Some Conceptual Clarifications 5.2 The Incarnation as Compassionate Self-limitation 5.3 The Murder of Jesus as Absolute Victimization 5.4 Offering Forgiveness: From Relative Victimization to Self-limitation

59 59 64 82

95 95 104 108 111

Chapter 6 God, Death and the Trinitarian Logic of Self-giving 6.1 The Death of Christ as Self-giving 6.2 Resurrected Victim – A Meaningless Arabesque? 6.3 A Trinitarian Theology of Self-giving Love 6.4 Self-giving Love as Vicarious Atonement

119 120 139 146 163

vi

Contents

Chapter 7 God and Sacred Exclusion/Inclusion 7.1 Scapegoating as Sacred Exclusion 7.2 Sacrificial Love and the (Im-)possibility of Unrestricted Hospitality 7.3 The Christian Meal – An Expression of Sacrificial Love?

175 175 176 191

Chapter 8 Theodicy – The Radical Nature of the Problem of Violence

199

Chapter 9 The Love Through Which God Truly Loves Humanity – A Preliminary Summary

205

Chapter 10 The Love Through Which Humanity Truly Loves God 10.1 Sin as Self-assertion or Self-sacrifice – A Critical Rethinking 10.2 Is Christian Faith an Immoral Self-sacrifice? 10.3 Sacrifice of Praise as Self-limitation and Self-giving

207 207 210 223

Chapter 11 Self-sacrificial Love as the Love Through Which We Sometimes Truly Love One Another 227 11.1 Self-sacrificial Love as ‘The Greatest Commandment’ 228 11.2 Self-sacrificial Love Between Self-destruction and Self-fulfilment 230 Chapter 12 The Monotony of Sacrifice – No End in View?

247

References Index

259 295

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is dedicated to three brave women – one of whom I am merely remotely acquainted with, while the other two I have never met. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Ann Parker and Susan Brison for sharing with the world their personal experiences of social exclusion and psychological and physical trauma. The thoughts formulated in this book have been profoundly shaped by their life-stories. May love always find you, stay with you and be your ember of hope. I am also grateful to the numerous generous colleagues at MF Norwegian School of Theology who have been reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of the book, among whom are Jan-Olav Henriksen, Peder Gravem, Atle Søvik, Kristin-Graff Kallevåg, Harald Hegstad and Trond Fagermoen. Furthermore, my discussion of Hegel has been greatly inspired by conversations with two fine scholars, separated in age by more than half a century: PhD candidate Ragnar Mogård Bergem at the University of Cambridge, and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, Lorenz B. Puntel. Their keen eye for detail have been of immense value to my work on Hegel. I would also like to thank professor Ingolf Dalferth for providing critical comments on a central section of my text. Last, but not least, I am grateful to the school administration for giving me the time, space and practical resources needed to pursue this research in a most satisfactory way. Asle Eikrem, Oslo, February 2017.

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

As far as our cultural memories trace back, the meaning of human life has seemed undecipherable without notions of sacrifice. Stories of people heroically sacrificing their lives on the altars of nations, religions, political ideals, family-life and friendships abound in narrative legacies all around the world. The suffering and death of a divine being is the root-metaphor from which these narratives of sacrifice have most often emerged. The North-Atlantic context of the Christian tradition in which this book is written offers no exception in this regard. Influential Welsh philosopher of religion, Dewi Z. Phillips, once stated that ‘in Christianity God and sacrifice become one – we see that God is sacrificial love, the essence of spirituality’.1 This statement comes as no surprise to readers familiar with biblical literature in which Jesus is presented as the self-revelation of God (Jn 1.1, 18; 10.30; 14. 9-11; Phil. 2.6f., Heb. 1.2f.) and said to be a sacrificial lamb (1 Cor. 5.7), covenantal sacrifice (Mk. 14.22, 24; Heb. 9.16ff.; 8.6-10; 10.29; 13.20; 1 Pet. 1.2), atoning sacrifice (Rom. 3.23-25; 1 Jn 2.2; 4.10), sin-offering (Rom. 8.3), and a sacrifice of thanksgiving (Eph. 5.2).2 Interpretations of Jesus drawing on a vocabulary of sacrifice originated in attempts to express how a good living fellowship between God and humanity can be sustained. Such fellowship was thought to be actualized in an unsurpassed way as the love of God revealed itself in Christ, the Son of God: ‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins’ (1 Jn 4.9f.; see also Jn 3.16; Rom. 5.8; 8.39). In this passage, God’s life-giving love for humanity is presented as intrinsically related to the sacrifice

1. D. Z. Phillips, Religion and Friendly Fire: Examining Assumptions in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 142. 2. It should be noted, however, that the questions of whether and how these textual locations make use of semantics of (cultic) sacrifice is highly disputed. See Gerhard Friedrich, Die Verkündigung des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982), and more recently Ruben Zimmermann, ‘Die neutestamentliche Deutung des Todes Jesu als Opfer: Zur christologischen Koinzidenz von Opfertheologie und Opferkritik’, Kerygma und Dogma 51, no. 1 (2005).

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God as Sacrificial Love

of Christ. After considering the theological significance of such biblical voices, the prominent theologian Colin Gunton concluded that ‘the metaphor of sacrifice … brings us closest not only to the historic action of God in Jesus, but to the very heart of his very being’.3 Whereas a host of contemporary Christian theologians would readily endorse Gunton’s conclusion, it also remains highly controversial. Since the enlightenment period, many voices have argued that love and sacrifice are incompatible as determinations of what brings human and divine relational life to fulfilment. This book is an attempt to systematically navigate the multilayered complex theological problems to which these intense debates have given rise. It aims to answer three interrelated questions: 1. Can God’s action in Jesus be coherently reconstructed as an expression of sacrificial love? 2. Are the human responses to God required for the divine–human relationship to be fulfilled an expression of sacrificial love? 3. Should we recommend sacrificial love as an ethical ideal guiding the morality of human beings who recognize themselves as living within the relational spaces generated by divine life? After first outlining the heuristic entry point and the systematic framework within which my investigation takes place, I will commence by providing a historical sketch of how some consequential Christian theologians have interpreted human existence by answering these questions, and end by identifying the crucial issues that remain hotly debated in contemporary theology. These issues will constitute the fixation points of my subsequent critical and reconstructive endeavour during which I will develop a nuanced conceptual scheme that allows us to make judgements regarding the substance of each critical perspective theoretically superior to those currently available in the theological literature. It is my hope that the readers who join me on this journey will find themselves endorsing Stephen Finlan’s statement that ‘there are few theological subjects that can stir up scholarly passions more quickly than sacrifice, its critique, and its reinterpretation’.4 In his late work On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein formulated an insight of profound importance for any systematic theological undertaking: ‘All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. … The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.’5 Stated differently, the truth-value of every

3. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 197. 4. Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of, and Controversy about, the Atonement Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 20. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), §105. See also ibid., §410.

Introduction

3

theological claim is relative to the theoretical framework in and through which it is presented. Ideally then, before analysing and discussing specific positions on my topic, I should offer a detailed exposition of all the (semantic, logical and ontological) components of the framework upon which it is based.6 Due to obvious limitations of space, I must, however, restrict myself to providing a brief account of the heuristic device I employ in order to enter the phenomenal field of sacrifice in a determinate way, and of the systematic procedure through which I subsequently develop my theological position. What is sacrifice? Past and present scholarship has offered widely different answers to this question. Phenomenological approaches to religion have often been critical of attempts to reduce the complexity of sacrifice by identifying its singular transcultural (essential) characteristic.7 As a heuristic perspective, this is fruitful because it prevents us from reducing the pluriformity and polysemy of the phenomenological realm by premature normative decisions. Following through on this conviction, my entry point will be a semantic–pragmatic perspective according to which sacrifices are relatively stable configurations of contextually situated social agreements in linguistic and accompanying non-linguistic activities, the meanings of which appear within the symbolic framework of the cultures in which they occur. These configurations of sacrifice share a network of similarities and differences, both on an overall level, and on matters of detail. Two sacrifices are similar because they share some distinctive aspects and (some of) the ways these aspects are structured as a configuration. An individual configuration of sacrifice can be quite simple and extremely complex.8 This means that the various

6. For a thorough explication of the theoretical framework underlying this book, see Lorenz B. Puntel, Structure and Being: A Theoretical Framework for a Systematic Philosophy, trans. Alan White (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 7. See especially Josef Drexler, Die Illusion des Opfers: Ein wissenschaftlicher Überblick über die wichtigsten Opfertheorien ausgehend vom Deleuzianischen Polyperspektivismusmodell (München: Akademischer Verlag, 1993), and also Hubert Seiwert, ‘Opfer’, in Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1998), 274ff., and Burkhard Gladigow, ‘Opfer und komplexe Kulturen’, in Opfer: Theologische und kulturelle Kontexte, ed. Bernd Janowski and Michael Welker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 86ff. 8. As a consequence, its various aspects have been explicated from a number of different perspectives: biology, political philosophy, economy, ethnography, aetiology, cultural anthropology, literary theory, theology and religious studies. See for instance M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes, Sacrifice (London: Academic Press for the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1980), Richard Schenk, ed. Zur Theorie des Opfers: Ein interdisziplinäres Gespräch (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), and Bernhard Dieckmann, Das Opfer – aktuelle Kontroversen: Religions-politischer Diskurs im Kontext der Mimetischen Theorie (Münster: LIT, 2001). The list could be extended even further.

4

God as Sacrificial Love

notions of sacrifice must be explicated according to a sliding scale of similarity and difference as the following figure shows:9 Sacrifice

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The figure illustrates how we might approach sacrifices phenomenologically, not as having an essence, but as a family of resembling semantic–pragmatic configurations.10 Employing such a heuristic device does not mean, however, that my phenomenological ‘cartography’ of semantics of sacrifice will be completely unrestricted. It is restricted in that it takes self-interpretations of the JudeaoChristian religion as its point of departure. Having said this, when turning to the scriptures of this religious tradition we quickly realize that the textual configurations of sacrificial subjects, sacrificed objects, the places and times of sacrifice, the structure of sacrificial actions or rituals, the purposes of sacrifices, the beneficiaries of sacrifices (etc.) have varied greatly. The Hebrew Scriptures (OT) concerned with sacrificial practices reflect a movement from the pluriformity of a decentralized religiosity towards the more regimented uniformity of a

9. The template for this figure is found in Lars Haikola, Religion as Language-Game: A Critical Study with Special Regard to D. Z. Phillips (Lund: Gleerup, 1977), 71. It has been adapted according to the topic of this book. 10. Each aspect of these configurations is itself a configuration (or structure).

Introduction

5

centralized cult.11 And even in cases where these concrete configurations did not change, their guiding (implicit or explicit) theological motivations developed considerably. Similarly, the semantic transformations (or metaphorizations) of these configurations in the New Testament (NT), and further on in the writings of Christian theologians, constitute a pluriform trajectory. For this reason, it is impossible to reconstruct a unitary empirical or phenomenological framework for Judaeo-Christian configurations of sacrifice. It is not, however, within the scope of this book to discuss configurations of sacrifice from a purely phenomenological or empirical point of view. As already emphasized, my investigation is ultimately systematic in character. It does not aim at determining empirical contents, but theoretical ones, meaning that the conceptual scheme developed in this book is not descriptive, but reconstructive. This approach not only enables us to determine practices that are not themselves understood as sacrificial by the religious practitioners themselves, but also that the aim of my systematic explication of the relevant material is to develop a theorylanguage with a vocabulary that is more nuanced than the biblical and traditional theological. Prominent NT-scholar Peter Stuhlmacher once claimed that ‘when we attempt to free ourselves from the vocabulary of the [biblical] texts, the subject matter to which the witnesses testify dissolves’.12 Such an insistence is both theoretically deficient and morally dangerous. While many theologians prefer to keep, for instance, the different (and incoherent) biblical metaphors of sacrifice as irreducible interpretative options for the Christian church,13 the biblical canon’s

11. This is not to say that the Levitical code appearing in the later strata of the OT texts reflects a thoroughly worked out systematic theology of sacrifice. Rather, it contains a semi-systematized ‘reservoir’ of the cultic actions of a more sedimented and centralized cult. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1975), 252, 259. See also Rolf Rendtorff, ‘Priesterliche Opfertora in jüdischer Auslegung’, in Opfer: Theologische und kulturelle Kontexte, ed. Bernd Janowski and Michael Welker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). 12. Peter Stuhlmacher, ‘Zur Predigt am Karfreitag’, in Das Wort vom Kreuz: Zur Predigt am Karfreitag, ed. Theo Sorg and Peter Stuhlmacher (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1996), 38. Author’s translation. See also Biblische Theologie und Evangelium: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 316. 13. Günter Bader, ‘Jesu Tod als Opfer’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 80, no. 1 (1983): 414 and see Ingolf Dalferth who seeks to guard ‘… the irreducible plurality of soteriological categories …’ (Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘Die soteriologische Relevanz der Kategorie des Opfers: Dogmatische Erwägungen im Anschluss and die gegenwärtigen exegetische Diskussion’, Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 6 (1991): 182, author’s translation) for reasons in addition to Bader. For similar views, see Craig L. Nessan, ‘Violence and Atonement’, Dialog 35, no. 1 (1996): 30f., Werner H. Ritter, ‘Abschied von Opfermythos?’ in Erlösung ohne Opfer?, ed. Werner H. Ritter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 235ff., and Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Killing Enmity: Violence and the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 94ff.

6

God as Sacrificial Love

history of effects has emphatically demonstrated that such a strategy opens the possibility of projecting almost anything upon the biblical texts. While historical– critical readings of the texts may of course prevent us from being left entirely at the mercy of arbitrariness, it can only bring us so far. As Kurt Erlemann’s concluding comment in his study of notions of God in the Gospel parables clearly shows: The picture of God in the parables is stamped with unresolved tensions owing to antithetical ideas: reward according to work versus reward out of kindness; wrath versus compassion; universalism versus particularism; invitation versus exclusion, (partial) generosity versus unrighteousness, fulfilment versus ‘crisis’, marriage festival versus judgment, adhering to Israel versus surrender of prerogatives to others. Now one aspect, now the other is emphasized, depending on the question posed and the situation.14

If theology is to be a (self-) critical pursuit of truth, it must systematically investigate such ‘unresolved tensions’ to determine what can be coherently claimed. This does not preclude that such tensions cannot provide us with linguistic resources for determining the theological significance of the life and death of Jesus. Whereas theoretical possibilities are restricted to logical possibilities, figurative discourse is not. By creatively producing contradictions, paradoxes and oxymorons, metaphors and symbols may at any time force us to reconsider what we conceive of as logically possible. However, the primordial, polysemic and creative character of these semantic fields is not in itself a guarantee of their theoretical relevance or validity. Some metaphors and symbols are just failed semantic experiments, both pragmatically and theoretically. Thus, I cannot endorse Douglas Hedley’s preference for the figurative/imaginative as a mode of knowledge that transcends the cognitive into the spiritual/sublime.15 Biblical metaphors and symbols of sacrifice need systematic explication if they are to contribute to a morally responsible and coherent understanding of their subject matters. In concluding this introduction, I will briefly outline the basic structure of the theoretical procedure to be employed in this book. If the life and death of Jesus can be seen as an expression of sacrificial love depends on whether or not the various aspects of the semantics of sacrifice and love can be integrated into a consistent and cohesive configuration of an optimal number of relevant interpretative elements.16 This means that it must both integrate

14. Translation provided by Raymund Schwager (Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 68). The German original can be found in Kurt Erlemann, Das Bild Gottes in den synoptischen Gleichnissen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1988), 279. 15. Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 2011), 13ff. 16. For a further explication of this specific concept of coherence, see Lorenz B. Puntel, Grundlagen einer Theorie der Wahrheit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990).

Introduction

7

as many differentiated elements as possible and reduce our interpretative options. As for the latter, in a theoretical presentation it is unavoidable that a strategy of reductive idealization is employed.17 It would not be explanatory if this was not the case, and it also opens up the possibility for my reconstruction to be critically assessed. After completing a brief historical survey of some influential Christian theologies of sacrifice, and the intensified critiques raised against them from the enlightenment period onward, I next propose a conceptual scheme that allows for optimally nuanced answers to the three main questions posed above. Employing these parameters, I will discuss the theological importance of various notions of sacrificial love against the background of insights from two theoretical perspectives, each with a different emphasis on what constitutes the essential characteristics of a sacrificial praxis: bloodshed and group formation. I will critically consider the theological (chapters 5–9), moral and socio-historical (chapters 10–12) implications of each of these perspectives, and reconstruct their constitutive elements in an attempt to coherently configure the relational spaces of God and humanity as love.

17. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Religiöse Rede von Gott (München: Kaiser, 1981), 364.

Chapter 2 THEOLOGIES OF SACRIFICE – A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

There are numerous questions that must be asked if we are to obtain a systematic grip on the theologies of sacrifice to be analysed in what follows: Who provided the sacrifice of Jesus? Who executed the sacrifice? Who was the object of sacrifice? Who was the receiver of the sacrifice? What caused it? What precisely was achieved? Who were the benefactor(s) of the sacrifice? What were its central characteristics, that is, what exactly made God’s self-revelation in Christ an expression of sacrificial love? When did it take place?1 While the following historical reconstructions are guided by a systematic ambition, I cannot delve fully into all the technical details of how theologians have answered these questions. I will limit myself to providing a general overview of the most significant aspects of some influential positions.

2.1 Theologies of Sacrifice in Early Christian Literature When reading theological literature of the Christian tradition through the lens of my interest, it would be wise to first determine how they answer the last two questions posed above, insofar as both concern how we delineate the phenomenal realm of sacrifice. Among the early Christian theologians, vocabularies of sacrifice were primarily used to articulate how the suffering and death of Jesus held an existential significance for human beings. These aspects of his fate were not considered significant as isolated events, but received their full meaning from an understanding of who Jesus was, namely the incarnation of (the Son of) God. The death and resurrection of Jesus did not bring about something qualitatively new, but was the culmination of the unification of the immortal God and mortal humanity in Christ. Although these authors emphasized that God became flesh to provide a moral antidote to the human exercise of evil, Athanasius was representative of the early Christian writers when insisting that if the moral transformation of human beings was the exclusive aim of the incarnation, the ultimate problem of human

1. This set of questions is an expansion of Sigrid Brandt’s ‘opfer-aktions-schema’. Sigrid Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis: Auf dem Weg zu einer befreienden theologischen Rede von Opfer (Münster: LIT, 2001), 359ff.

10

God as Sacrificial Love

existence would have been left unresolved, namely eternal (spiritual) death.2 Although the idea of salvation as deification was prevalent among these writers and had a distinct moral dimension that concerned human living prior to death, it was never reduced to this.3 The suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus remained the centrepiece of their expositions of the content and existential relevance of Christian faith. While the ultimate aim of the following historical prelude is to understand how various notions of sacrifice have been used to understand the relational spaces of divine life as a whole (and thus also human life), I find it most constructive to take as my point of departure interpretations of Jesus in which his suffering and death are construed as that which made him a sacrifice, simply because these are the aspects of human life that are most commonly associated with the ultimate significance of the word ‘sacrifice’ both in Christian traditions and in many other contemporary cultural codes. With this particular focus set, we come upon two main answers to the analytic questions formulated at the start of this chapter. Origen was the most prominent representative of the first view. According to Frances Young, references to the sacrificial aspect of the death of Christ were rare before Origen developed his allegorical interpretation of the Hebrew sacrificial cults.4 Yet in the writings of this ‘great theologian of sacrifice’,5 various elements of a semantic of sacrifice stand side-by-side with several other metaphorical schemes, the most noted being the so-called ransom-paradigm, without the relation between these vocabularies being systematically clarified.6 Indeed various answers given to some of the above-

2. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: The Treatise de Incarnatione Verbi Dei, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 29ff., 48f. For Athanasius, the problem was not human finitude as such, but that ‘transgression of the commandment was turning them back to their natural state, so that just as they have had their being out of nothing, so also, as might be expected, they might look for corruption into nothing in the course of time’ (ibid., 29f.). See also Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, trans. John Keble (Oxford: James Parker, 1872), 280ff., 482 and Proofs of the Apostolic Teaching, trans. Joseph P. Smith (Westminster: The Newman Press, 1952), 67f., as well as John N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper, 1978), 173f. 3. See for instance Athanasius, On the Incarnation , 96; Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 146, 408f., 464, Homilies on Joshua, ed. Thomas P. Halton, trans. Barbara J. Bruce (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 87f. This topic is also the main thrust of Ireneaus’s argument in Against Heresies, book V (Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 448ff.) 4. Frances M. Young, The Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom (Cambridge, MA: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 159. 5. Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 4th ed., vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 477. Author’s translation. 6. On the plurality of soteriological metaphors in Origen, see Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), 194ff. Thus, Stephen Finlan’s claim

Theologies of Sacrifice – A Historical Overview

11

formulated structural questions seem to stand in direct opposition to one another. To determine if this in fact is the case, I will systematically reconstruct Origen’s statements on this issue, and thus optimize the rationality of his position (as far as it goes).7 On the one hand, when drawing on the vocabulary of sacrifice, Jesus is said to be a spiritual sacrifice presented to God in the heavenly sanctuary to restore peace between humanity and God once and for all.8 This spiritual sacrifice is described as an ‘intercession’. The historical sacrificial cult of ancient Israel was a shadowy anticipation of these ‘heavenly things’.9 On the other hand, when developing the metaphorical vocabulary of the ransom-image, Jesus is thought to die because human evil caused God to hand the devil a just claim on the lives of human beings.10 Yet because God is not only just but also steadfast in his love for humanity, God (the Father) provided the solution to humanity’s tragic fate, delivering it from the grasp of the devil by paying the soul of Jesus as ransom.11 Jesus’s death left Satan as the apparent victor, yet through the resurrection of Jesus, God showed humanity who the ultimate victor was, releasing it from the devil’s clutches. The latter did not refer to natural death (as in Augustine), but to ignorance, moral corruption and eternal death. In both conceptual paradigms, the Triune God provided the sacrifice,12 the object was the soul of Jesus (the dimension of his human nature

that the patristic writers ‘locate the full significance of salvation in one particular metaphor for death as an atoning act’ is not true of Origen (and neither of Athanasius). Finlan, Problems, 66. 7. Although Origen’s works manifest a systematic ambition (Anders-Christian Jacobsen, Christ – the Teacher of Salvation: A Study on Origen’s Christology and Soteriology (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2015, 260f.)), the various elements of his conception are rather loosely connected. 8. Origen, Homilies on Leviticus: 1–16, trans. Gary Wayne Barkley (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 33f., 52f. See also Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: Books 1–5 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 223ff. On this and the following, see also Joseph O’Leary, ‘Atonement,’ in The Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. John A. McGuckin (London: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 67f. 9. Origen, Contra Celsum, 299, Homilies on Joshua, 105, 120, 157, and ‘Commentary on the Gospel of John’ in The Ante-Nicene Fathers (henceforth ANF), ed. Allan Menzies, vol. 10 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 389. On the typological interpretation of the OT sacrificial cult among early Christian writers, see Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 145ff. 10. Origen, Der Kommentar zum Evangelium nach Mattäus, trans. Hermann J. Vogt, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1990), 174ff., ‘Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew’ in ANF, ed. Allan Menzies, vol. 10 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 465, and Romans: 1-5, 161ff. 11. Origen, ‘John,’ 377. 12. Ibid. Although Origen’s notion of the Trinity shows subordinationist tendencies, he also emphasized the unity of the divine will ad extra. On this, see Crouzel, Origen, 188.

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God as Sacrificial Love

that was filled with the divine λόγος),13 the executor of the sacrifice was the devil, the benefactors were both humanity and God, and its essential characteristic was the death of Jesus on the cross. Because he accepted death in order to serve God, the devil was unable to keep hold of the ‘Son of Man’ in death, condemned to see him rise as the eternal Son returning to the transcendent world of restored souls.14 What seems incompatible in these two depictions are the cause and aim of the death of Jesus as well as the identity of the receiver of the sacrifice.15 The first difference is merely apparent because Origen simply articulated the same basic point from two different angles. God’s judgement on the ignorance and moral corruption of humanity had two internally related consequences. It caused a break in the life-giving fellowship with the divine, and eo ipso submitted it to bondage under the forces of destruction. This logical relation clarifies Origen’s identification of the goal and receiver of the sacrifice/ransom within these two paradigms. Insofar as the devil received the soul of Jesus as a ransom resulting in the transference of ownership from the devil to God, a necessary condition of reconciliation with

13. Origen, Mattäus, 179f., ‘De Principiis’, in ANF, ed. A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968), 282, and ‘Romans: 1-5’, 219ff. In his commentary on Mt. 16.8, he also states that the ransom paid was the blood of Jesus (see also ibid., 161, 279). Upon the death of the human soul, the divine λόγος along with the body of Jesus returned to the Father. Origen explicitly rejected that the divine λόγος suffered death (Contra Celsum, 408f., and The Commentary on the Gospel of John: Books 13–32, ed. Thomas P. Halton, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 324f.; see however Contra Celsum, 88). For a more detailed construal of Origen’s understanding of the divine–human union, see Charles Kannengiesser, ‘Christology,’ in Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. John A. McGuckin (London: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 75ff., and Jacobsen, Origen’s Christology, 296ff., 330. 14. See Mogens Müller, The Expression Son of Man and the Development of Christology: A History of Interpretation (London: Routledge, 2014), 28. On this specific point, he refers to In Johannem 33, 35. 15. Like Origen, Athanasius may also seem a bit ambiguous on this matter, stating at times that Jesus is sacrificed to God, and on another occasion saying that Jesus died in order to ‘settle man’s account with death’. It is the same dynamic that lies behind his construal: God’s judgement of sin means that humanity will perish unless Godself, in eternal love of humanity, provides a solution that may keep it alive and well. Yet there is an important nuance to be noted. In Athanasius, the death of Jesus was not a ransom paid to the devil, but an act that satisfied God’s justice. However, this did not mean that God changed God’s attitude towards humanity because of Christ’s death, but rather actualized God’s love for humanity without invalidating the adequacy of God’s prior judgement (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 33ff., 48f., 54ff.). Christ’s sacrifice was a divine ‘self-reconciliation’. Origen would agree that the primordial cause of Christ’s death was God’s just judgement on sinful humanity (see e.g. Origen, Romans: Books 1–5, 216ff.), but Christ’s death did not actualize God’s judgement. Rather, its effect was a rational and moral transformation of human beings that enabled them to avoid God’s judgement. On this, see also Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 204ff.

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God was satisfied.16 Still reconciliation was not fulfilled until ignorance and moral corruption were completely removed from the life of human beings. The death and resurrection of Jesus were not the final blow in the ‘war against the devil [that] establishes peace with God’.17 This war is brought to an end in and through the rational and moral transformation people undergo when recognizing in Christ their source of life. Christ ‘gave men an example which teaches us to resist sins even to the point of death’.18 By dedicating their whole life to imitating Christ, Christian believers fight the evils that continue to separate God and humanity.19 Now, importantly, the sacrifice of Jesus did not first cause a change in the attitude of God towards men, and then a subsequent change in the attitude of human beings towards God. Rather, in and through Christ’s death, God sought to win back what was lost, that is, the will of human beings to live for and from their Creator. What moved Origen to speak of Jesus as an atoning spiritual sacrifice to God was his insistence that the death of Jesus removed that which caused God to leave humanity to the forces of destruction in the first place.20 Humanity was reconciled to God in the sacrifice of Jesus because through it Jesus presented humanity as a consecrated gift to God.21 In other words, the content of Jesus’s intercession at the heavenly altar was a rationally and morally transformed humanity.22 To conclude then, we should say that Origen understood Jesus to be presenting a double sacrifice, one to the devil and one to God. The first consisted of his soul and freed humanity from captivity under the devil; the second of a humanity perfected by the power of his life and death.23 Both sacrifices contributed to free humanity from forces of destruction and established an eternal life-sustaining fellowship with God.

16. Origen, Romans: 1-5, 301, and Contra Celsum, 408f. 17. Romans: 1-5, 281. 18. Ibid. See also ‘An Exhortation to Martyrdom,’ in Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer and Selected Works, ed. Richard J. Payne (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 49f.; Romans: 1-5, 65; Contra Celsum, 408; ‘John’, 377f.; and Homilies on Leviticus: 1-16, 38, 47ff. See further Jacobsen, Christ, 316ff. 19. According to Origen, martyrdom is more than martyrial death: it is every witness to Christ. See Origen, ‘Martyrdom’; Contra Celsum, 83; Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: Books 6–10 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 240; and Romans: 1-5, 353ff. 20. There are admittedly several statements in his commentary on Leviticus that are difficult to consistently integrate into this construal. This is also true of his treatment of the wrath of God in his commentary on Rom. 3.8. 21. Origen, Romans: 6-10, 143, 275, and Contra Celsum, 408f. See further Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 167ff. 22. See Origen, Homilies on Leviticus: 1-16, 188ff. 23. Ibid., 80ff. When Origen in his commentary on Rom. 3.8 says that the ‘sacred blood’ of Jesus effects ‘appeasement’ (and forgiveness), it means that it works repentance in (and so sanctifies) the believer, and thus undergirds a state of reconciliation between God and humanity. See especially ibid., 45ff., and Romans: 1-5, 223ff.

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The second manner prevalent among early Christian writers in which notions of sacrifice were employed portrayed the cross as an expression of a cosmic battle between good and evil. In Gregory of Nazianzus, a much-cited representative of this view, there is no economic-contractual exchange between God and the devil, and there is no sacrifice made to satisfy the requirements of God’s justice.24 Jesus was simply killed in the battle against evil forces; the resurrection, however, constituted the winning blow. Because Gregory’s emphasis on the unity of God and humanity in Christ was significantly stronger than Origen’s, he did not ascribe the death of Christ only to his human soul. Gregory spoke emphatically of the death of the incarnate God on the cross.25 Still, like Origen, Jesus was not an arbitrary victim, but submitted himself to the divine Father’s will to salvation and temporarily surrendered himself to his religious and political opponents for the purpose of freeing humanity from destructive forces.26 It was the united will of the Triune divine life that the Son should take the form of a finite being, transform its existence and so enable it to enjoy eternal fellowship with God. Thus, as in Origen, God was the provider of the sacrifice, but not its executioner. In neither Gregory nor Origen was the significance of the incarnation reduced to the death and resurrection of Christ or to its transformative rational and/or moral power; both emphasized the internal connection between them: the second following with necessity from the first.27 This internal connection is also apparent in the writings of Augustine. ‘A true sacrifice is every work which is done that we may be united to God in holy fellowship, and which has a reference to that supreme good and end in which alone we can be truly blessed. … True sacrifice are works of mercy to ourselves or others, done with a reference to God.’28 Yet Augustine deviated from Origen, as well as a number of other early Christian writers, in his understanding of the identity of the receiver of the sacrifice of

24. Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (henceforth, NPNF), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 7 (Oxford: James Parker, 1891), 431. 25. Ibid., 333, 433. For Gregory’s understanding of the hypostatic union, see ibid., 348f., and ‘Select Letters,’ in NPNF, vol. 7 (Oxford: James Parker), 439ff. However, Gregory’s Christological vocabulary is neither rigorous nor entirely consistent (Danut Manastireanu, ‘Perichoresis and the Early Christian Doctrine of God,’ Archaeus 11–12 (2007): 66f.). In Oration 30, 5, he attributes the godforsakenness of Christ to his human nature only (Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ 311). On Gregory’s Christological interpretation of death, see further Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In your Light We Shall see Light (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 139. 26. Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ 311, 56f. 27. Ibid., 431. 28. Augustine, ‘The City of God,’ in NPNF, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 183f. On this and the following, see also Basil Studer, ‘Das Opfer Christi nach Augustins ´De Civitate Dei` X, 5-6,’ Studia Anselmiana 79, no. 6 (1980).

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Christ.29 The exclusive receiver of the sacrifice was God, not the devil. Even if the various actions falling under the category of ‘true sacrifice’ differed greatly, not any action whatsoever could actualize unification with God. For Augustine, it was the love of God, as it came to expression through the person of Christ, which determined the specific character of the acts that manifest a truly sacrificial intentionality. What made the love of Christ sacrificial, according to Augustin? The answer is clear: its servant-character. Because of the human need for an antidote against the self-absorbing pride that separates human beings from God, fellowship with God can only be achieved in the form of servanthood. This servanthood consists of a three-dimensional sacrificial giving through freely sacrificing himself to remove God’s displeasure with sin (i.e. his just wrath), and thus provide humanity with a reason to no longer fear eternal separation from God, Christ consecrates the believers to God (i.e. sets them apart to be his servants), and when human beings accept this call to servitude, the image of God is renewed in them.30 As servants they themselves become the sacrifice (victima) of Christ. However, we misunderstand Augustine if we conclude that the sacrifice of Christ was carried out to satisfy a need that God had exclusively in and by Godself. An individual human heart is consecrated to God because by thus being it generates actions that benefit fellow human beings.31 The sacrificial significance of Christ has a soteriological and a moral dimension that are intrinsically connected in the idea of servanthood. As to the precise understanding of the sacrificial subject, Augustine insisted that the sacrifice of Christ was not an instance of divine death. God cannot die when in Godself. Yet God can die when in the form of that which is not God.32 The sacrifice of Christ was the humanly death of the Word of God.33 While the early Augustine distinguished between the persona (i.e. the ‘mask’) of Christ and the Word of God (behind the mask), in his later writings the persona of Christ became identical to the Word, and as a consequence when Christ suffered death, the Word

29. Augustine, ‘The City of God’, 193, 202, and The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), 166f. 30. ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity’, in The Fathers of the Church (henceforth, FoC), ed. Roy J. Deferrari, vol. 2 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1950), 398, and The Trinity, 325f. Admittedly, this reconstruction is based on the later writings of Augustine. In his earlier works, Jesus was more of a ‘poor man’s Plato’: a moral and spiritual teacher. On this development in Augustine, see Brian Dobell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 86ff. 31. Augustine, ‘The City of God,’ 183, 418, and The Trinity, 353ff. 32. The Trinity, 164ff. 33. ‘On Music’, in FoC, ed. Hermigild Dressler, vol. 4 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 332, The Trinity, 355f., and Augustine’s Commentary on the Letter to Galatians, trans. Eric Plumer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 165, 167.

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of God died as a human being.34 Insofar as the human being Jesus was one with God, the eternal Word was also the receiver of his sacrifice. Finally, in Augustine, the sacrifice of the Word of God did not have God’s love of humanity as its result. It was the expression of a divine love of humanity that was already there when God created the cosmos.35 My focus so far has been on the way some early Christian theologians have used vocabularies of sacrifice to spell out the meaning of God’s action in Jesus with respect to the death of Jesus (question 1 above). At the same time, I have also emphasized how the application of semantics of sacrifice is repeatedly used to connect the spiritual and moral lives of the believers to the fate of Christ (questions 2 and 3 above). The sacrificial love of God coming to expression in Christ is transmitted to the life of the church in its fullness. This semantic re-contextualization is echoed throughout early Christian texts.36 Virtuous acts such as fasting, presenting charitable gifts to the poor, making provision for Christian teachers, worship, contemplation and martyrdoms were described as spiritual sacrifices to God. It is a matter of discussion whether the product of these metaphorical processes was that of spiritualization, if by the latter we refer to sacrificial practices that are entirely dissolved from their traditional material aspects. While prayers and purity of intentions may be said to fall into this category, fasting and martyrdoms were not non-material sacrifices, but rather reflect a moralization of sacrifice, and the presenting of gifts may be taken as a substitute for, not a spiritualized version of, cultic sacrifice.37 Be that as it may, what undoubtedly took place was a re-contextualization of semantics of sacrifice from

34. On this development, see also Dobell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion, 83ff. Furthermore, insofar as Christ, in Augustine, is a distinct intention of the one divine subject, we may even interpret him as speaking of the humanly death of God in Christ. See The Trinity, 272ff., 374ff., and St. Augustine’s Confessions, trans. William Watts, vol. 2 (New York: Harvard University Press, 1912), 395f. 35. The Trinity, 355. 36. For example, Saint Justin Martyr, ‘Dialogue with Trypho’, in FoC, ed. Hermigild Dressler, vol. 6 (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948), 328f.; Origen, Homilies on Leviticus: 1-16, 29, 49f., 101ff., 195ff.; Contra Celsum, 151, 384f.; Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ 223f., 247, 431f.; ‘The Shepherd of Hermas’ in The Apostolic Fathers (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1968), 104; Clement of Alexandria, ‘The Miscellanies’, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library, trans. William Wilson, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1944), 261ff., 426ff.; ‘Acts of Apollonius’, in The Apology and Acts of Apollonius and Other Monuments of Early Christianity, ed. F. J. Conybeare (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 47f. See further Frances M. Young, ‘Opfer IV: Neues Testament und alte Kirche,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 97ff., 273, and Sacrificial Ideas, 223ff. 37. Rendtorff, ‘Priesterliche Opfertora,’ 197. See also Wolfgang Stegemann, ‘Metaphorik des Opfers’, in Opfer: Theologische und kulturelle Kontexte, ed. Bernd Janowski and Michael Welker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 197, and Finlan, Problems, 20ff.

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the traditional cultic settings to cultic ones significantly different from these. In Origen’s description of the Christian cult as almost entirely immaterial, we find one good example of this process.38 Another can be found in the way in which Polycarp was described on the eve of his public execution: ‘like a splendid ram chosen from a great flock for sacrifice, a burnt offering prepared and acceptable to God’.39 Through this re-contextualization of vocabulary of sacrifice, his death attained a meaning different from that of a politically sanctioned judicial punishment of a criminal. As was the case with the crucifixion of Christ, it occurred in a sacred space significantly different from those of the Old Hebrew cults. Whether the martyr sacrifices of Christian believers were offered to God in order to quiet God’s righteous wrath,40 or simply expressed an absolute refusal to renounce their Christian confession, they were (along with the spiritual sacrifices mentioned above) interpreted as pleasing to God in that they imitated Christ by giving up something of value in order to prevent evil from destroying the lives of others.41 The basic motivation behind the exhortations to provide spiritual or moral sacrifices to God was that they contributed to the actualization of divine living, that is, deification. When offered to quiet God’s anger, they represented a recognition that such anger was a just means to make human beings turn away from the path of evil and onto the path of good. The impulse for this moral conversion was, however, generated by God’s love for humanity as it came to expression in Christ. Finally, the vocabulary of sacrifice was used to articulate the meaning of Christian fellowship-meals. We first come upon it in Did. 14.1–3 where the Greek terms εὐχαριστεîν and θυσία were combined to characterize the event as a sacrifice of thanksgiving.42 What made the meal sacrificial was the consecration of the food.43 The act of consecration constituted a collective act of commemorative thanksgiving to God, recognizing the fellowship’s dependency on God’s provision of life-giving substances. According to Irenaeus, what distinguished these

38. Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 97. Despite his immaterialist focus, it should be noted that Origen acknowledged moral life as a form of immaterial sacrifice (Robert J. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled: The True Meaning of Christian Sacrifice (London: T. & T. Clark, 2009, 94). On the immaterialist tendency in the Alexandrian school of theology, see ibid., 84ff. 39. ‘The Martyrdom of Polycarp’, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. J.B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992), 237. See also Origen, ‘Martyrdom’, §50. 40. This is rarely the case, but see Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ 251ff., and Eusebius, The Proof of the Gospel, trans. W. J. Ferrar, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 114f. See further Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 230ff. 41. Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 109f. 42. Young, ‘Opfer IV: Neues Testament und alte Kirche,’ 275f. See further Ernst Kinder, ‘Opfer IV: Dogmengeschichtlich’, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Wilfried Werbeck (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), 1651f. 43. Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 99, and Robert J. Daly, The Origins of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifice (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 131f., 139.

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sacrifices from those of the Hebrew cult was that they were not required by God, but rather constituted free gifts of thankfulness.44 God only took pleasure in these sacrifices because humanity would benefit from them by making salvation concretely present in their lives.45 Even if the connection of the Christian meal to the death of Jesus was intensified to the point that the aspect of commemoration was rearticulated as re-enactment,46 it was rarely understood as appeasing God.47 The participants had to be purified though faith, baptism and repentance before taking part in the meal.48 By virtue of such metaphorizations, notions of sacrifice came to determine the relational dynamic that brings divine and human relational life as a whole to its fulfilment in love. The impulse for these spiritualizing and/or moralizing tendencies in early Christian theologies of sacrifice came from the theology of Neoplatonism with its insistence on the immaterial and changeless nature of the gods.49 Neither material nor immaterial sacrifices could effect a change in the attitude of a changeless god. However, spiritual sacrifices were assigned an important function in human lives in that they enabled participation in the immaterial divine nature. Augustine said, For God, indeed, being the Father of all, is in need of nothing; but for us it is good to adore him by means of justice, chastity and other virtues, and thus to make life itself a prayer to Him, by inquiring into and imitating His nature. For inquiry, says he ‘purifies and imitation deifies us, by moving us nearer to Him’.50

This passage is an excellent sample of how early Christian theologians strove to coherently coordinate their semantics of sacrifice with the notion of God understood as love – a challenge that continued to occupy them into the Middle Ages.

44. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 357f., 360f., and Origen, Contra Celsum, 476. See also Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 256ff. and Daly, Origins, 91ff. 45. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, 344ff., 352ff. See also Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 112f. 46. Cyprian was the first to explicitly make this connection, and numerous others followed suit. Cyprian, Letters: 1–81, trans. Rose Bernard Donna (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 204; Cyril of Jerusalem, ‘Catechetical Lectures,’ in The Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (hencedorth, NANF), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 7 (Oxford: James Parker, 1891), 151f.; Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Select Letters,’ 469; and John Chrysostom, ‘Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews’, trans. Frederic Gardiner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 449. 47. Yet see Daly, Origins, 97f. 48. Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 279ff. 49. Ibid., 24ff., 111ff. 50. Augustine, ‘The City of God,’ 417. See also Origen, Contra Celsum, 499, and Clement of Alexandria, ‘The Miscellanies,’ 471f.

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2.2 Theologies of Sacrifice in the Middle Ages According to Michel Beaudin and Jean-Marc Gauthier, ‘the sacrificial structure of Christian soteriology has its peak in the Cur Deus Homo written by Anselm of Canterbury’.51 In saying this they do not mean that Anselm himself found in the imagery of the sacrificial cults of the Hebrew Scriptures a vocabulary that exhausted the saving significance of Christ. Their claim is rather that Christian soteriologies of sacrifice have traditionally found their primary source of inspiration in Anselm’s work. An enquiry into this connection is all the more interesting since Anselm himself rarely employed semantics of sacrifice. Anselm’s construal of the significance of Jesus has been, and still is, the source of much controversy. Not only have theologians, as we shall see in Chapter 4, harshly criticized the notion of God they see coming to expression in Cur Deus Homo, but interpreters have also disagreed over how the conception of this book is to be reconstructed. On the one hand, we have those who analyse Anselm’s doctrine of atonement by focusing on his feudal imagery.52 Here, by being its creator, God is Lord of the cosmos, and created human beings are to be God’s loyal subjects.53 But because of their sinful nature, human beings cannot fulfil this requirement. A fitting compensation must be paid for God’s honour to be restored in accordance with the just ordering of the cosmos. Human beings are, however, unable to pay the price required. Only God is capable of doing so. Thus, God must become human and by sacrificing his life to God, the incarnate Son pays the necessary price to restore the divinely ordained order of the universe.54

51. Michel Beaudin and Jean-Marc Gauthier, ‘The Uncontrolled Return of the Passions in the Economical and Political Sacrificial “Soteriology” of Our Times: Theological Perspectives,’ in Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media: In Discussion with Christian Theology, ed. Wolfgang Palaver and Petra Steinmair-Pösel (Wien: LIT, 2005), 189. 52. See for example J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 2nd rev. edn (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011), 228ff. See also Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence, and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 85ff.; Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998), 8ff.; Anthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 77ff.; Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today (New York: Continuum, 2000), 110ff.; Finlan, Problems, 72f.; Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 120ff.; Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 267f. 53. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man and the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (New York: Magi Books, 1969), 84ff., 103ff. 54. The notions of satisfaction and merit originated in Tertullian’s theology of penance, and the idea that surplus merit may be transferred to other persons for their benefit was

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It is important to note that this line of interpretation does not necessarily imply that Anselm construed the death of Jesus as brought about by God, the Father, punishing Jesus instead of us. As we shall promptly see, this so-called penalsubstitutionary view on atonement was developed by the reformers. Yet, these interpreters do emphasize that the violent death of Jesus was required by God to compensate for the debt incurred by disloyal humanity, and that the path of Jesus is set up as a moral ideal for Christian believers. On the other hand, we find those disputing central aspects of this interpretation. Anselm-scholar Richard Southern thinks it a grave misunderstanding to formulate Anselm’s doctrine of atonement in feudal terms, writing that in a systematic enquiry ‘everything of importance in Anselm’s argument can survive the removal of every trace of feudal imagery and the supposed contamination by elements of Germanic law’.55 I agree with Southern that we risk missing the subtleties of Anselm’s conception if we get too hung up in the feudal imagery. First, these images are metaphors, and what characterizes metaphors is that they both establish relations of similarity and difference between two semantic contexts. As I will show below, Anselm’s depiction of humankind’s relationship to God is not identical to the hierarchical structure of the feudal society in which he lived. Even though there are some similarities, there are also significant differences. Second, my primary focus will be on explicating the internal structure of his argument as a whole, not exclusively focusing on those established by feudal imagery at the beginning of his treatise. Third, it is important that we do not simply stay within the feudal imagery when spelling out the position of Anselm, but strive to theoretically explicate the subject matters of his argument. What then do we get from Anselm? As both lines of interpretation emphasize, Anselm disagreed with the basic tenet upon which Origen built his view on how the sacrifice of Jesus achieved salvation for humanity. In accordance with Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine, he dismissed the idea of a contract existing between God and the devil, obliging God to pay the soul of Jesus as ransom for the devil to release humanity from his clutches.56 Anselm opted for an Augustinian line of thought when locating the receiver of the sacrifice of Jesus. Because sin is an act that disrupts the order of God’s creation, it was to God alone that humanity remained responsible, not to the devil.57 Thus, God must be the exclusive receiver of the sacrifice of Christ.

developed by Cyprian. See Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (London: SPCK, 1970), 81f. 55. Richard Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 221. See also Gisbert Greshake, ‘Erlösung und Freiheit: Zur Neuinterpretation der Erlösungslehre Anselms von Canterbury,’ Theologische Quartalschrift 153 (1973): 340; John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 163; and Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 156. 56. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 161. 57. Ibid., 71ff., 158.

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Now, God did not need this sacrifice because sin constituted an insult to God’s personal dignity.58 Again in accordance with Augustine, Anselm insisted that the nature of God is unchangeable and, needing nothing, God’s dignity is therefore incorruptible. God required the death of Jesus because of a disruption of the relational order existing between God and humanity given in and through the creation of the world.59 If the problem was located exclusively on God’s side (i.e. a personal insult), God could have dealt with the problem by simply overlooking it. But this is not possible when the problem concerned how to re-establish a right ordering of relations between two conflicting parties. If God unconditionally forgave sin (as Anselm acknowledges that human beings are commanded by God to do), God would show Godself not to take this relational problem seriously. By undermining the responsibility that constitutes human dignity, God would reveal Godself as not being just and loving. In cases of relational disturbance, Anselm considered two possible solutions. Either one could punish the guilty party, or the guilty party could offer compensation (satisfactio) for its violation of order.60 While the first alternative often meant going to war, the latter was considered a peaceful solution.61 Anselm opted for the second, claiming that Jesus did not die because of God’s punishment of sin, but because God required satisfaction to be made. This distinction is important to underline because when Anselm spoke of Jesus as satisfying the demands of God’s honour, he was not saying that Jesus suffered the anger of a personally insulted despot requiring the punishment of an innocent in order to spare the guilty.62 He explicitly denied this as a highly unsuitable theological claim.63 His point was rather that God

58. For an overview of the discussion on the notion of God’s dignity in Anselm, see Günther Wenz, Geschichte der Versöhnungslehre in der evangelischen Theologie der Neuzeit, vol. 1 (München: Kaiser, 1984), 47ff. The reconstruction of Rebecca Parker is faulty already at this point. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves us (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 29. 59. See Greshake, ‘Erlösung und Freiheit,’ 331f. Here it should be mentioned that Anselm never speaks of God as being reconciled with humanity, but rather of humanity being reconciled with God. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 142. 60. Ibid., 85, 88f. See also Wenz, Geschichte 1, 44f. and Rieger, Christ and Empire, 136f. This crucial analytic distinction is lacking in Parker’s reconstruction. See Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 29. 61. Gerd Althoff, ‘Genugtuung (Satisfactio): Zur Eigenart gütlicher Konfliktbeilegung im Mittelalter,’ in Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994). 62. As Joanne C. Brown and Rebecca Parker claim in ‘For God So Loved the World?’ in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 7f. See also Beverly W. Harrison and Carter Heyward, ‘Pain and Pleasure: Avoiding the Confusions of Christian Tradition in Feminist Theory,’ ibid., 153, and Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 29. 63. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 83.

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would compromise God’s honour if God did not stay true to the original purpose of God’s creative act, namely to create beings eternally happy in the enjoyment of God.64 This is only possible where God is recognized as creator and sustainer of the cosmos because only such a power has the capacity to overcome the evil that destroys its beauty. In other words, that God required satisfaction according with God’s honour (and justice) is the expression of God’s love of the beauty of creation. Thus, Darby Ray is wrong when claiming that in Anselm God’s ‘compassion is born of justice, not vice versa’.65 In Anselm, God’s justice is an expression of God’s original will to joyful fellowship (i.e. of love) with creation.66 Furthermore, while punishment restores a relationship through compulsion of violence, satisfaction is freely undertaken. Accordingly, ‘God did not compel Christ to die, there being no sin in him. But Christ freely endured death, not by giving up His life out of obedience, but by obeying a command to preserve justice, in which He persevered so unwaveringly that He incurred death as a result.’67 This statement seems contradictory: Jesus did not die out of obedience, but because he obeyed a command to preserve justice. Anselm senses the difficulty.68 His answer is that Jesus was neither obliged to die because of his own sins, nor by external compulsion, but rather his will was one with the divine will to save creation from chaos and destruction.69 Because God was the only one capable of fulfilling the obligation of humanity to live justly, the second person of the Trinity willingly became an individual human being. In the person of Christ, the will and the capacity inherent in his divine nature is communicated to the will and the capacity of his human nature enabling Christ to freely resist sin and always act justly.70 The free obedience of Christ refers to the unity of wills thus obtained. Without it, salvation could not have been achieved.

64. Ibid., 119ff. For this reason, I think Günther Wenz slightly misconstrues Anselm’s conception when saying that the problem of mortality is not central to Anselm’s conception (Wenz, Geschichte 1, 59f.). And for the same reason, Vincent Brümmer (with reference to David Smith) is wrong in stating that for Anselm the Father, in contradiction to the Son, wills the death of the sinner. Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 195. 65. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 10, see also 35. 66. See also Anselm of Canterbury, ‘Proslogion,’ in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 91. Here Anselm describes God’s mercy as effectuating the experience of compassion in us. See further Daniel Deme, The Christology of Anselm of Canterbury (Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2003), 201f., 220. 67. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 77. See also ibid. 156. 68. Ibid., 146ff. 69. Ibid., 75ff., 155ff., and ‘The Incarnation of the Word’ in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 241ff. A further elaboration of Anselm’s construal of the unity of the divine will, see Deme, Christology of Anselm, 132ff. 70. Anselm of Canterbury, ‘The Incarnation of the Word,’ 248ff., and ‘A Meditation on Human Redemption’ in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of

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This line of reasoning gives us the decisive clue to how Anselm understood Christ as a sacrifice. In one of the few places where Anselm gives us a vocabulary of sacrifice, he connects it to the notion of gift.71 A gift is only what it is if presented out of free will and not out of obligation. Living a morally impeccable life cannot be a gift to God because this is how the order of creation laid down by God obliges human beings to live. Yet if someone were to succeed in living such a life, that person would not owe God anything because he himself would be God. Christ was that someone. Being sinless, Christ was not obliged to suffer the ultimate consequence of sin, that is, death. Because he willingly did so to compensate for the disobedience of others, his death constituted a gift to God. When Anselm stated that this gift consisted of the person of Christ as a whole, what he was saying was that the sacrifice given was a human being whose merit was infinite because he was also God. Following Augustine’s identification of the sacrificial subject, Anselm affirmed that Christ ‘offered His humanity to his divinity, which is one and the same for the three persons’.72 Thus, when Anselm spoke of Christ’s’ free obedience as satisfying the honour of God, the latter did not refer exclusively to God, the Father, but to the whole Trinity. It is thus the interconnection of two aspects of the Christ-event that made it a sacrifice, according to Anselm. First, Christ gave up his life voluntarily, and thus it acquired the character of being a gift. An obligatory death would not be a gift, and in being given without being necessary, his death produced the infinite surplus value necessary for humanity to benefit from it. Second, God was the receiver of this gift. According to Cur Deus Homo, the sacrifice of Christ consisted of a voluntary gift of death presented by the second person of the Trinity in human flesh in order to honour God’s original will to create beings who enjoy eternal fellowship with God. Sacrifice achieves satisfaction.73 Towards the end of his treaty, Anselm concludes that no greater act of mercy can be imagined.74 While the moral significance of Christ’s death is not entirely absent from Anselm’s work, it is not articulated by drawing on the vocabulary of sacrifice. Given what has been said above, the reason for this is obvious. An act is sacrificial only insofar as it has an inherent gift-aspect, and an act is only a gift if it is presented out of free will and not out of compulsion. But what of a martyr’s death? Rebecca Parker claims that, in Anselm, Christians are exhorted to ‘imitate Christ’s self-offering when the cause of justice demands it’.75 This is not entirely accurate.

Canterbury (Minneapolis, MN: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000), 422f. My interpretation of Anselm’s two-nature doctrine is in line with Deme, Christology of Anselm, 149ff. 71. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 135f., 156. 72. Ibid., 158. 73. Anselm speaks explicitly, as did Gregory of Nazianzus and later Luther, about the death of God in Christ. Ibid., 141ff., 155ff. 74. Ibid., 161f. 75. Rebecca Ann Parker, Blessing the World: What can Save us Now (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2006), 70.

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Although ‘[Christ] gave men the example of never turning away from the justice they owe to God, no matter what disadvantages they can experience’,76 this is what human beings are required to do as God’s creatures, and thus their lives and deaths cannot constitute proper sacrificial gifts. Anselm’s younger contemporary Peter Abelard agreed with Anselm that the devil had no legitimate right to receive the sacrifice of Jesus.77 The standard account of Abelard’s relation to Anselm, however, also tells us that Abelard was highly critical of the structure of Anselm’s soteriological conception. This account is most often based on an excursus in Abelard’s commentary on Romans in which he claimed that God could have forgiven the sins of human beings without receiving any satisfaction, and that neither the devil, nor God (who needs nothing), but humanity was the receiver of the sacrifice of Jesus. Abelard exclaims: ‘How cruel and unjust it seems that someone should require the blood of an innocent person as a ransom, or that it in any way please him that an innocent person be slain, still less that God should have so accepted the death of his Son that through it he was reconciled to the whole world.’78 The problem for Abelard was not simply the morally suspect character of such a God. A God who pays a price for captives which belongs to God in the first place is simply an incoherent construct. Abelard immediately proceeds to present what looks like an alternative to Anselm’s ‘objective’ understanding of the significance of the death of Christ. He writes that God’s love was revealed in Christ in order to evoke a corresponding relational life among human beings.79 Its meaning lies in the effect it has on the moral character of human beings. The death of Jesus (according to his human nature) is only the final moment in a sacrificial event that is constituted by the full story of his life, a life in which we come to see that God is not vengeful, but loving, and in so doing we repent and accept the love of God as morally determining our lives. The self-sacrificial love Christ displayed in enduring suffering and death becomes the ultimate mark of a Christian life transformed by the love of Christ. Yet Abelard’s (at best semi-systematic) account must be placed within the larger context of his understanding of salvation. When doing so, we come to see that the standard interpretation is extremely one-sided, and that Abelard in fact grounded the above construal in an understanding of Christ as suffering God’s punishment of humanity’s sin on the cross. The death of Christ released humanity from the guilt that otherwise would have resulted in the eternal death of human

76. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 156, 160. 77. Peter Abelard, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. Steven R. Cartwright (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 164ff. Abelard is, however, not consistent on this point, see ibid., 191. 78. Ibid., 167. 79. Ibid., 228, 266f., Peter Abelard’s Ethics, trans. D. E. Luscombe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 91, 93, 95, Peter Abelard and Héloïse, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 152f.

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beings because of God’s wrath towards sin.80 It is only because God would go this far for us that God can elicit a grateful and loving response in human beings. In other words, it was only because God first addressed the objective power of sin that its subjective aspect could be addressed. From this we can conclude that Abelard indeed formulated a different interpretation of Christ’s death to that of Anselm, but not in the way in which most scholarly overviews on atonementtheology have been prone to tell us. While Abelard put a stronger emphasis than Anselm on the moral response which the death of Christ calls forth in the believer, this response is evoked by a death which is interpreted in a way that is closer to the later penal-substitutionary paradigm of the reformers than Anselm, lacking as it does the distinction between satisfaction and punishment so important to the latter.81 Beaudin and Gauthier’s claim that Anselm’s vocabulary gave rise to Christian soteriologies of sacrifice becomes evident when reading Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of the death of Jesus: ‘A sacrifice properly so called is something done for that honor which is properly due to God, in order to appease Him. … Therefore it is manifest that Christ’s passion was a true sacrifice.’82 Here we encounter a re-articulation of satisfaction in terms of sacrificial propitiation (or lit. placandum, i.e. placation), a movement that later reached its peak in the reformers. Yet, the term ‘propitiation’ did not here refer to an act that effects a change in God’s attitude towards humanity from wrath to love: ‘Christ is not said to have reconciled us with God, as if God had begun anew to love us, since it is written (Jeremiah 31, 3): ‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love’; but because the source of hatred was taken away by Christ’s passion.’83 The hatred referred to is human hatred, not divine. As in Anselm, the sacrifice of Christ was pleasing (Lat. placo) to God because it manifested the relational order of the cosmos capable of bringing it to completion.84 His sacrifice was not understood as an external (or objective) event carried out on behalf of humanity because it is only when Christian believers

80. Abelard, Romans, 163, 91f., 207ff., 225ff., 265, and Abelard and Héloïse, Letters, 153f. On this and the following, see also Thomas Williams, ‘Sin, Grace, and Redemption’, in The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 265ff. 81. Abelard uses these terms, together with the term propitiation, interchangeably. Abelard, Romans, 225ff. 82. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 4 (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1948), 2278f. (Henceforth, ST 4). 83. Ibid., 2284. See also Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 1 (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1948), 115 (henceforth, ST 1), and ST 4, 2019f. On this and the following, see further Rik van Nieuwenhove, ‘The Saving Work of Christ,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 84. Brandon Peterson, ‘Paving the Way? Penalty and Atonement in Thomas Aquinas’s Soteriology,’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 3 (2013): 279f.

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participate in it that their total relational being is transformed.85 While God, for Aquinas (like Augustine, Anselm and Abelard) is absolutely free and in need of nothing, and thus could have overlooked human sin without requiring satisfaction, God would not do so because the goal for which human beings were created – to participate in divine life – is best achieved when enduring suffering willingly for the sake of love.86 Thus, while Aquinas is adamant that the misery Christ underwent was heaped on him by evil men,87 the uncompromising love of God and human beings would not have been revealed without it. This is the kind of love that pleases (or placates) God, and in which the believer participates. Having said this, I tend to agree with Brandon Peterson who, against the interpretation provided by Rik van Nieuwenhove, argues that Aquinas attached penal images to his notion of satisfaction.88 Together with Abelard, he thus paved the way for the later reformers’ understanding of the sacrifice of Christ in terms of penal satisfaction. With Aquinas, we gain access to a philosophically refined construal of the sacrificial subject. Taken in isolation, some of his statements seem to affirm the Neoplatonic dogma of divine impassibility. He states, ‘Christ’s Passion did not concern His Godhead.’89 At the same time, he also insists that ‘the Godhead of the Word was not severed from the flesh in death’.90 What is the logical relation between these two statements? Following the lead of the late Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria, Aquinas insisted that suffering and death can only be predicated

85. ‘The head and members are as one mystic person; and therefore, Christ’s satisfaction belongs to all the faithful as being His members.’ Aquinas, ST 4, 2278. See also ibid., 2282. 86. Ibid., 2260f., and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles: Book Four: Salvation, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 231f., 242ff. (Henceforth SCG 4.) 87. Ibid., 2279. 88. Peterson, ‘Paving the Way?’. Peterson’s text is an elaboration of the interpretation provided by Gerald O’Collins in Jesus our Redeemer: A Christian Approach to Salvation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 136f., and Gerald O’Collins and Michael Keenan Jones, Jesus Our Priest: A Christian Approach to the Priesthood of Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 118f. Aquinas explicitly states that the death of Jesus was a ‘satisfactory punishment’ (poena satisfactio), a ‘debt of punishment’, and a ‘penal compensation’. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 2 (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1948), 977f. (Henceforth, ST 2), ST 4, 2274, and SCG 4, 243ff. 89. Aquinas, ST 4, 2271. On this and the following, see also ibid., 203, 2110f., 2287ff. For a systematic presentation of Cyril’s position, see Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 156ff., and for concise presentations of Aquinas’s underlying Christological conception, see Eleonore Stump, ‘Aquinas’ Metaphysics of the Incarnation,’ in The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God, ed. Stephen T. Davis, David Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 90. Aquinas, ST 4, 2289.

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on the eternal Son in the flesh. Whereas the eternal Son could not suffer and die with respect to that which made him divine, he could, and did so, having taken on human nature. The human nature assumed by the Son is not in itself a person because (unlike the case with other human beings) it is subsumed into a larger whole, namely the divine supposit that is the eternal Son. Insofar as Christ is a divine person with human nature as one of its constituent parts, suffering and death can be directly ascribed to his human nature, and derivatively to the person as a whole.91 This is the reason why Aquinas says that while the Word in his Godhead did not die, it was not severed from the flesh in death.92 Christ’s death was a divine self-sacrifice in the mode of human being. While Anselm limited his application of the concept of sacrifice to the death of Jesus, in Aquinas (as in Augustine) this concept is used to interpret the whole relational life of Christ, as well as that of the Christian believers. Unlike cultic religion where only specific acts or objects can be sacrificed, Aquinas states that ‘whatever is offered to God in order to raise man’s spirit to Him, may be called a sacrifice’.93 Among these things, he explicitly mentions devotion, prayer, martyrdom, sexual abstinence and possessions shared with fellow human beings.94 The Christian meal is a special case. Aquinas reflects the movement, first visible in Cyprian, towards understanding it as a re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ. He identifies its prefiguration in the expiatory sacrifices of the Hebrew cult and in the aversion ritual of the first Passover.95 It is atoning in that it serves as spiritual food that preserves the new lives of the believers generated in baptism.96 As it becomes clear from his understanding of the real presence of Christ, the meal is more than a commemorative thanksgiving. Aquinas elaborates the point when stating that the Christian meal manifests the invisible eternal priesthood of Christ according to which Christ offers himself eternally to God in heaven.97 This does not mean that he repeats his sacrifice in eternity, but that his one-time sacrifice has an eternal expiatory effect sufficient in itself. In the celebration of the Christian meal, the believer manifests, and thus participates in, this divine reality:

91. Aquinas formulates the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts in St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John P. Rowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961), 626f., and Disputed Question on the Union of the Word Incarnate, §1 (English translation can be found at http://hosted.desales.edu/w4/philtheo/ loughlin/ATP/De_Unione/De_Unione1.html, last accessed on 25 November 2016). 92. In this context, it could also be added that Aquinas speaks of Jesus as abandoned by the Father in the sense that he withdrew his protection from the Son, yet maintained the union. Aquinas, ST 4, 2288. 93. Ibid., 2136f. Thus, Jesus was not a sacrificial victim to those who executed him. 94. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 3 (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1948), 1550f. (Henceforth, ST 3). 95. Aquinas, ST 4, 2432. 96. Ibid., 2428ff. 97. Ibid., 2140.

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God as Sacrificial Love Whatever is an effect of our Lord’s passion is also an effect of this sacrament. For this sacrament is nothing other than the application of our Lord’s passion to us. … Hence it is clear that the destruction of death, which Christ accomplished by his death, and the restoration of life, which he accomplished by his resurrection, are effects of this sacrament.98

Furthermore, contrary to the moral and spiritual sacrifices mentioned above according to which any act performed by any person aimed at participating in the divine life is a sacrifice, the Christian meal becomes a sacrifice only insofar as a person formally authorized to be a representative of Christ (i.e. a minister) consecrates the bread and wine.99 While acknowledging the basic structure of Anselm’s conception, the reformers also developed further Aquinas’s reformulations of satisfaction in terms of sacrificial propitiation (poena satisfactio) along with Abelard’s notion of vicarious punishment. Luther did so by drawing on the juridical vocabulary of the Pauline literature: humanity is guilty of sin against God’s law and thus rightfully worthy of death.100 While Anselm and Luther agreed on the general point that the innocent blood shed by Christ was necessary for saving human beings from this tragic fate,101 Anselm never portrayed the death of Jesus as a vicarious penalty of sin as Abelard did, construing it rather as a compensation rendered by Jesus. Although employing the term ‘satisfaction’ in his early writings, Luther later came to explicitly detest it because of its connotations to all too human modes of re-establishing relationships (i.e. economic compensation).102 Against Anselm, Luther insisted that the death of

98. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. Fabian R. Larcher and James A. Weisheipl, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 43. See also ibid., 46ff. 99. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 5 (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1948), 2498f. (Henceforth, ST 5). 100. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, trans. Jakob A.O. Preus, Luther’s Works, vol. 25 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1972), 15f., 32, 47; ‘Against Latomus: Luther’s Refutation of Latomus’ Argument on Behalf of the Incendiary Sophists of the University of Louvain,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. George W. Forell, vol. 32 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1970), 223ff. See also First Lectures on the Psalms I: Psalms 1-75, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman, Luther’s Works vol. 10 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1974), 145; Lectures on Galatians: Chapter 1–4, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, trans. Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther’s Works, vol. 26 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1963), 277; and ‘Enarratio 53. Capitis Esaiae,’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. G. Bebermeyer, vol. 40 (3) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachvolger, 1930), 732. 101. See Luther, Lectures on Galatians: 1-4, 26, 175, 177, 277, and Lectures on Romans, 25, 32. 102. Martin Luther, ‘A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann, Luther’s Works, vol. 35 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1960), 103. See however Lectures on Romans, 25, 32, Lectures on Galatians:1-4, 26,

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Jesus did not actively produce a merit sufficient enough to re-establish the honour justly belonging to God as the creator of the cosmos, but that Christ, as Abelard claimed, passively suffered the punishment of sin in humanity’s place.103 Luther identified the reason behind Jesus’s death as God’s wrath against sin that had eternal death as its ultimate and unavoidable consequence (i.e. penalty): ‘[Christ] really and truly offered Himself to the Father for eternal punishment on our behalf. His human nature behaved as if He were a man to be eternally condemned to hell.’104 God became a human being because only thus could he suffer, die and through the resurrection of Christ save humanity from their tragic fate.105 Does this mean that God died in the vicarious sacrifice of Christ? Because of their emphasis on the unity of Christ’s two natures, we should have expected an unequivocally affirmative answer to this question in the earlier Alexandrian theologies of sacrifice. Yet, this was most often not the case.106 When interpreting Jesus’s cry of dereliction on the cross, they shrunk back from their distinct Christological conviction (vis-à-vis the views of Tertullian and the Antiochene theologians), that God suffered in Christ, attributing his experience of godforsakenness and death exclusively to Christ’s human nature.107 On this

277, and ‘The Large Catechism,’ in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 434f. 103. Luther, Psalms I, 10, 354, Lectures on Galatians: 1-4, 26, 276ff., and Martin Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 31 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 351f. See further Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus, God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (London: SCM Press, 1968), 44; Wenz, Geschichte 1, 63; and Friederike Nüssel, ‘Die Sühnevorstellung in der klassischen Dogmatik und ihre neuzeitliche Problematisierung,’ in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 78. 104. Quoted in translation, after Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (London: Macmillan, 1920), 400. See also Luther, Lectures on Galatians: 1-4, 26, 177, ibid., 277, and further Nüssel, ‘Die Sühnevorstellung,’ 79. 105. Luther, ‘A Treatise,’ 84. 106. See Werner Elert, ‘Die theopaschitische Formel,’ Theologische Literaturzeitung, no. 4/5 (1950): 199ff. 107. This ambiguity can be found in Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John A. McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 85, 104ff., 115ff., 127, 130, 133; Cyril of Alexandria, ‘Scholia on the Incarnation,’ in The Armenian Version of Revelation and Cyril of Alexandria’s Scholia on the Incarnation and Epistle on Easter (London: The Text and Translation Society, 1907), 210f.; Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ 311; Tertullian, ‘Against Praxeas,’ in ANF, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968), 626f.; Athanasius, ‘Against the Arians’ in NPNF, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1952), 424; and ‘Ad Epictetum’ in NPNF, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1952), 572, 574. In typical fashion, Athanasius affirmed that ‘the crucified was God’, and rejects that the eternal Logos

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specific question, they were more or less in agreement with Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas. In some of his writings, Luther followed a similar line of thought, maintaining that while the divine nature of Christ participated in the sacrifice on the cross, suffering and death cannot be directly ascribed to his divine nature per se.108 The key to understanding Luther’s comments on this matter is to be found in the way he critically appropriated the traditional doctrine of communicatio idiomatum, that is, the communication of the attributes of the two natures to the person of Christ.109 While the Son cannot die as the second person of the immanent Trinity (λόγος ἀσάρκος), he can die when incarnate (λόγος ἐνσάρκος). Christ suffered death only in his human nature, but since the different predicates ascribed to the human and the divine natures of Christ are predicates of the one person Christ, we may speak of the death of God in Christ. However, in the heat created by controversies among the reformers concerning the theology of the Eucharist, Luther radicalized the theopaschite formula of the Alexandrians.110 He reacted vehemently against Zwingli’s characterization of the two natures of Christ as self-enclosed. As a result, the notion of λόγος ἀσάρκος vanished from sight, and Luther came to speak of the eternal Son as united with

suffered in Christ. See further, Gérard Rossé, The Cry of Jesus on the Cross: A Biblical and Theological Study (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 73ff. 108. On this and the following, see Martin Luther, ‘On the Councils and the Church,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Eric W. Gritsch, vol. 41 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966), 103f., ‘Von der Menscheit Christi und seinem Ampt’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. Karl Drescher and Oskar Brenner, vol. 45 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1911), 299ff.; ‘Die Disputation de Divinitate et Humanitate Christi’, in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. G. Bebermeyer, vol. 39 (2) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1932), 93 thesis 4, 101f.; ‘Die Promotionsdisputation von Georg Major und Johannes Faber,’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. G. Bebermeyer, vol. 39 (2) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1932), 320ff.; ‘The Disputation Concerning the Passage: “the Word was made Flesh,”’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Martin E. Lehmann, vol. 38 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 254; ‘Against Latomus’ 257; ‘Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper’, in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 37 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1961), 209ff. See further Jörg Baur, ‘Ubiquität’, in Creator est Creatura: Luther’s Christologie als Lehre von Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 205f., 225. 109. On the relation between scholastic versions of this doctrine and Luther’s critical appropriation of it, see for instance Marc Lienhard, Luther, Witness to Jesus Christ: Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology, trans. Edwin H. Robertson (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1982), 335ff.; and Benjamin Gleede, ‘Vermischt, ausgetauscht und kreuzweis zugesprochen: Zur wechselvollen Geschichte der Idiome Christi in der Alten Kirche,’ in Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 93f. 110. According to Werner Elert, ‘The attack on the platonic concept of God, which from the beginning was contained in the theopaschitic formula, was brought to an end by Luther.’ Elert, ‘Die Theopaschitische Formel,’ 204. Author’s translation.

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humanity in Christ without reserve (neque logos extra carnem, neque carno extra logon), and of a communication of attributes between the two natures of Christ: ‘Two natures dwell in the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet he is but one person. These two natures retain their properties, and each also communicates its properties to the other.’111 If this is the case then ‘He who kills Christ has killed God’s son, indeed, God and the Lord of Glory himself.’112 While the Father and the Spirit did not themselves die, but at best suffered through the Son, the latter must be said himself to die because of his identification with the human being Jesus of Nazareth.113 Death cannot be directly ascribed to his divine nature per se, but can be so indirectly, that is, through its unity with human nature in the concrete person of Christ. If death cannot be ascribed to the Son of God, then the unity of Christ’s person is disrupted and the Son of God remains a phantom. If the Son of God assumed a truly human nature in the concrete person of Christ, then the Son of God died when the human being Jesus of Nazareth died. Jesus’s salvific gift was thus not a sacrificial gift offered pars-pro-toto, but consisted of his whole being.114 According to Luther, the incarnation redefines what God is capable of. In Christ, we come to see that human death is not incompatible with being divine.115

111. Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1–4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, trans. Martin H. Bertram, Luther’s Works vol. 22 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1957), 491f. Italics are mine. See also ‘De Divinitate,’ 102. In the patristic literature, a similar claim was defended by Apollinarius, while Gregory of Nazianzus also speaks of the mutual interpenetration (perichoresis) of the natures of Christ (Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Select Letters,’ 439ff ). For an elaborate account of this ambiguity in Luther’s Christology, see Dennis Ngien, ‘Chalcedonian Christology and Beyond: Luther’s Understanding of the Communicatio Idiomatum,’ Heythrop Journal 45, no. 1 (2004). Against the school of Ockam which claimed that the humanity of Christ was an accident of his divine substance, Luther insisted on the one essence of the two natures in one person. See also Reinhard Schwarz, ‘Gott ist Mensch: Zur Lehre von der Person Christi bei den Ockhamisten und bei Luther,’ Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 63 (1966): 301f., Wenz, Geschichte 1, 65, and Wolfgang Simon, Die Messopfertheologie Martin Luthers: Voraussetzungen, Genese, Gestalt und Rezeption (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 277f. Luther’s insistence that the divine logos became flesh without reserve also distinguishes his position from that of Calvin which leans more in the direction of the Antiochene way of understanding the incarnation. 112. Luther, ‘Confession’, 62. Luther also, in an earlier statement, spoke of Jesus dying as an ‘eternal divine person’. ‘A Treatise’, 85. See also ‘On the Councils,’ 103f., and ‘De Divinitate,’ 93, thesis 4. 113. ‘De Divinitate,’ 110. On this, see also Gerhard Ebeling, Dogmatik des Christlichen Glaubens, vol. 2 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1979), 204, and Lienhard, Luther, 327. 114. On this aspect of Luther’s construal, see also Eberhard Jüngel, Das Evangelium von der Rechtfertigung des Gottlosen als Zentrum des christlichen Glaubens: Eine theologische Studie in ökumenischer Absicht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 142. 115. See further Baur, ‘Ubiquität,’ 219.

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Consequently, Luther insisted that the sacrifice of Christ was made not only to God but also by God. In fact, the gist of Luther’s critique against the sacrifices of the Mass was that no human sacrifice can provide expiation for sin. God did not sacrifice his humanity to his divinity as in Anselm. For Luther, God alone was provider, subject, object and receiver of the sacrifice of Christ. At this point the complexity of Luther’s construal of the sacrifice of Christ reached its peak. In his Longer Commentary on Galatians, he writes: Thus, the curse, which is the wrath of God against the whole world, was in conflict with the blessing – that is to say, with God’s eternal grace and mercy in Christ. The curse conflicts with the blessing, and would condemn it and altogether annihilate it, but it cannot. For the blessing is divine and eternal, therefor the curse must yield, then God Himself would have been overcome. But that is impossible. Christ, who is God’s power, righteousness, blessing, grace, and life, overcomes and carries away these monsters, sin, death, and the curse.116

Here the sacrifice of Jesus is not understood as the result of strife between human beings and God, but because of tension between God’s love and God’s wrath unfolding in and through the Triune life of God. To understand how Luther construed this relation, it is important first to note its hermeneutic and narrative dynamic. He described the divine wrath experienced by Jesus on the cross as ‘strange’, its meaning impossible to understand until the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit.117 As the drama of the NT narrative culminates, the seemingly angry God revealed on the cross turns out to be a loving God mercifully bestowing God’s gifts of salvation on humanity: ‘In Christ we come to see that God is not a wrathful taskmaster and judge but a gracious and kind Father … apart from which there is no God’.118 The italicized phrase tells us that tension is epistemic, rather than ontic.119 Even so, because he did not recognize the freedom of the human will in matters concerning salvation, Luther was compelled to locate the reason for the eternal destruction of non-believers in the hidden dimension of Godself in which God’s anger is indistinguishable from God’s goodness. He writes, ‘But God hidden in his majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life, death, and all in all.’120 116. Luther, Lectures on Galatians: 1-4, 281f. 117. Luther, Lectures on Romans, 365f., 382f., and Psalms 1, 10, 405. See also Wenz, Geschichte 1, 64. 118. Luther, Lectures on Galatians: 1–4, 396. See also ibid., 431. Italics are mine. 119. A similar interpretation of Luther’s distinction between deus revelatus and deus absconditus can be found in Ingolf U. Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften: Christlicher Glaube und menschliche Passionen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 82ff. 120. Martin Luther, ‘The Bondage of the Will,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Philip S. Watson, vol. 33 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1972), 140. See also ibid., 36ff., 62f., 138ff., 184ff., 290ff. For a summary of Luther’s position on this matter, see Raymund Schwager, Der wunderbare Tausch: Zur Geschichte und Deutung der ErlöSungslehre (München: Kösel, 1986), 214ff.

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Whereas Anselm construed God’s justice as transparent, Luther accentuated God’s freedom in relation to human conceptions of justice.121 In his defence of the Augsburg confession, Melanchthon followed Aquinas and Luther and termed Christ a ‘propitiatory sacrifice’ and understood this as ‘a work of satisfaction for guilt and punishment that reconciles God, [i.e.,] conciliates the wrath of God ’.122 As in Aquinas we see that the distinction between satisfaction and punishment, so important to Anselm, has become less clear. Satisfaction is no longer presented as an alternative to punishment – it is the punishment itself. Justice demands the punishment of sin, and a just God cannot be but angry with the sinner. When Christ is sacrificed, God’s just wrath is changed into love. While Anselm explicitly taught that humanity was reconciled to God through the death of Jesus, Melanchthon spoke of God, the Father, being reconciled to us. Calvin followed Melanchthon’s line of thought writing that Christ was a sacrifice of expiation ‘intended to appease God’s wrath, to satisfy his judgment, and so to wash sins and cleanse them that the sinner, purged of their filth and restored to the purity of righteousness, may return into favor with God’.123 While God in God’s justice hates those who have broken divine law, in God’s love God saves the elect among them from destruction. That Christ sacrificed himself meant that he suffered the just vengeance of God in our place. What made Jesus’s death unique was not the simple fact of ordinary death, but that he suffered a supernatural agony caused by ‘God’s curse and wrath’.124 Only thus was the justice of God served. As to the notion of the Christian meal as sacrifice, both Luther and Calvin departed from those voices, from Cyprian to Aquinas, who described it as a re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ and thus assigned to it an expiatory effect. When remembering the sacrifice of Christ, one does not sacrifice Christ anew.125

121. On Scotus’s position, see Thomas Williams, ‘A Most Methodical Lover? On Scotus’s Arbitrary Creator,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 38, no. 2 (2000). 122. Philip Melanchton, ‘Apology for the Augsburg Confession,’ in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 261. See also ibid., 38; The Chief Theological Topics: Loci Praecipui Theologici 1559, trans. Jakob A. O. Preus (Saint Louis: Concordia, 2011), 143, 150, 153f., 164; Luther, Lectures on Romans, 25, 32, and §37 of the Heidelberg Catechism in Christian Catechetical Texts, vol. 1 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2011), 401. 123. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford L. Battles, vol. 2 (London: SCM Press, 1961), 1441f. On this and the following, see also ibid., vol. 1, 466, 501ff. On Calvin’s relation to Anselm, see Robert B. Strimple, ‘St. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo and John Calvin’s Doctrine of the Atonement,’ in Anselm: Aosta, Bec and Canterbury, ed. David E. Lusbombe and Craig R. Evans (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). 124. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford L. Battlers, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1961), 519. 125. Martin Luther, ‘Lectures on Hebrews’, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen, vol. 29 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1968), 219f., ‘A Treatise,’ 99,

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As for Luther, it should be noted that what prompted his reactions in the first place was not specific theological doctrines, but what he believed to be practical abuses.126 The more specific theological polemic arose, and was reinforced, when he encountered the theological reaction of the Council of Trent which he claimed twisted traditional views into conformity with these practices. Here Aquinas’s focus on re-enactment and commemoration is sharpened: In this divine sacrifice which is performed in the mass, the very same Christ is contained and offered in bloodless manner who made a bloody sacrifice of himself once for all on the cross. Hence the holy council teaches that this is a truly propitiatory sacrifice, and brings it about that if we approach God with sincere hearts and upright faith, and with awe and reverence, we receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. For the Lord is appeased by this offering, he gives the gracious gift of repentance, he absolves even enormous offences and sins.127

Luther reacted quite vigorously, insisting that while Christ, in the unity of his two natures, is the subject of the sacrifice on the cross, human beings are the subjects of the Christian meal. To Luther this made all the difference in the world. While the former was an attempt by God to save human beings, the latter would, if construed as atoning in nature, constitute an attempt by human beings to save themselves. When employing semantics of expiatory sacrifice to spell out how God’s saving presence is actualized in the meal, Luther was afraid that we would confuse these two dimensions. Still, this did not prevent Luther from employing a vocabulary of sacrifice to determine the meaning of other aspects of the meal. When the sacrifice of Christ is made present in the meal, it evokes a moral and spiritual response in the believer that could be called a sacrifice of thanksgiving or praise where ‘a person acknowledges his own total abyss and ascribes and confesses as belonging to the goodness of God everything that he is, has, and can do’.128 This sacrifice

‘The Babylonian Captivity of the Church’, in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 36 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1959), 50ff. For similar remarks by Calvin on this issue, see Calvin, Institutes 2, 1438ff. On this and the following, see also Simon, Die Messopfertheologie, 165ff., 215f. 126. Although it must be said that the revolutionary biblical hermeneutics that had already developed in Luther’s thought were the basis from which he dismantled the theological doctrines which had allowed these practical abuses to develop. See Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13, 52. 127. ‘Council of Trent: 1545-1563’ in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), 733. Robert Daly notes, however, that pre-tridentine theology should at least be held accountable for the development of some of the practical abuses. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 146f. 128. Luther, Psalms 1, 234, and ‘A Treatise,’ 98ff. See also Calvin, Institutes 2, 1443ff.

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is a recognition of human incapacity to give God anything of worth except the very recognition of this incapacity itself, and simultaneously a recognition of God’s capacity to lovingly accept human beings despite this.129 In other words, an expression of faith. The place of sacrifice is in the believer. Sacrifice is internalized. While this inner response constitutes the primary aim of God’s saving act made visible in the celebration of the Christian meal, Luther also attends to the outer moral and socio-historical aspects of the Christian meal resulting from it by drawing on a vocabulary of sacrifice.130 When the Christian fellowship collects and distributes resources to people in need,131 it carries out a sacrificial act with a twofold receiver: human beings receive it as benefactors and God receives it by being recognized as its ultimate provider. Within the context of the Christian meal, Luther radicalized the concept of sacrifice in a way common to both the soteriological and the socio-historical dimension of sacrifice. In both cases, the human subject is also the sacrificed object: the self that establishes itself in and through itself is its sacrifice. Only by losing this self, recognizing that its source of selfhood is in the righteousness of Christ (extra se), will it truly find itself. The sacrifice of Christ is an expression of love because it creates human subjectivity anew.132 The doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass articulated as a response to the reformers is the single most important reason why, in Roman Catholic theology even up until today, sacrifice has replaced satisfaction as the central term spelling out the meaning of the Christ-event, and at the same time the reason why many Protestant theologians have employed other terms to describe the content of the Christian meal.133 Despite their different vocabularies of these theologies of sacrificial atonement, important similarities between the view of the earliest Christian writers, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas and the reformers are to be noted.134 First, God is the provider

129. Luther sharply distinguishes between the created human capacity for good coram mundo, coram hominibus, and coram meipso, and the incapacity to merit salvation coram deo. Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian,’ 344ff. 130. Luther, Lectures on Romans, 25, 437ff. See further Simon, Die Messopfertheologie, 287ff. 131. Luther, ‘A Treatise,’ 96ff. 132. Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation,’ in Luther’s Works, trans. Harold J. Grimm, vol. 31 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971), 57. 133. For an overview of the various post-reformation Catholic voices, see Daily, Sacrifice Unveiled, 150ff. As Philip McCosker notes, developments in the Catholic theologies of sacrifice during the last century have paved the way for rapprochements between Catholics and Protestants on this topic. Philip McCosker, ‘Sacrifice in Recent Roman Catholic Thought: From Paradox to Polarity and Back Again?’ in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, ed. Johannes Zachhuber and Julia Meszaros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135f. See also Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 20f., 189ff. 134. See Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 173, 176f.

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of the sacrifice of Christ, and the one who secures victory over destructive forces (be they devil or death, disloyalty, egoism, mistrust or injustice). Second, God’s action in Christ is a creative act: it aims to restore the beauty of God’s creation. Third, common to all is also the insistence that the saving power of this sacrifice is actualized from within the depths of finitude. Despite significant differences in the details of their Christological conceptions, the notion of incarnation is integral to all as the exclusive saving initiative of God. Fourth, except for Anselm, everyone places acts of self-sacrifice at the heart of the Christian life providing the ground for the wide-spread passion-mysticism of the Middle Ages.135 Fifth, Luther followed Augustine and Anselm in identifying God as the receiver of the sacrifice of Christ while also agreeing with Origen and Aquinas that the object of his sacrifice is twofold: when offering himself up to God for human beings, Christ presents (the elect among) them as a sacrifice to God.136 The crucial disagreements between the Christian writers of the Middle Ages concern, first, the notion of God implied by the description of Christ as a sacrifice. While all agreed on the fact that in this event three aspects of God are made manifest (that is to say his love, his justice and his wrath), two disparate strategies were taken in order to coordinate these aspects. On the one hand, we have those continuing the Neoplatonist line of thought insisting on God’s unchangeability (incl. impassibility) and the transparency of God’s justice and love (Anselm, Abelard and Aquinas). On the other, we come upon those (the reformers, scotists) who insisted on God’s ability to change and suffer, emphasizing God’s freedom and the inscrutability of God’s nature. Second, these writers also disagreed on how to understand the relation between the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Christians. This controversy

135. See for example Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952), 83ff. According to Hans urs von Balthasar, it was often practised with particular intensity among women such as Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude of Helfta, Angela di Foligno and Margaret Ebner; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), 39, 47. Even though Anselm encouraged Christian believers to endure martyrdom for the sake of their faith, Rita N. Brock is mistaken when claiming that this construal motivated Anselm to be a firm supporter of crusades (Rita Nakashima Brock, ‘The Cross of Resurrection and Communal Redemption,’ in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 246. and Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, 268f., see also Aulén, Christus Victor, 97). As Anselm-scholar Richard W. Southern has shown, Anselm opposed the crusades initiated by the Pope (Southern, Saint Anselm, 169). Supporting Southern, Joerg Rieger claims that Anselm ‘achieves by intellectual means what the Crusaders achieve only through fire and sword’. Rieger, Christ and Empire, 133. 136. Martin Luther, First Lectures on the Psalms II: Psalms 76–126, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman, vol. 11, Luther’s Works vol. 11 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1976), 141.

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constituted the core of the reformation. While several of the early Church theologians along with Aquinas and Abelard spoke of the moral transformation of human beings as necessary for them to achieve (or merit) salvation, Luther insisted that Christian believers do not live by a righteousness gifted by God for human possession (in se), but by the righteousness of Christ (extra se). In Luther, sin and salvation are not distinct attributes potentially intrinsic to a human person making it partly sinner and partly just, but two relational modes that simultaneously characterize human personhood as a whole from two different perspectives.137 The Christian believer is completely a sinner when considering his or her own merit before God, and completely just when considering him or herself in Christ in God. Furthermore, the externality of the source of salvation is not a passing moment in a process,138 but always outside of human beings. For Luther, this recognition was necessary if human beings are to be set free from their concern with themselves and for themselves, making divine and human others their exclusive attention. Human beings who are only occupied with administering the gift of grace in a way that merits their own salvation will relapse into self-absorption, both in relation to God and their neighbour. Thus, the very state from which God wanted to save humanity in the first place is perpetuated. According to Luther, it is only the human being who knows that it is unconditionally accepted by God (as sinner) that is truly set free to love sacrificially, that is, without any self-interest.139 In relation to the particular topic of this book, these two crucial disagreements come together in the following way: whereas in the Catholic position God’s sacrificial love consists in presenting this love as a gift for human beings to achieve unity with God through moral transformation, in Protestant positions God is sacrificial love because God allows the sinner as such to be united with God, because only thus can it be recreated.140 Whereas in the latter instance God’s fellowship with humanity is already complete, in the former it will only be upon the moral completion of humanity. From this point, the following question came to intensely occupy Christian theology:141 How are we to understand the passivity of human beings in the process of salvation, and the importance of active participation in it? In other words, how are we to understand the precise relation between actualization of God’s sacrificial

137. On this fundamental difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic position, see Hampson, Christian Contradictions, 25ff., 98ff. 138. Compare Aquinas who said that ‘the justification of the ungodly is a certain movement whereby the human mind is moved by God from the state of sin to the state of justice’. Aquinas, ST 2, 1148. 139. Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian,’ 367. Compare this to Aquinas who says that God does not love the human being as sinner, but because of the goodness inherent in human nature as created (ST 1, 115. See further Hampson, Christian Contradictions, 91). 140. Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation,’ 57f. 141. Wenz, Geschichte 1, 151ff.

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love in Christ and the actualization of sacrificial love in the human subject in its relationship with God as well as with fellow human beings?

2.3 Theologies of Sacrifice in the Modern Era With the late-sixteenth-century Socinian theologies of sacrifice, the penalsubstitutionary construal of the death of Christ came under heavy critique, and Abelard’s emphasis on its moral significance received a sharper focus. When Fausto Socinus described Jesus as an ‘expiatory sacrifice’, he did not mean to affirm that Jesus offered a sacrifice of propitiation or satisfaction to God.142 Because God is absolutely free, God did not need the death of Jesus. According to Socinus, forgiveness is unconditional by definition, so where there is forgiveness there is no need of satisfaction, the latter being by definition conditional. Through his death, Jesus offered humanity an assurance that the promises of unconditional forgiveness he communicated were true.143 God gave Jesus to humanity because God wanted to present to human beings a moral example of how to achieve salvation: ‘Christ Jesus showed us … the way whereby we might be turned to God, and thus be reconciled to him; and strongly impelled us to this by his death also, wherein appeared the great love of God towards us.’144 While a penalty is caused by wrath, affliction is caused by love.145 It is only the steadfast pursuit of love in and through afflictions that can bring about eternal life. By refusing to succumb to evil even when facing death, Jesus left for human beings an inspirational sacrifice the fulfilment of which eternal life is the reward. The sacrifice of Jesus was seen as expiatory exclusively because of its transformative moral power.146 However, it should be noted that, according to the Socinians, the sacrifice of Jesus was not completed on the cross.147 His sacrifice on the cross was perfect because only through the cross did he achieve moral perfection. Only beyond death could he present a perfect sacrifice. This is the case also for the believer: eternal life is achieved through the moral perfection that is reached through a

142. On this and the following, see Faustus Socinus, The Racovian Catechism, trans. Thomas Rees (London: Longman, 1818), 297f., 305ff., A Brief Introduction in Christian Religion, trans. William Fontana Sr. (CreateSpace: 2013), 63ff., and further Wenz, Geschichte 1, 100ff. 143. Socinus, The Racovian Catechism, 297, 301. Although they saw in Jesus a divinely inspired human being, the Socinians rejected the claim that he had a divine nature (ibid., 55ff., and A Brief Introduction, 27f., 31ff.). His resurrection was not an affirmation of his divinity, but of his moral perfection. 144. Socinus, The Racovian Catechism, 318, and A Brief Introduction, 30f. 145. On the development of this theme in Socinian theology of Johann Crell, see Wenz, Geschichte 1, 145. 146. Socinus, The Racovian Catechism, 351ff. 147. Ibid., 319, and A Brief Introduction, 70f.

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death suffered because of a refusal to succumb to evil.148 Christ did not fulfil the law and die so that human beings do not have to. Humanity must walk the same sacrificial path as Christ did in order to reach the moral perfection that leads to, and characterizes, eternal life.149 While this certainly marked a distinct shift in focus compared to the reformers, it did not constitute a radical break. Insofar as faith for the reformers meant that the believers are taking part in everything that Christ is and has, the justice to which they relate also has a moral dimension.150 What remained distinct was the claim that the justice of the individual human being was not completed in the sacrifice of Christ but on the condition that the believer lives as Christ did. The Christological problem that arose out of these tensions was the following: how are we to relate to the passive aspect of Jesus’s life, that is, his status as a victima, to its active dimensions, that is, his sacrificium? The internal relation between these questions becomes apparent when we look at Friedrich Schleiermacher’s, Albrecht Ritschl’s and Karl Barth’s theologies of sacrifice. Like the Socinians, Schleiermacher rejected both the idea that Jesus vicariously suffered the penalty of sin (the wrath of God) on the cross along with the idea that Jesus actively sacrificed himself.151 When combined, these two aspects would mean that Jesus committed self-torture, which Schleiermacher found absurd. If Christ was to secure the preservation of life, he must have embodied an unreserved will to live. If not, he could not serve as a religious ideal capable of securing prosperous human life on earth. Schleiermacher says, ‘The victim [Opfer] has no independent activity; it is completely passive in everything which happens to it. So too Christ was perfectly passive in respect to those details of his suffering as to which he had no choice, and which consequently are not to be regarded as being for Him significant elements of experience.’152 Is Schleiermacher saying that Jesus was an absolute victim? No, he is simply claiming that what made the life of Jesus a sacrifice was not an action integral to his mission, but a re-action, that is, something he underwent, without actively seeking it, in his attempt to restore a perfect fellowship of life between God and humanity.153 Schleiermacher insisted that the sacrifice of Jesus was the complete expression of his steadfast self-denying love of God and compassion with humanity. Does this mean that

148. See Wenz, Geschichte 1, 145. 149. Socinus, A Brief Introduction, 66ff. 150. See Wenz, Geschichte 1, 97. 151. On this and the following, see Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and James S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999), 435f., 457ff. See further Wenz, Geschichte 1, 368ff. 152. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 459. 153. Ibid., 436, 453. In §104.2 Schleiermacher is (re-)interpreting the distinction, introduced during the period of Protestant orthodoxy, between active and passive obedience. For a good background survey of this distinction, see Wenz, Geschichte 1, 80ff.

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Schleiermacher understood the death of Jesus as accidental?154 No, because only a death suffered out of self-denying love reveals ‘the full dominion of the spirit over the flesh’ that characterizes the self-consciousness completely determined by its consciousness of God.155 Insofar as Schleiermacher derived the divinity of Jesus from his consciousness of his complete dependence on God, self-denying death was intrinsic to the revelation of his divinity.156 The resurrection did not add anything to this identification.157 Behind this understanding of the death of Jesus lay a critique of the traditional understanding of the relation of Jesus’s divinity and his humanity (as two natures in one person) that had a heavy impact on how many later theologians came to understand Christ as sacrificial subject.158 If a nature is, by definition, that which is complete in itself, then two natures cannot constitute an individual person. ‘For in utter contradiction to the use elsewhere, according to which the same nature belongs to many individuals or persons, here one person is to share in two quite different natures.’159 In doing so, the living unity constitutive of an individual person is broken. If we, on the other hand, should seek to preserve the personal unity of Jesus, we would risk mixing the two natures establishing a third, or giving precedence to one of the natures with the result that Jesus was not either truly human or truly divine. Schleiermacher’s way out of this problem was to locate the divinity of the human being Jesus in his perfect God-consciousness. Highly influential German theologian of the reformed tradition, Albrecht Ritschl, followed Schleiermacher’s lead in his critique of the idea of penal satisfaction, even to the point of rejecting the juridical paradigm of the reformers altogether.160 The notion of a judge who punishes a righteous one in place of the unrighteous is an incoherent

154. This claim is made by George Hunsinger. George Hunsinger, ‘Salvator Mundi: Three Types of Christology,’ in Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 45. 155. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 463. See also ibid., 377ff., 457. 156. What should of course be noted is that, for Schleiermacher, this relation is a relation internal to the self. God does not exist as a subject outside of our self-consciousness, but is rather the dimension of our self-consciousness upon which our true experience of ourselves depends. Thus, Jesus does not submit to an external authority, but to his true self. 157. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 417ff. 158. Ibid., 391ff. See further Pannenberg, Jesus, 285f. 159. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 393. A similar claim was already made by Anglican theologian Richard Hooker in the context of the reformation controversy concerning the Lutheran notion of ubiquity being communicated to the human nature of Christ. Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (London: Belknap Press, 1977), 227f. 160. Albrecht Ritschl, ‘Studien über die Begriffe von der Genugthuung und dem Verdienste Christi,’ Jahrbücher für Deutsche Theologie (1860): 634f., and The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and Alexander Beith Macaulay, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902), 253f., 472ff.

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juridical construct because an act of punishment is, by definition, exclusively directed towards a guilty party. Causing someone to suffer is to be termed punishment only if the sufferer is guilty, something Jesus was not. Such a judge cannot be a God of love. Unlike the reformers, Ritschl clearly distinguished the juridical vocabulary from the biblical semantics of sacrifice, in which he claimed there were important resources for articulating the significance of the life and death of Jesus. In accordance with Schleiermacher, Ritschl rejected that the suffering and death of Jesus was a fate passively undergone. Jesus was not an absolute victim, but rather a sacrifice in that he (actively) endured suffering and accepted death because of his refusal to give up his calling to actualize the Kingdom of God.161 The divinity of Christ is derived from him having the same moral aim as God, namely the unification of humanity in love. On this point, he echoed the early Christian writers’ insistence that the death of Jesus did not bring about something qualitatively new, but was the consequence of a life lived entirely in the consciousness of being united with God in love. Ritschl insisted that the purpose of the life and death of Jesus was to transmit this sacrificial consciousness to human beings. God is not the receiver of this sacrifice of Christ, humanity is. God only benefits from it insofar as it establishes a community of human beings who shares Christ’s consciousness of enjoying fellowship with God. On US soil, the widely influential writings of Horace Bushnell followed a line similar to that of the Socinians, Schleiermacher and Ritschl, writing that the suffering and death of Jesus was a necessary consequence of a life lived in perfect love: ‘The beauty and power of His sacrifice is, that He suffers morally and because of His simple excellence, and not to fill a contrived place in a scheme of legal justification. He scarcely minds how much He suffers, or how, if only He can do love’s work.’162 Yet a God of sacrificial love does not simply overlook the sins of human beings. Jesus satisfied God’s justice by providing a morality with the capacity to conquer the injustice inherent in human hearts:

See further Günther Wenz, Geschichte der Versöhnungslehre in der evangelischen Theologie der Neuzeit, vol. 2 (München: Kaiser, 1986), 95f. 161. Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung: Der biblische Stoff der Lehre, vol. 2 (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1889), 41ff., 161ff., and Justification, 429f., 442ff., 459f., 477ff. On this and the following, see also Wenz, Geschichte 2, 73ff. 162. Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice: Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation (New York: Scribner, 1866), 69. In support of his view, he invokes Anselm! Ibid., 22. See also ‘The Power of God in Self-Sacrifice’, in Sermons for the New Life, ed. Horace Bushnell (New York: Scribner, 1858). For a brief overview of Ritschl’s relation to Bushnell, see Johannes Zachhuber, ‘Modern Discourse on Sacrifice and its Theological Background,’ in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, ed. Johannes Zachhuber and Julia Meszaros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20ff. In the UK a similar, and very influential, view was articulated by J. McLeod Campbell and later by Hastings Rashdall. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life, 6th edn (London: Macmillan, 1886), and Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement.

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God as Sacrificial Love It can regenerate your habits, settle your disorders, glorify your baseness, and assimilate you perfectly to God. This it will do for you. Go to the Cross and meet there God in sacrifice. … Do this and you shall feel sin die within you, and a glorious quickening, Christ the power of God, Christ in you the hope of glory, shall be consciously risen upon you, as the morn of your new creation.163

Although these exclusively moralizing interpretations of the sacrifice of Jesus dominated the modern period, it had its distinguished opponents. Whereas Schleiermacher, and later Ritschl, derived the sacrificial character of the Christevent from Jesus’s dedication to his moral calling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated that in the death of Jesus natural will is surrendered. All distinctiveness, all traits of personality, all interests and purposes towards which the natural will might direct itself, are as nothing. This is a revolutionary element to the extent that it gives the world another shape. All things great and of worldly value are as nothing; all these things are buried in the grave of spirit.164

Hegel’s alternative was to construe the sacrificial character of the Christ-event as the sublation of the otherness of death. While the idea of a conquest of death and the establishment of eternal life, so central to the earliest Christian writers, had almost completely disappeared in Schleiermacher and Ritschl, Hegel resuscitated this notion as a point of departure for understanding the significance of Christ. Whereas Ritschl was convinced that the significance of the sacrifice of Jesus could not be articulated by answering the speculative metaphysical questions concerning the nature of the God-human and his relation to the immanent Trinity,165 Hegel thought that the sublation of death taking place in and through Christ could not be fully understood without considering these metaphysical questions. Recall Gregory of Nazianzus’s and Luther’s insistence (contrary to Origen) that the death of Christ was God’s own death.166 Hegel endorsed Luther’s claim

163. Bushnell, ‘The Power of God,’ 362f. 164. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, et al., vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 128f (henceforth LPR 3). See further Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 295, 352ff. 165. Ritschl, Justification, 398f. 166. For a good overview of Luther’s relation to the Christian tradition on this point, see Oswald Bayer, ‘Das Wort ward Fleisch: Luther’s Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation,’ in Creator est Creatura: Luther’s Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), and Baur, ‘Ubiquität’, and on Luther’s relationship to Hegel on the topic of the death of God, see Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 209ff.

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that Christ died as an eternal, divine person to the extent that he agreed with Luther that the relation between the divine and human in Jesus should not (only) be understood in abstract terms, that is, as self-enclosed substances unaffected by each other, but as concrete mediation.167 Luther spoke emphatically of a communication of attributes between the two natures, and Hegel argued that the person of Christ should be understood as constituted by an internal mediation of ‘spiritual essentiality’ (geistige Wesenheit, here referring to dialectical moments of self-consciousness uniquely actualized in Christ).168 And for both Hegel and Luther the self-explication of the humanity and divinity of Christ was identical to the self-consciousness of his person. For Hegel this meant, however, that the incarnation and death of Christ were the self-actualization (Verwirklichung) of God. Not only did humanity need God to save it from death as the penalty of sin (as in Luther), but also God needed to die as a human being in order to become truly Godself.169 Hegel’s theology of death has two moments. First, Christ was the religious representation of a God who actualized Godself by negating Godself (as abstraction) in becoming a concrete particular

167. Luther says, ‘We must move from the simple and non-relational category of substance into the category of the relationship.’ Martin Luther, ‘In XV Psalmos Graduum,’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. G. Bebermeyer, vol. 40 (3) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachvolger, 1930), 334. Author’s translation. See also ‘Enarratio Psalmi LI 1532’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. Karl Drescher, vol. 40 (2) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1914), 354. See further Oswald Bayer, ‘Philosophische Denkformen der Theologie Luthers als Gegenstand der Forschung: Eine Skizze,’ in Lutherforshung Im 20. Jahrhundert: Rückblick – Bilanz – Ausblick, ed. Rainer Vinke (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004), 143ff., and ‘Idiomenkommunikation,’ 31f. 168. Hegel, LPR 3, 211f., 214. On this, see also Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold V. Miller and J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 459ff. and further Walter Jaeschke, Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 345; Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 153ff.; and Thomas A. Lewis, Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218. Moreover, Hegel’s Christological interpretation of death did not announce ‘the end of substance metaphysics’ as Robert R. Williams claims (Williams, Death of God, 373). Hegel based his Christological conception upon an attempt to sublate substance-ontology into a relational ontology of substantial subjectivity. As Martin Wendte notes, the end point for Hegel is the return of the divine subject as a fully explicated substance in and for itself (Martin Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel: Eine logische und theologische Untersuchung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 68ff.). According to Hegel, God as Spirit is ‘infinite, substantial subjectivity’. Hegel, LPR 3, 169. Italics in the original. Hegel’s ontology is in both discontinuity and continuity with the classical substance-ontology. 169. Hegel, Phenomenology, 19, and LPR 3, 124ff. 215, 219ff. On this significant difference between Hegel and Luther, see Mark C. Mattes, ‘Hegel’s Lutheran Claims,’ Lutheran Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2000): 262, 265, 270.

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flesh.170 The incarnation signalled the ‘death’ of the self-enclosed abstract God (ἀσάρκος) who cannot die. The claim that Jesus was true God presupposes that λόγος ἀσάρκος is ‘dead’. Hegel insisted, ‘It is not this human being who dies, but the divine; and in so doing becomes human.’171 Thus, Hegel took up Luther’s most radical formulations regarding the death of God insofar as both insisted that if the Son of God did not die in Christ then the incarnation becomes an impossibility. Christ was not an abstract God and a concrete human being – he was God as the concrete person Jesus of Nazareth.172 Thus, when we move on to the second moment of the death of God, namely Christ’s death on the cross, Hegel affirmed that when Christ died as a human being he died as God. In Jesus ‘God sacrifices himself, gives himself up to annihilation. God himself is dead.’173 The death of the individual saviour gave rise to the collective self-consciousness of the Church as a reconciled community of love. Together the incarnation of God and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross must be thought of as a ‘moment[s] in the nature of God himself ’ between abstract unmediated divine life and concrete divine life in its fulfilment as the life of the church.174 If the cross is not understood in this way, it would be impossible to state that God was truly incarnate as Jesus. God would be a vicious tyrant demanding the sacrifice of another, and such a God is in reality no God.175 In other words, if God was construed as self-enclosed opposition to finitude, God would not be truly infinite. God can only be so insofar as God reveals that mortal bodily existence takes place within God’s own life, that is, that finitude is a moment in Godself.

170. Hegel, Phenomenology, 476. Insofar as it is the realization of the eternal Son as Son, it is also the realization of the immanent Trinity: Jesus knows himself as the Son of the Father. It should also be noted that this realization is not taking place empirically, but in the self-consciousness of Christ (as confessed by the church). LPR 3, 361ff. See further Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 258f. 171. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6) with Commentary, trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 178, footnote 4. Translation altered. 172. Hegel explicitly states that God begets himself as the Son. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. Arnold V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 299. 173. Friedhelm Nicolin, ‘Unbekannte Aphorismen Hegels aus der Jenaer Periode.’ Hegel Studien 4 (1967): 268. Author’s translation. 174. Hegel, LPR 3, 328; Phenomenology, 475; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–1823, trans. Peter C. Hodgson and Robert F. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 489f. See further Christian Link, Hegels Wort ‘Gott Selbst ist Tod’ (Zürich: Theologisher Verlag, 1974), 79ff.; Wenz, Geschichte 1, 310ff.; Robert R. Williams, ‘Theology and Tragedy’ in New Perspectives on Hegel, ed. David Kolb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 48ff.; Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, 177ff.; Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 264ff.; and Williams, Death of God, 290ff., 369. 175. Hegel, LPR 3, 220.

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Hegel writes, ‘But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.’176 The sacrifice of Jesus is thus the recognition that only by dying can God live as truly infinite. Following this line of thought it becomes clear why Hegel thinks that the moral-juridical interpretation of the sacrifice of Christ fails. By speaking of satisfaction and/or punishment it construes the sacrificing subject and the sacrificing object as merely externally related. Only if the sacrifice (i.e. the sublation of death) takes place in God can God be united (or atoned) with every finite being forever. That God sublated death in and through Christ did not mean that he took death up in Godself in an unqualified manner. When Hegel explicates Luther’s description of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus as ‘the death of death’, he is not simply saying that death no longer is.177 Rather death has become something else in and through this event – it has been sublated. What does this mean? To be a sinner means to be a finite being that is enclosed within itself, refusing to recognize the other as its source. That God became a human being and died meant that he entered into this relationless state (of consciousness). His death was not merely natural death, but the death of a sinner.178 Yet in dying this death, God transformed the meaning of death from being a relationless state into an event taking place in God. After the death of Jesus, death does not remain the same. It has become a negation of the relationless life of human beings because finitude is truly determined as internally related to divine life. God’s subsequent loss of God’s abstract impassible and particular selves are the ways in which God fully actualizes Godself as truly infinite, that is, as the dimension of Being that embraces the sinner in his or her relationless state. Thus, in Hegel, death has two meanings. First, it refers to natural death. Second, it refers to non-being, that is, the death of the sinner. Christ’s death represents that of the second kind, but in doing so its meaning is transformed. Non-being is revealed as taking place in God. This is the sacrifice of Christ – death sublated. Jesus’s sacrificial death was the ultimate expression of love because ‘Love consists in giving up one’s personality, all that is one’s own, etc. It is a self-conscious activity, the supreme surrender of oneself in the other, even in this most extrinsic other being of death. … The death of Christ is the vision of this love itself.’179 But God does not entirely lose Godself in love. Rather through the resurrection, God becomes truly Godself: ‘The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.’180

176. 177. 178. 179. 180.

Phenomenology, 19. LPR 3, 131f. Ibid., 130f. Ibid., 125. See also ibid., 276. Ibid., 286. See also ibid., 219f., 311f., 315f., and ibid., 280f.

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While the relation between the passive and active aspects of the person and work of Christ was of central concern to Karl Barth, he shared Hegel’s rejection of an exclusively moralized understanding of the significance of Jesus, as well as his preference for orienting his construal around the notion of the incarnation. According to Barth, Jesus was revealed as true God because he accepted victimization for the sake of salvation. The suffering and death of the human being Jesus was an expression of his free obedience to God’s sovereign will to elect all human beings to salvation through judgement.181 Insofar as the way of salvation through judgment was the result of an eternal decision by God, on the cross ‘the good will of God [was] indistinguishably one with the evil will of men and the world of Satan’.182 Thus, Christ became the victim of both divine and human wrath. In saying this, Barth did not mean that the cross occasioned a change in the attitude of God. Rather the sacrifice of Jesus occasioned a change in human beings. In the death of Jesus, human beings come to recognize their rebellion against God, deserving of nothing but God’s wrath, and through this recognition turn to God as their source of salvation. Christ was the instrument of God’s chastisement of humanity, and it was an expression of love because it brings humanity back into fellowship with its life-giver. Although it is true that in Barth God is revealed as saviour through the suffering and death of Jesus in his human nature, he reworked the traditional understanding of Christ as sacrificial victim in a way similar to Hegel. According to Barth, when we ascribe death to Christ’s human nature, this does not imply that there was a parallel divine nature in Christ that was exempt from death. Rather it was the humanity of God that died on the cross (and the humanity of God that rose from the grave).183 Yet he shrunk back from drawing the conclusion that God died on the cross as if God ceased to be God in some sense, restricting himself (as most traditional theologians have done) to talking of God as suffering a human death.184 Barth concludes that in and through the person of Jesus ‘God gives himself, but

181. On this and the following, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation Part I, trans. G. W. Bromily, vol. 4 (1) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 129f., 164, 192, 211ff. (henceforth CD 4-1), and Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God Part I, trans. G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), 394ff (henceforth, CD 2-1). See further Schwager, Der wunderbare Tausch, 249ff., and Wenz, Geschichte 2, 224ff. It should be noted in this context that in Barth the Son’s obedience to the Father is a determination of the immanent Triune life. See Barth, CD 4-1, 201. 182. CD 4-1, 271. 183. Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1960), 46ff. This line of reasoning is also evident from Barth’s talk of Christ as one of God’s modes of being (Seinsweisen). Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God Part 1, ed. G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromily, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), 355 (henceforth CD 1). 184. CD 4-1, 130f., 561.

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He does not give Himself away.’185 Indeed, having that capacity is what makes God God. This conclusion also followed from his claim that God’s victory over death is settled in God in advance.186 Barth reinterpreted the traditional doctrine of predestination as a doctrine of election, and followed a strictly Christological approach seeing in Christ the eternal decision of God to elect all human beings to both judgment and salvation.187

185. Ibid., 185. See also Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 193ff. Likewise Augustine said that noting is subtracted from God in the incarnation. Rather, in becoming human something is added to God (Augustine, Sermons: 148-183 on the New Testament, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. 3 (New York: New City Press, 1992), 339). 186. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation Part III, trans. G. W. Bromily, vol. 4 (3) (Edinburg: T. & T. Clark, 1961), 173ff (henceforth CD 4-3). See further Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming, trans. Horton Harris (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 79f. Barth rejected the Lutheran notion of the hidden God (of wrath) akin to the dark side of the moon hidden from sight. Jesus is to be understood as the full self-revelation of God, beyond which there is no unrevealed dimension. This does not mean that Barth rejected any notion of divine hiddenness. When God reveals Godself, God also reveals the mystery of God’s person. Barth, CD 2-1, 147, 160. 187. CD 4-1, 37ff., 516, 563; CD 2-1, 94ff.; and Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation Part II, trans. G. W. Bromily, vol. 4 (2) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958), 32 (henceforth, CD 4-2). Thus, despite his critique of the nominalistic tendency in Luther’s emphasis on the absolute freedom of God, Barth himself was unable to rid himself of it entirely (on this, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1990), 53). Furthermore, because the cross event was entirely the (eternal) initiative of God and not caused by any refusal of God by humanity, Barth claimed that the wrath displayed on the cross must be an eternal attribute of God. See further Wenz, Geschichte 2, 234f.

Chapter 3 MODERN CRITIQUES, RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AND PREVAILING CHALLENGES

As has become apparent through my historical prelude, the use of semantics of sacrifice has been both widespread and yet subject to various forms of critiques and reinterpretations. After the period of the enlightenment, these critiques have intensified and further differentiated. Insofar as the sacrificial character of the Christ-event had been understood to have historical, Christological, soteriological, ecclesial as well as a moral and political aspects, these critiques have focused on several issues.1 Historical critiques of theological uses of notions of sacrifice argued that while sacrifices were part of the religious lifeworlds of the Hellenistic society in late antiquity (including both Jews and non-Jews), and thus natural interpretative tools for early Christian writers, in a culture deplored of practices where cultic notions of sacrifice are constitutive, such language has become theologically redundant. In 1787 Johann August Eberhard compared Christian theologies of sacrifice with food ‘which was directed to the weak, who had grown up in Jewish theology’.2 This evolutionary view of revelation was also championed by his contemporary Gottlob Lessing. While recognizing the validity of the NT vocabulary in its own time, human reason was only dependent upon it as an impulse to be transcended.3 Accordingly, interpretations of the death of Jesus by recourse to cultic notions of sacrifice would become redundant in the context of the largely a cultic and more rational culture.4

1. In what follows, I adhere to the analytic scheme found in Ingolf U. Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte: Zur Grammatik der Christologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994), 287ff. 2. Johan August Eberhard, Neue Apologie des Sokrates, oder Untersuchung der Lehre von der Seligkeit der Heiden (Frankfurt: Olms, 1787), 165. Author’s translation. See also Gotthilf Samuel Steinbart, System der reinen Philosophie oder Glückseligkeitslehre des Christenthums (Züllichau: Fromann, 1778), 288f. 3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Theological Writings: Selections in Translation with an Introductory Essay, trans. Henry Chadwick (London: A. & C. Black, 1956), 91. 4. Mark Heim has recently echoed this attitude when writing that ‘In actual belief, most people are no more likely to regard Christ as a sin-offering who removes our guilt than they

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Other critiques focused on what they saw as the logical contradiction of goal and mean in sacrificial religiosity. David Hume wrote, A sacrifice is conceived as a present; and any present is delivered to the deity by destroying it and rendering it useless to men; by burning what is solid, pouring out the liquid, and killing the animate. For want of a better way of doing him service, we do ourselves an injury; and fancy that we thereby express, at least, the heartiness of our good-will and adoration. Thus, our mercenary devotion deceives ourselves, and imagines it deceives the deity.5

To save creation by destroying something created is a deception that makes as little sense as forgiving sin by committing the most horrible of sins, namely the sacrifice of an innocent, or to demand the sacrifice of blood in order to abolish blood-sacrifice. They all leave us with a contradiction of goal and means. For Nietzsche, to accept such contradictions and interpret the death of Jesus as a sacrifice required by God would be to admit that the essence of Christian faith is ‘a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental pre-conditions of life’.6 If sacrificial actions are at the heart of true Christian faith and spirituality, paganism would be the heart of Christianity.7 Moral concerns were connected to these logical critiques, and found considerable resonance also among theologians. According to these critics, sacrificial practices misconstrue the relation between humanity and God, relying as they do on an understanding of it as something available to causal manipulation. If this is interpreted in juridical terms as a relationship of rights and duties, no inner change is demanded from the parties involved. Thus, semantics of sacrifice are hit by the old Hebrew prophetic critique against a merely external religiosity, that is, practices not accompanied by righteous living (e.g. Isa. 1.10ff.; 66.3f.). Voltaire echoed this prophetic voice when writing that ‘it was the repentance, and not the [expiatory sacrifice of a] goat, which purified the Jewish souls’.8 Critical voices of

are to consider sacrificing an ox on an altar in the neighborhood playground as a way to keep their children safe.’ S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 212. 5. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver and John Valdimir Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 61, footnote j. 6. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 136. See also ibid., 97. 7. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo and the Antichrist, trans. Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, 2004), 120, 142. See also On the Genealogy of Morals, 119ff., and Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Maudemarie Clark (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137. 8. Voltaire, The Portable Voltaire, trans. Ben Ray Redman (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 117.

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this mould emphasized that it was not the cultic framework that provided the continuity of the message of Jesus with the Hebrew Scriptures, but the prophetic critique of sacrifice with its announcement of the new justice (enemy-love) as the content of the life of the Christian church. An alternative interpretation of sacrificial praxis as an economic transaction was considered equally problematic from a moral point of view. In line with the Socinians, Kant emphasized that guilt is something internally connected to what is personal and thus cannot be transferred to someone else.9 That this connection is internal means that such a transference would imply the dissolution of the personhood (and thus the humanity) of the acting subject. To interpret the death of Jesus as vicarious sacrifice because of guilt is thus a moral impossibility. Several nineteenth-century theologians absorbed the Kantian critique and rearticulated the significance of the death of Jesus in terms of exemplary obedience.10 However, while many representatives of this critique derived the divinity of Jesus from his moral consistency and perfection, they did not always reject that his sacrifice was a result of divine punishment of sin. The latter was thought of as a deterrent example for humanity, an impulse for its moral improvement. Furthermore, interpreting the saving significance of the death of Jesus in terms of sacrifice has often been used to legitimate moral–political sacrifices.11 Socio-historical critiques of Christian theologies of sacrifice have argued that instead of abolishing any further demand for sacrifice, the death of Jesus merely replaced cultic sacrifices of the Hebrew religion with moral ones. While the ascetic renouncing of the world for some higher calling was among the practices indirectly criticized, it was primarily the ideal of political martyrdom that was addressed. If the death of Jesus is understood as a passive means required by someone else for the sake of actualizing some ulterior purpose, the absolute preparedness to sacrifice one’s life required by the totalitarian nation easily finds its religious legitimation.12 Alternatively, if understood as an expression of the

9. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 66, 107ff.; Socinus, A Brief Introduction, 65. See also Christiano Democrito, Der von den Nebeln des Reichs der Verwirrung gesäuberte helle Glantz des Evangelii Jesu Christi oder Schrift und wahrheitmässige Entwurff der Heylsordnung (Stockholm: 1727), 24; David Smith, The Atonement in the Light of History and the Modern Spirit (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), 108ff., and further Wenz, Geschichte 1, 124f., 227. 10. Geschichte 1, 248ff. 11. See for example Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1963), 71, and also Zachhuber, Modern Discourse, 24, 26. 12. Recently both John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas have given voice to this kind of critique. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3f., and Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions, trans. Max Pensky and Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 46.

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martyr’s own refusal to give up on one’s moral calling, they glorify self-denial, and so contradict Jesus’s command to love one’s neighbour as oneself. Yet, sociohistorical sacrifices were not restricted to the public arena. As early feminists emphasized, the domestic sphere had long suffered under the yoke of this ideal. According to suffragette pioneer Elisabeth Cady Stanton writing in 1895: ‘Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.’13 Theological critiques of theologies of sacrifice emphasized the problematic notion of God which it implies. They had different emphases. While some focused on the crude anthropomorphism inherent in thinking of God (the Father) as someone who would change his attitude towards someone when being offered gifts and pious deeds,14 others claimed that it is only a tyrannical and vengeful despot who would demand the sacrifice of his innocent Son in order to restore his lost honour, not a perfectly loving Father.15 In the former view, the Father becomes a small-minded sadistic materialist, and in the second a hard-hearted ‘moral governor’.16 Proponents of both view God making an all-out mockery of Jesus’s reluctance to repay evil with evil, and his insistence on loving one’s enemies.17 They also rely on an understanding of God which implies an immoral asymmetrical power-relation in the divine life in which the Father requires to be propitiated/satisfied by the Son who propitiates/satisfies. According to David Smith, writing in 1918, the logical conclusion to such forensic reasoning was Unitarianism.18

13. Elisabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (Boston: Northeastern University, 1993), 84. As Sheila Redmond has demonstrated, this ideal has also undergirded the promotion of women to the status of saint. She recounts the story of the eleven-year-old Maria Goretti who, after being murdered by her rapist, became a Catholic saint in 1950. Not only did the authorized biographers present her fate as destined by God, but they also thought the assailant should be happy that he was chosen by God to play a part in her elevation to her saintly status. Sheila A. Redmond, ‘Christian “Virtues” and Recovery from Child Sexual Abuse,’ in Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 74f. 14. This was the main thrust in the early (Neo)platonist critiques of the theologies of sacrificial cults, Young, Sacrificial Ideas, 24ff. 15. Adolf von Harnack, The History of Dogma, trans. William McGilchrist, vol. 6 (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1997), 76f. 16. Smith, The Atonement, 91. 17. Both aspects are in full display in Fautus Socinus’s rejection of the idea of satisfaction. See Socinus, The Racovian Catechism, 297f., 305ff., and A Brief Introduction, 64ff. 18. Smith, The Atonement, 106f. This developmental tendency was already present in Voltaire. Voltaire, God & Human Beings, trans. Mike Shreve (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 22f., 116, 133, 149ff.

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3.1 Recent Responses and New Developments The debate has continued throughout the twentieth century. Whereas some theologians have persistently defended understandings of the death of Jesus as sacrificial propitiation or satisfaction and self-sacrifice as integral to Christian faith and morality, others have attempted, in various degrees, to adjust their theological vocabularies in order to avoid (aspects of) the modern critiques presented in the previous section. Still others have followed up on these critiques and developed them further. These recent responses and new critical developments provide the context for the discussion to be conducted in this book. For now, I will limit myself to briefly indicate three of the most important critical trajectories that will shape it. All three will be further elaborated upon in due course. Throughout history, interpretations of the death of Jesus in terms of sacrifice have fortified themselves as symbols giving meaning to the sufferings of the oppressed. For instance, womanist theologian JoAnne Marie Terrell writes, Embracing the cross, transmuted into an ethics of love by the historical Christian emphasis on sacrifice and by their own understanding of themselves as sacramental witnesses, very many African Americans in and since slavery found the power they needed to survive, to be free and to express themselves. In the process they affirmed their innocence, refuted claims of white supremacists, sanctified their own suffering and situated themselves within the cosmic drama as victims-becoming-victors.19

In the past forty years, however, theological concerns have been raised concerning this development. Building on the traditional socio-historical, logical and theological critiques, liberationist and feminist voices have been persistent in emphasizing how sacrifice has been turned into a moral ideal when religiously legitimated in traditional understandings of atonement. One of the main thrusts

19. JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood?: The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 34. See also Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (London: SCM Press, 1974), 44; Leonardo Boff, Passion of Christ, Passion of the World: The Facts, their Interpretation, and their Meaning Yesterday and Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 93ff.; Jacquelyn Grant, ‘Come to My Help, Lord, for I’m in Trouble: Womanist Jesus and the Mutual Struggle for Liberation,’ in Reconstructing the Christ Symbol: Essays in Feminist Christology, ed. Maryanne Stevens (New York: Paulist Press, 1993); Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 305ff.; Alicia Vargas, ‘Through Mujerista Eyes: Stories of Incarnate Redemption,’ in Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 103; and Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 139ff.

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of these critiques concerns the so-called divine child abuse committed by a Father God demanding the sacrifice of his Son for the salvation of humanity, legitimating a morality of sacrificing unwilling others for one’s own (higher) gain.20 Other critical voices go even further, arguing that neither the unwilling nor the willing acceptance of being sacrificed can be defended as liberating soteriological (and moral) ideas and practices. Both serve to sustain repressive structures. Feminist theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, for instance, argues against the suggested saving effect of all theologies based on sacrifice: ‘Notions of sacrifice give rise to a mentality of sacrifice, not self-responsible saving actions.’21 Any attempt to see a higher aim achieved through the suffering of an innocent remains unable to forge an effective counterforce to current violence and suffering. Thus, she concludes, the cross remains a ‘paradoxical symbol’.22 In the last decades, the debate concerning the theological significance of semantics of sacrifice have also been re-ignited by the publication of the groundbreaking works of cultural anthropologists Walter Burkert and René Girard, as well as a renewed discussion of biblical notions of atonement among Christian theologians.23 According to Burkert and (at least the early) Girard, sacrificial practices are inherently violent, and Girard spends much energy on showing how Jesus succeeds in exposing sacrificial practices as based on a false construal of how life-affirming fellowships are established and sustained. He writes, ‘The Christ of the Gospels dies against sacrifice, and through his death, he reveals its nature and origin by making sacrifice unworkable, at least in the long run, and bringing sacrificial culture to an end’.24 According to Joseph Niewiadomski, Girard gave the

20. See for instance, Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 23, 26; Rita Nakashima Brock, ‘And a Little Child will Lead us: Christology and Child Abuse,’ in Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 51f., and Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 161ff. 21. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, ‘Opfer oder Hingabe – Sühnopfer oder Gottesfreundschaft: Wie können wir für uns Heute den Tod Jesu Verstehen?,’ in Sühne, Opfer, Abendmahl: Vier Zugänge zum Verständnis des Abendmahls, ed. Andreas Wagner (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999), 66, see also 69. Author’s translation. 22. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, ‘Gibt es eine feministische Kreuzestheologie?,’ in Das Kreuz mit dem Kreuz: Hofgeismarer Protokolle, ed. Eveline Valtink (Hofgeismar: Evangelische Akademie, 1990), 92. 23. See for instance, Rudolf Weth, ed. Das Kreuz Jesu: Gewalt, Opfer, Sühne (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001); Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement; Finlan, Problems; John Sanders, Atonement and Violence: A Theological Conversation (Nashville TN: Abingdon Press, 2006). 24. René Girard, ‘Mimesis and Violence,’ in The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroads, 1996), 18. See also René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Matteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

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impulse to a steady growing consensus among Christian theologians that the life and death of Jesus is to be described as ‘the antisacrificial Program’.25 In his essay Faith and Knowledge, Jacques Derrida points to the paradox inherent in such a program: self-sacrifice is an attempt to retain the un-violability of life through a violation of (his own) life.26 By displaying an ‘absolute respect for life’ by abstaining from violence, Jesus is required to display a ‘universal willingness to sacrifice’. The cross becomes a symbol that is constructed around a contradiction of goal and means.27 And so the traditional logical problem seems once again to be rehearsed. However, for Derrida this just emphasizes the finite character of human life in general. We cannot choose not to sacrifice when we love because exclusion is constitutive of any instance of human acting. Within the context of morality, this comes to expression in the fact that ‘I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others.’28 If a non-sacrificial world means a world without acts of exclusion,

Press, 1987), 180, and Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). For Girard’s later position, see Section 4.2. 25. Józef Niewiadomski, ‘Transzendenz und Menschwerdung: Transformationskraft des Opfers im Fokus österlicher Augen,’ in Das Opfer: Aktuelle Kontroversen, ed. Bernhard Dieckmann (Münster: LIT, 2001), 299. Italics in the original. Author’s translation. 26. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone,’ in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 50ff. See also Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 204ff.; Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 137; and Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘Self-Sacrifice: From the Act of Violence to the Passion of Love,’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68, no. 1–3 (2010): 78f. As Edmund Arens has shown, this contradiction reflects the general contradictory structure of Girard’s underlying anthropology according to which human beings are only capable of reconciling through exclusion of a third part, while at the same time required not to do so if they are to retain their humanity. Edmund Arens, ‘Dramatische Erlösungslehre aus der Perspektive einer theologischen Handlungstheorie,’ in Dramatische Erlösungslehre: Ein Symposion, ed. Józef Niewiadomski and Wolfgang Palaver (Wien: Tyrolia Verlag, 1992), 172, 175f. After re-considering his position during the mid-1990s, Girard in fact came to a similar conclusion. See René Girard, Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum, 2007), 215f. 27. Among those who emphasize the paradoxical nature of sacrifice, we find Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice 2f., passim; Erin Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice: The Loss of Self, the Gift of Self (New York: Crossroad, 2007). 28. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68. See also Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 55, and his analysis of the

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then a non-sacrificial world would be a world without determinate finite beings.29 A non-sacrificial world would require sacrificing the defining trait of humanity. This means that both human beings and God are doomed to sacrifice when acting within the realm of a finite world.30 The desire for a non-sacrificial world is a desire for the impossible. So where does this plethora of voices leave us? It leaves us with three options: either to follow most traditionally oriented theologies and persist in arguing that (1) Jesus was the last and consummate cultic sacrifice that ended the need for all further sacrifices once and for all; (2) to understand Jesus as representing a (more or less profound) critique of the Levitical cultic institution of sacrifice, replacing them with either a different cultic, or a non-cultic, framework for sacrificial practices; or (3) to argue along the line of many feminist theologians or the early Girard, that Jesus was the end of each and every sacrifice because in him we come to see that semantics of sacrifice misrepresent the relationship between God and humanity and so are inadequate as a semantic aiming to formulate what brings human and divine relational life to its fulfilment. These options constitute the overarching framework for the discussion to follow.

3.2 The Challenges Theologies of Sacrifice Face Today Confronted with traditional and contemporary critiques of theologies of sacrifice, I think it too rash to draw the conclusion that semantics of sacrifice merely holds a negative significance in Christian theology, that is, as something humanity must be saved from. What is needed is ‘reconstructive surgery’ by which we remove the ulcers and save what is healthy.31 While recognizing that traditional and contemporary theologies of sacrifice give rise to problems that threaten the internal coherency of their understanding of what brings the relational life of God and humanity to its fulfilment, I find it equally problematic to articulate the full theological significance of the person of Jesus without integrating aspects located within the semantic network of sacrifice.

violence inherent in the positing and preservation of law that follows a similar logic in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 272ff. Further also Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice, 151. 29. Derrida’s view on this matter is heavily influenced by Alexander Kojeve’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology as envisioning negativity (i.e. violence) as the condition of human historicality. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 145f., 162, 166, and Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Raymond Queneau (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 209f. 30. Dennis K. Keenan identifies this claim in a range of different postmodern authors. Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice. 31. The metaphor is borrowed from Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 71.

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In what follows, I will be constructing a systematic argument that both acknowledges the theological significance of some aspects of semantics of sacrifice, and at the same time problematizes the very widespread, and undifferentiated, ways in which such semantics have been used in Christian confessions and doctrinal theologies to determine the relational spaces of divine and human orders of being. My investigation is based on the hermeneutic-criteriological thesis that we cannot adequately understand the world as created, sustained and brought to fulfilment by a loving God unless we systematically explicate the biblical vocabulary of sacrifice. Yet in doing so we are also required to transcend it. After unfolding the theological and logical critiques in dialogue with some contemporary theologians, I move on to develop a conceptual scheme that allows for a far more nuanced reconstruction of the relationship between a theological semantic of sacrifice and a theological semantic of love. I distinguish between absolute and relative victimization, self-limitation, self-sacrifice, self-destruction, self-annihilation and self-giving, and commence to consider which aspects of the relational life of Jesus fall under these determinations. The three questions formulated in the introduction provide the overarching structure of the systematic reconstruction spanning from chapters 5–12. Whereas chapters 5–9 discuss if God’s action in Jesus can be coherently understood as an expression of sacrificial love, Chapter 10 questions the adequacy of this determination as a prescription of how human beings ought to respond to God in faith and worship. In Chapter 11, I critically consider the ethical validity of self-sacrificial love as part of a Christian moral vision. My systematic argument culminates in Chapter 12 where I attempt to show how the ethical vision of sacrifice coming to an end is coherent with the claim that a world in which sacrificial practices are an immanent trait is created by a God who is love. In accordance with the methodological framework of this book, the reconstruction will be increasingly complex as I progressively attempt to integrate as many aspects as possible from each theological approach considered.

Chapter 4 SACRIFICIAL LOVE AND THE PROBLEM OF SACRED VIOLENCE

In this chapter, I will spell out in more detail the complex problems that make some Christian theologians answer the first question formulated in the introductory section negatively. Despite the ignorance of some of the leading theologians of the last century, it is primarily the aspect of violence present in the symbolic field of sacrifice that has moved numerous theologians to reject that God’s action in Jesus can be coherently reconstructed as an expression of sacrificial love, arguing that sacrifice is incompatible with the non-, or even anti-violent enemy-love revealed by God in Christ. The basic argument can be rendered in the following manner: if semantics of sacrifice developed in the Christian Bible make violence an essential aspect of sacrificial love, a paradox is created at the heart of Christian soteriology: enemy-love and sacrifice are mutually exclusive because there is a logical contradiction of goal and means that reflects a tension in the concept of God: how can a perfectly loving God solve the problem of violence and death by actively committing, or passively allowing, deadly violence? Many theologians respond to this critical question by rejecting the conceptual and theological assumptions on which it rests, and attempt to show how God’s actions in Jesus can be construed in a different (non-, or anti-violent) manner. In the chapters to follow, I will critically assess both the critique(s) and some counter-critiques with an aim to coherently integrate what I consider to be important insights on both sides. In order to sharpen the focus of my analysis of the problems connected to sacred violence, I will begin by fleshing out the main aspects of violence understood as a semantic configuration. This conceptual investigation will also provide important structural elements in the systematic argument to be developed in chapters 5 through 7.

4.1 What is Violence? Violence is an extremely complex phenomenological configuration. According to sociologist Peter Imbusch, ‘Violence is one of the most elusive and most difficult concepts in the social sciences.’1 This fact, along with the strong negative 1. Peter Imbusch, ‘The Concept of Violence’, in International Handbook of Violence Research, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 13.

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connotations of the concept, makes it easily ideologized and an effective rhetorical means in polemical discourse. Although a completely de-ideologized concept is of course impossible to construct, I will employ a conceptual strategy that is openended from the outset. My aim is not, however, to develop an empirical cartography of the fullness of this phenomenal realm, but to theoretically reconstruct the concept of violence in a way that makes my discussion of the notion of God as sacrificial love optimally clear. In other words, mine is not an attempt to capture the essence of violence, but to construct a configuration of aspects regulated by the overarching problem I have posed.2 Despite common parlance speaking of the sea or a tornado as being violent, this is theoretically inadequate in the context of the problem being discussed in this book. Unlike accidental events that cause suffering, violence is treated here as a social phenomenon and thus interactional in character. By interactional, I refer to actions that effect relational changes. Even if there is not always a reason behind a violent act (i.e. it might be completely irrational or driven by unconscious impulses), there are always social motivations behind it. An interactional understanding of violence is not only concerned with violence unfolding between human individuals. Cooperative human endeavours are also potential subjects (and objects) of violence. Where individual violence is carried out, cooperatives often (not always) act as bystanders that either indirectly hinder or support the direct action of others, and are thus part of the relational structure of violence.3 In real life it is hard to even distinguish the violent subject and the bystander from one another as both contribute in different ways to the destruction of others.4 Yet cooperative violent actions are different in character from that of individuals. While the latter act in conflict with social norms (i.e. as illegitimate) often with the intention of disrupting the social order, the violent acts of the former are based on conformity with social norms, aimed at preventing the social organism from disintegrating (i.e. as legitimate). Consequently, participants in cooperative violence are less likely to experience moral guilt than individuals who act exclusively on their own behalf.5 The social norms which allow such collective moral anaesthesia to occur rely on various symbolic strategies that make what on the individual level is considered morally wrong appear as morally right, for instance through the construction of mythologies that dehumanize the victim(s). What takes place is akin to what Johan Galtung termed cultural violence, and Pierre Bourdieu as symbolic violence.6 2. This means, for instance, that I do not discuss contemporary usage of the concept of violence to denote acts of interpretation that misrepresent the intention or content of a text. 3. ‘Neutrality’ is a quasi-position that in reality shields the perpetrators of violence. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 218f. 4. Arne Johan Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 231. 5. Imbusch, ‘The Concept of Violence,’ 28. 6. Johan Galtung, ‘Cultural Violence,’ Journal of Peace Research 3 (1990): 196ff., and Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passerion, Grundlagen einer Theorie der symbolischen

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Furthermore, the subject and the object of an intentional act are not always two different individuals (or collective agents). When describing violence as interaction, oneself can be the intentional object of one’s own violent act. As Paul Ricoeur has emphasized, oneself ontologically belongs to the realm of the others.7 Thus violence may be a way of relating to oneself as another. This fact complicates the question of who the subject/victim in a violent act is. Not only does it make voluntary suffering a phenomenon within the semantic network of violence, it also raises the question of whether putting oneself at risk of becoming a victim of violence is itself a constitutive aspect of the violent act in question. They can themselves be interpreted as acts of violence done, or allowed to be done, to oneself (in order, for instance, to prevent it from being done to someone else). How then are we to further characterize the relational changes that are termed violent? Most commonly perhaps is the association of violence with acts that inflict physical injury. Yet violence is not usually restricted to the use of physical force that causes injury to bodily tissue. In current usage, it also often denotes various forms of action that cause psychological harm or mal-development (e.g. social exclusion, verbal humiliation, threats, manipulative control, neglect). These forms of violence often appear together as aspects of a complex event.8 Now, what is important to note is that such descriptions take as their heuristic point of departure the experience of the victims of violence. Violence becomes the experience of having one’s capacity and desire for living a good life weakened or destroyed. It becomes something suffered at the hands of another human being who refuses to accept its limitation vis-à-vis oneself. From the perspective of the victim, the action of the violent subject is the opposite of the voluntary, that is, the opposite of freedom (except of course when the violent subject and the victim are the same person and freely accepts suffering violence).9 Even if violence is often experienced as opposed to what is voluntary, few would include in their definition of violence the act of physically restraining children Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). See further Imbusch, ‘The Concept of Violence,’ 25. 7. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 2003), 387, and most recently Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 140f. For a contrary view, see for instance Joseph Betz, ‘Violence: Garver’s Definition and a Deweyan Correction’ Ethics 87, no. 4 (1977): 349, and Gerald C. MacCallum Jr, ‘What is Wrong with Violence?’ in Legislative Intent and Other Essays on Law, Politics, and Morality, ed. Gerald C. Jr MacCallum, Marcus G. Singer and Rex Martin (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 241f. 8. Heinrich Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, 2nd rev. edn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 43ff. 9. Also excluded are cases of ritualized violence such as ‘mosh pitting’ at rock-concerts, or sado-masochistic practices, where the equal participants willingly play their part in a ‘game’ where victim and perpetrator are symbolic roles. See Imbusch, ‘The Concept of Violence,’ 26.

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from running into a street with a lot of traffic. If we do so, a contradiction of goal and means will be at work insofar as I come to bruise the child I push off the road as a car approaches at high speed: it becomes an act in which violence is used to protect personal freedom. A child running into the street when a car is approaching is rarely, if ever, a voluntary act in the sense that it would have been carried out if the child were fully aware of the approaching danger. The aspect that excludes such acts from the semantic network of violence is not located in the intent of the acting subject, but in the experience of the victim: ‘I am being protected.’ Similarly, governmental laws are instituted to protect citizens from the exercise of unrestricted freedom in society. Yet if we change the perspective to the violent subject, violent acts can be precisely the opposite, namely an expression of freedom.10 Violence is an expression of the human capacity to act in certain ways to the exclusion of others.11 Thus, ‘we are condemned to violence’.12 In exercising freedom in forging one’s path, violence becomes the way in which a human being identifies himself or herself as someone in particular. Here violence is not restricted to violentia (fury, impetuosity), but is an expression of the power (lat. potestas) to be oneself, that is, self-affirmation. It is not merely an ability to resist outside pressure, but to overcome resistance from counter-wills and so positively exercise one’s freedom. This means that human life is in a constant state of violence insofar as each individual human desire to fulfil its own potential is never entirely satisfied. Because there will always be a gap between what is and what could be in the life of a finite being, violence here becomes a general characteristic of historical life as such.13 Curiously then, what from the perspective of the acting subject is experienced as an expression of freedom, is from the perspective of the victim experienced as a violation of freedom: the freedom of the one presupposes the unfreedom of the other. And if the victim reacts by seeking to overcome the threat of the violent subject, the roles are switched. Thus, it seems only universal human death, that is, the end of freedom, can bring about a cessation of violence. For the time being, I will leave open the question of whether some of these definitions of violence (or aspects thereof) are more adequate than others, and so also the question of whether or not violence is by definition morally wrong (which would leave a discussion of this question settled a priori – paradoxically

10. Kojève, Introduction, 209f. 11. Hent de Vries widens the scope even further defining violence as ‘ any cause, any justified or illegitimate force, that is exerted – physically or otherwise – by one thing (event, or instance, group or person, and perhaps, words and object) on another’. Vries, Religion and Violence, 1. 12. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 138. 13. Similarly, Derrida claims that history’s very discursive forging of itself into something determinate is violent. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 145f., 162, 166, 184.

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then through an act of symbolic violence) or incoherent.14 My intention so far has been to give some attention to the complexity of the concept, and thus to put out an advance warning against drawing a quick polemical conclusion regarding the relation between semantics of sacrifice, violence and love. How we understand these relations are tightly connected to which aspect of the conceptual configuration of violence we take as its essential characteristic. In what follows, I will discuss whether, and how, these aspects are relevant to understand the life and death of Jesus as a source for claiming that God is sacrificial love. From what I have said so far, phenomena of violence have at least six different aspects that need to be considered: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Violence as acts that cause physical injury. Violence as acts that cause psychological mal-development. Violence as directly executed and as indirectly supported. Violence as something unwillingly/willingly suffered. Violence as individual and cooperative. Violence as the expression of human freedom.

A superficial reading of the biblical literature makes it abundantly clear that all these aspects of violence are found within its semantics of sacrifice.15 In the succinct words of Miroslav Volf, ‘The drama of salvation starts and ends with violence, and without violence its central act is unthinkable.’16 Yet, as my historical prelude has shown, it is far from clear what the systematic theological implications of such an observation are, and it is still a hotly debated matter. My discussion takes as its point of departure important contemporary developments of the traditional theological, logical, moral and socio-historical critiques focusing on the problematic ways in which aspects 1, 3 and 4 of the configuration of violence reconstructed in this paragraph have been integrated into an understanding of God as sacrificial love. I will move on to discuss whether, and how, such a notion causes psychological mal-development through social exclusion (aspects 2 and 5), and end up by articulating the radical depth of the problem of sacrificial violence when understood as an expression of human freedom (aspect 6).

14. On this, see Keith Burgess-Jackson, ‘Violence in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy,’ in International Handbook of Violence Research, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 992, 996f. 15. For a general overview of biblical configurations of violence, see Jack NelsonPallmeyer, Is Religion Killing Us?: Violence in the Bible and the Quran (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2003), 27ff., and the various contributions in Friedrich Schweitzer, ed. Religion, Politik, und Gewalt (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 250ff. 16. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 290f.

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4.2 Sacred Bloodshed – The Problem Explicated The first aspect of violence noted in the previous section becomes relevant to our topic when the suffering and death of Christ are symbolically understood as sacred bloodshed. The sacred bloodshed of Christ is a complex physical violence through which God is sometimes said to (re-)establish, sustain and/or nurture a good living relationship between humanity and God. In other words, it is a bloodshed that incorporates humanity in the holy (lat. sacrum facere). As noted above, a considerable number of theologians have in the last decades criticized those who make sacred bloodshed integral to divine love as revealed in Christ. Their arguments concern different aspects of these positions. However, at the centre of attention are the theological and logical problems, and their moral and socio-historical implications. These critiques are not uniform. They can, however, be reconstructed as comprising two basic moulds. This does not mean that the critiques belonging to each of the two groups are identical at all points. They are distinguished by the degree to which they resemble one another, and thus they should be understood as two distinct families of critiques. On the one hand, we find those who limit their critique to the idea of sacrificial satisfaction or propitiation which they somewhat justifiably ascribe to Anselm, Aquinas and the Catholic tradition, the theologians of the reformation, as well as in post-reformation Protestant orthodoxy. The theological thrust of these critiques is, more or less, in accordance with liberal Protestant voices like Schleiermacher, Ritschl and Bushnell. In their view, the distorted relationship between God and humanity primarily comes to expression as moral corruption within the human world. A God who addresses these problems by demanding the bloodshed of an innocent in order to spare humanity from God’s just rage is no God of love.17 A God of love does not repay evil with evil, but overcomes evil through healing the relational distortions of the world through compassion. As Paul Fiddes illustrates, ‘A doctor might be said to “hate” disease as God hates sin, but the first aim of medicine is to remove the disease and heal the patient, not to placate the anger of the doctor.’18 Does this mean that these critics think that the concept of sacrifice is irrelevant as a determination of the love of God? No, not at all. What they reject is the claim that God was the receiver of a propitiatory sacrifice in Christ, and that God’s attitude towards humanity is somehow changed because of Christ’s suffering and death. Jesus was not, however, purely a victim of violence. They insist that Christ actively sacrificed something to God. Christ willingly endured unjust suffering in

17. See for instance Boff, Passion of Christ, 90ff.; Kurt Koch, ‘Überwundenes Opfer im Leben der Christen?: Theologische Einrede gegen einen modischen Trend,’ Stimmen der Zeit 214, no. 5 (1996): 340ff.; J. Denny Weaver, ‘Violence in Christian Theology,’ in Cross Examinations: Reading on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 228ff.; and Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, 18. 18. Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989), 70.

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order to present the hearts and souls of human beings as consecrated gifts to God. Within this family of conceptions, the suffering and death of Jesus are thought to be necessary in order to reveal a love radical (i.e. divine) enough in character to fundamentally transform the relational lives of human beings.19 Among contemporary theologians, many critics within this family have found inspiration in Jürgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God in which he radicalized the theopaschite impulse in Luther and Hegel arguing that love and suffering cease to be contradictory within the structure of self-sacrifice: ‘In this theology, God and suffering are no longer contradictions, as in theism and atheism, but God’s being is in the suffering and suffering is in God’s being itself, because God is love. … Selfsacrifice is God’s very nature and essence.’20 Here the suffering and death accepted by Jesus are understood to be addressing fallen human beings only through a prior identification with the victims of sin. Self-sacrifice is not intrinsically related to what it means to be a God of love because God so vicariously accepts the punishment due to sinners, but because it reveals God’s radical compassion with sufferers.21 ‘Only the suffering God can help’, as Bonhoeffer once put it.22 Recently, Wendy Farley has given eloquent voice to a similar view: ‘Christ wanders in solidarity with our bondage. Hungry, tired, dragging a mournful chain, he wanders among us, making visible the chains that bind us. … The union between Christ’s sufferings and human suffering grants a dignity that suffering itself strips away.’23 Suffering is here not understood as absolutely passive, but as a powerful act of solidarity that desires to overcome destructive suffering through compassionate love.24 Underlying such views is often a variant of kenotic Christology according

19. See also Dorothee Sölle, ‘Der Erstgeborene aus dem Tod: Dekonstruktion und Rekonstruktion von Christologie,’ in Ihr aber, für wen haltet ihr mich?: Auf dem Weg zu einer feministisch-befreiungstheologischen Revision von Christologie, ed. Renate Jost and Eveline Valtink (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1996), 67, and more recently Vincent Brümmer, Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 87f., and O‘Collins, Jesus our Redeemer, 170f., 188ff. 20. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 234, and The Way of Jesus Christ, 32. See also The Crucified God, 42. 21. The Way of Jesus Christ, 32f. A view recently endorsed by, for instance, Hannah Bacon, ‘Thinking the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today?’ Cross Currents 64, no. 4 (2012): 453, 458. 22. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Isabel Best et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 479. 23. Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, 139. See also The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 106, 112f. 24. See Moltmann, The Crucified God, 45f.; Boff, Passion of Christ, 17f., 64f., 77, 100f., 115; Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 62, 107ff.; Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995), 256ff.; Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 124f.; Sobrino, Christ the Liberator; Brandt, Opfer als

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to which the divinity of Christ is revealed in its very renunciation.25 The more human Christ was, the more divine he was. The immensity of his power comes to expression in the immensity of his weakness. Within this theological family, there are at least two different understandings of who the primary self-sacrificing subject was. According to the first, Christ represented the self-emptying of the Father.26 According to Robert Daly, the Father is not sacrificing an external other, but that ‘in sending the Son, the Father is actually sending himself ’.27 Christ was God because he did not represent an impassionate divine king who rules humanity from a transcendent beyond, but a (Father) God whose power is consummated in becoming ‘a fellow sufferer who understands’ as Alfred North Whitehead famously put it.28 In Moltmann’s version, the Son becomes the consenting (i.e. freely obedient) medium of the Father’s compassion with creation.29 Even if Moltmann, in the face of what he claimed to be grave misunderstandings of his position in The Crucified God, endeavoured to Gedächtnis, 433ff.; Lisa S. Cahill, ‘The Atonement Paradigm: Does it still have Explanatory Value?’ Theological Studies 68 (2007): 424ff.; Vargas, Through Mujerista Eyes, 103ff.; Henry L. Novello, Death as Transformation: A Contemporary Theology of Death (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 37; and Wietzke de Jong-Kumru, Post-Colonial Feminist Theology: Enacting Cultural, Religious, Gender and Sexual Differences in Theological Reflection (Berlin: LIT, 2013), passim. 25. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 43, 211. See also The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1981), 118ff., and The Way of Jesus Christ, 178. Other well-known representatives of kenotic Christology are Boff, Passion of Christ, 83; von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 33f.; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 1983), 10f., 137; Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, 142; and Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined, 108. For an overview of kenotic Christologies in the post-reformation era, see Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 168ff. 26. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 197; The Way of Jesus Christ, 176; Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 137; and Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theoogical Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 161; Michael Schulz, Sein und Trinität: Systematische Erörterungen zur Religionsphilosophie G.W.F. Hegels im ontologiegeschichtlichen Rückblick auf J. Duns Scotus und I. Kant und die Hegel-Rezeption in der Seinsauslegung und Trinitätstheologie bei W. Pannenberg, E. Jüngel, K. Rahner und H.U. V. Balthasar (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1997), 938; Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 76; and Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 5ff. 27. Sacrifice Unveiled, 102. Daly’s formulation is very like what has been traditionally termed patripassianism (which has often had a modalist flavour). 28. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978), 351. See also Moltmann, The Crucified God, 264f., 279ff. 29. See The Crucified God, 252; The Trinity, 81; and The Way of Jesus Christ, 173. Similarly, see also Boff, Passion of Christ, 60f. and Novello, Death as Transformation, 29, 54, passim.

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(re-)emphasize the mutual self-emptying (and indwelling) of Father and Son,30 there is no doubt that the primary subject remained that of the Father: ‘In the sending, in the surrender and in the resurrection, the Father is the actor, the Son the receiver.’31 While receiving is indeed understood as an act, it is that of a secondary subject. In Moltmann, the self-emptying of Jesus is the divine selfemptying of the eternal Son responding with passion to fulfil the Father’s original strategy for securing salvation.32 It is eschatologically consummated when the Son subjects himself to the kingly rule of the Father: ‘Only with the handing over of rule to the Father is the obedience of the Son, and thus his Sonship, consummated.’33 Jesus’s death on the cross was a sacrifice to the Father because it was carried out in obedience to the Father’s will to reveal his solidarity with a suffering humanity. Confronted with critiques stating that such a Trinitarian Christology negates the freedom (or personhood) of Christ by glorifying a will to self-humiliation originating in the will of the Father, a kenotic paradigm of a different mould has gained some standing among contemporary theologians. Within it, the primary subject emptying itself by opening up to divine empowerment is Jesus as a human being. Sarah Coakley has recently developed this line of thought describing the self-emptying of Jesus as a ‘gentle space-making’. She elaborates, ‘By choosing to “make space” in this way, one “practises” the “presence of God” – the subtle but enabling presence of a God who neither shouts nor forces, let alone “obliterates”.’34 In emptying himself, Jesus practices God’s responsive power for him.35 However, even if the openness of Jesus displayed in his ‘silent waiting’ is here the presupposition of the empowering gift of the Father, the power for the Son still comes from an external source. There is also a crucial difference between members of this theological family when it comes to identifying the reasons behind the self-sacrifice of Jesus. While

30. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 176f. and The Trinity, 174ff. 31. The Way of Jesus Christ, 94. See also The Trinity, 83, 106, 168, 178, 182. 32. Similarly, also Boff, Passion of Christ, 20, 52, 60f., 94. While Robert Daly also insists on the mutuality between the Trinitarian persons revealed in the Christ-event, he also speaks of the sending of the Father as the first ‘moment’ in the outpouring of divine love, and the Son as responding to this initiative with self-giving love. Daly emphasizes, however, that the initiative of the Father is only temporally prior to the response of the Son as the Triune life comes to expression historically. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 5ff., and ‘Trinitarian Christ-Event: Different Sacrifice,’ Concilium: International Journal of Theology 4 (2013): 102f. The priority of the Father’s will is also underlined by prominent orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003), 353. 33. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 274. See also The Trinity, 81f., 93, and The Way of Jesus Christ, 173. 34. Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 35. See also Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 26, 31, 67. 35. Anna Mercedes, Power for: Feminism and Christ’s Self-Giving (London: T. & T. Clark, 2011).

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some, like for instance Moltmann, include among the reasons for the sacrifice of the Son his being rejected and abandoned by his Father, according to others Jesus exclusively suffers the abandonment of the human world.36 For the latter, the death of Christ was a non-violent prophetic protest through which God revealed the injustice and evil that killed him, and thus robbed evil of its power.37 This view is akin to the main thesis of the widely influential interpretation of the story of Jesus developed by René Girard. According to Girard, ‘Sacrifice is simultaneously a murder and a most holy act.’38 Yet, what makes it a holy act is different, depending on whether one sees it from the perspective of the murderers or the perspective of the murdered. For the former, it becomes a holy act insofar as it is saves society from destruction. This is achieved by an unconscious39 inner-psychic mechanism by which a society canalizes unto an innocent victim the violent impulses which threaten to it. In the experience of re-established harmony, the murder of the victim achieves its sacred character. It becomes a sacrifice proper: ‘simultaneously violent and peaceful, malevolent and benevolent, he [the victim] is divinized in the sense of the archaic sacred’.40 Bloodshed becomes sacralized. Here, a mechanism of redemptive substitution is constitutive of the saving sacrifice.41 From the perspective of the murder-victim, the sacrality of the act is experienced in a radically different way: ‘No greater difference can be found: on the one hand, sacrifice as murder; on the other hand, sacrifice as the readiness to die in order not to participate in sacrifice as murder.’42 Girard identifies the key to unravel the illusion of redemptive substitutionary sacrifice in one of the unique characteristics of the Gospel narratives, namely in the fact that they recount the killing of Jesus from the viewpoint of the innocent victim.43 In doing so, they break the spell

36. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 253, 287, passim, The Trinity, 77, and The Way of Jesus Christ, 166f. 37. Boff, Passion of Christ, 44ff., 69, 72, 111ff.; Dorothee Sölle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); 26ff., Thinking about God (London: SCM Press, 1990), 127ff.; Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, 161; and The Wounding and Healing of Desire, 108ff. 38. René Girard, Sacrifice, trans. Matthew Pattillo and David Dawson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 6. See also Raymund Schwager, Brauchen wir einen Sündenbock?: Gewalt und Erlösung in den biblischen Schriften (München: Kösel, 1978), 210ff., and James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of Eschatological Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 46f. 39. In his critical analysis of the Girardian position, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer fails to note this, arguing that the conscious intentions of Jesus’s victimizers were to demoralize the Judaean people (Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 223). While this may be true, it is irrelevant to a critique of the Girardian line of reasoning. 40. Girard, Sacrifice, 31. 41. Ibid., 57, 84. 42. Girard, Antonello, and Rocha, Evolution and Conversion, 215. 43. Girard, Sacrifice, 75ff.

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of the scapegoat-mechanism. The life story of Jesus is an exposure of the evil of scapegoating that does violence to innocent victims for the sake of restoring social order.44 In Girard’s writings Jesus is construed as the personification of how this cycle of sacralized violence is broken ‘once for all’ (Heb. 7.27; 9. 26, 28). He points to the episode where Peter defended Jesus by raising his sword on his enemies. Jesus responded by admonishing him to put his sword back in its place ‘ for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?’ (Mt. 26.52f.). From this episode, Girard concludes that Jesus rejects violent retaliation as integral to redemption. True redemption cannot be reached through divine, or divinely sanctioned, violence. Whereas in his groundbreaking work Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World Girard rejected interpretations of the death of Jesus by recourse to the concept of sacrifice, in the mid-1990s Girard adjusted his understanding of sacrifice in a way that allowed him to assign to it a positive soteriological significance: ‘I am now convinced that his self-surrender [Selbst-hingabe] – as paradoxical as it may seem – must ultimately be described in terms of (self-) sacrifice.’45 Despite this re-formulation of his position, Girard did not come to regard Jesus (or God) as the subject of violence.46 He was still purely a victim of destructive forces.47 In this way, Girard comes close to how Gregory of Nazianzus understood the sacrifice of Jesus. There are, however, theologians of a second family of critiques that reject basic theological tenets upon which the various theologies of the first family are built. What Moltmann, Farley, Coakley and Girard (etc.,) fail to see, according to these critics, is how self-sacrifice constitutes a morally dubious act of self-violence.48 44. Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 38f., 50f. It is important to note that this scapegoating is not identical to that practised in the scapegoat-ritual within the Hebrew cultic framework. In this ritual, the high priest placed his hand upon a goat to symbolically transfer the sins of the people onto it, and the subsequent driving out of the goat into the wilderness cleansed the nation. Jesus, on the other hand, was certainly not treated as a scapegoat by the high priest Ananias. The high priest condemned Jesus because of his own continuous blasphemies. However, insofar as the process against him revealed the victimization of an innocent man, it conforms to the modern concept of scapegoating that reflects upon this unmasking. On this point, see Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 91f. 45. René Girard, ‘Tatsachen, nicht nur Interpretationen,’ in Das Opfer – Aktuelle Kontroversen, ed. Bernhard Dieckmann (Berlin: LIT, 2001), 265. Author’s translation. See also ‘Mimetische Theorie und Theologie,’ in Vom Fluch und Segen der Sündenbocke: Raymund Schwager zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Józef Newiadomski and Wolfgang Palaver (Wien: 1995), Girard, Antonello and Rocha, Evolution and Coversion, 215f., and Girard, Sacrifice, xi, 62ff. 46. Girard, ‘Tatsachen, nicht nur Interpretationen,’ 268. 47. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 150. 48. Coakley criticizes Girard for claiming that in his conception violence is used to overcome violence, but she proceeds to recommend altruistic self-sacrifice as if that had

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Violence towards oneself is accepted in order to end violence towards others, and violence is thus merely re-channelled, not resisted. The only way for Christian theology to eradicate violence as a dimension of the saving actions of the divine is to dismiss completely the category of self-sacrifice from their interpretations of the death of Jesus. In their seminal article ‘For God so Loved the World?’, Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Ann Parker criticized all theologies of sacrifice for making Jesus’s suffering and death necessary for the salvation of humanity and/or the moral transformation of humanity. Referring to the views of Origen and Gregory of Nazianzus, they write: ‘God is pictured as working through suffering, pain, and even death to fulfil “his” divine purpose.’49 Horrendous suffering is trivialized in a way that makes it deeply problematic from a moral and socio-historical point of view. Calling horrendous moral evils right does not make them right. It is rather a paradigmatic instance of cultural violence, making what is wrong appear as morally right. Cultural victimization never leads to life. It only leads to more suffering and death. Thus, these construals are unable to free themselves from the logical contradiction of goal and means that creates a tension in the concept of God. Victimization is the basic reason why critics of this mould also reject Anselm’s and the reformer’s construal of the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ, often grouping them together under the label ‘penal satisfaction’-theories of atonement. It is reconstructed in the following manner: ‘The penalty of sin is death. God loves us and doesn’t want to punish us. But his honour has been shamed. God is torn between love for us and the requirements of justice. To resolve the problem, he sends his only son Jesus into the world to pay the price we owe, to bear the punishment that all of humanity deserve.’50 I have already made some critical comments on the precision of this reconstruction, and will not repeat them here.51 At this point, I will restrict myself to clarify the argument upon which this critique is based. Its basic thrust is theological. If Jesus is portrayed as obeying his Father’s will to suffer and die in the place of humanity, then the Father becomes a divine child abuser.52 According to J. Denny Weaver the views of Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus and Abelard have similar theological implications. By letting the devil

nothing to do with violence. Sarah Coakley, Sacrifice Regained: Reconsidering the Rationality of Religious Belief (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13, 26f. 49. Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 7. On this and the following, see also Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 18ff., 44ff., 148, 156f., 212. 50. Ibid., 29. 51. See Section 2.2. 52. Ibid., 5, 8, 30, 157; Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 53ff.; and Carter Heyward, Saving Jesus from those who are Right: Rethinking what it Means to be Christian (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 151. On a similar note, Daphne Hampson claims that a mother (God) would never have allowed her son or daughter to sacrifice him- or herself. Daphne Hampson, After Christianity, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2002), 152.

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or humanity kill Jesus for some higher purpose, they all make God suspect as a loving father-figure.53 Even if it is not God the Father who kills Jesus, his executors still carry out the will of the Father, making God’s care for his Son extremely faulty. If Jesus suffers and dies because of a mysterious concurrence of divine and human will it becomes unclear on whose side God really is: that of the victims or that of the perpetrators.54 Dorothee Sölle says, ‘Any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic.’55 For this reason some theologians claim that Jesus’s crucifixion was an accidental and tragic act carried out by forces opposing God. It would have been better had it never happened.56 An obvious objection to this view would be to emphasize that Jesus freely took this fate upon himself. Death may be unwillingly suffered, but it may also be willingly accepted in solidarity with those who suffer. While, for instance, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel argues that self-sacrifice fails to nourish self-responsible saving actions, one could also view self-sacrifice as the most extreme expression of autonomy: a self-made decision to die for someone or some cause. This point was already made by Anselm, and Jürgen Moltmann, along with several others who

53. Weaver, ‘Violence,’ 228ff., and ‘Narrative Christus Victor: The Answer to Anselmian Atonement Violence,’ in Atonement and Violence: A Theological Conversation, ed. John Sanders (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006), 7. See also Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 5ff. 54. Weaver, ‘Narrative Christus Victor,’ 6. In contradistinction to Hans Boersma, ‘Violence, the Cross, and Divine Intentionality: A Modified Reformed View’ ibid. and Thomas Finger, ‘Christus Victor as Non-Violent Atonement’, ibid., 98. 55. Sölle, Suffering, 26. Italics are mine. See also ibid., 134. 56. Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 57; Brock, Journeys, 93, 98; Brown and Parker ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 27; Marie F. Fortune, ‘The Transformation of Suffering: A Biblical and Theological Perspective,’ in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 141f.; Regula Strobel, ‘Das Kreuz im Kontext feministischer Theologie: Versuch einer Standortbestimmung’, in Verlangen nach Heilwerden: Christologie in feministisch-theologischer Sicht (Fribourg: Exodus, 1991); Christine Marie Smith, Risking the Terror: Resurrection in this Life (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 33ff.; Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus against Christianity, 225, 340; Delores S. Williams, ‘Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,’ in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 32; Christina M. Kreinecker, ‘Das Leben bejahen: Jesu Tod, ein Opfer: Zur Bedeutung der unterschiedenden Rede von Victima und Oblatio.’ Zeitschrift für katolische Theologie 128, no. 1 (2006): 52; Thomas Bohache, Christology from the Margins (London: SCM Press, 2008), 254; and Daniel M. Bell Jr, ‘God does not Demand Blood: Beyond Redemptive Violence,’ in God Does Not...: Entertain, Play Matchmaker, Hurry, Demand Blood, Cure Every Illness, ed. D. Brent Laytham (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009), 58ff. The list of theologians endorsing this claim is by no means exhaustive.

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followed suit insisting that precisely this was the case with Jesus.57 Likewise Sarah Coakley defends the ‘willed self-effacement’ of Jesus as the manner in which he discovers his true self in God,58 and Anna Mercedes sees in Christ’s self-emptying an assertive non-soluble self.59 In living for others, Christ also affirmed himself. Although Ingolf Dalferth also insists on Christ’s own freedom in pursuing his mission, the aim of his mission is understood in a more nuanced way. Its redemptive character is not found in his willed assertive self-sacrifice. He argues that even if Jesus’s way of life led to death, he did not necessarily intend his own suffering and death.60 Jesus died for us because avoiding death would contradict the distinct nature of his love, namely its uncompromising character. If Jesus had stopped loving human beings out of fear of losing his life, he would entangle himself in an ‘existential self-contradiction’. Like parents facing death willingly for their child without seeking their own death, Jesus simply wanted to love all human beings even if it meant losing his human life. To die for someone is not necessarily a self-sacrificial act because that would mean intending one’s own suffering and death. Still, according to Dalferth, Jesus’s suffering and death are not adequately described as that of an absolute victim. Jesus willingly suffered something that he

57. Moltmann, The Trinity, 82, and The Way of Jesus Christ, 173. See also Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 61ff.; Hinderk M. Emrich, ‘Zur philosophischen Psychologie des Opfers,’ in Zur Theorie des Opfers: Ein interdiziplinäres Gespräch, ed. Richard Schenk (Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1995), 97ff.; Robert J. Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 195; O’Collins and Jones, Jesus our Priest, 258; Mercedes, Power for, 68; and Jan-Heiner Tück, ‘Am Ort der Verlorenheit: Ein Zugang zur rettenden und erlösende Kraft des Kreuzes,’ in Erlösung auf Golgota?: Der Opfertod Jesu im Streit der Interpretationen, ed. Magnus Streit and Jan-Heiner Tück (Freiburg: Herder, 2012), 40f. 58. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 37, and ‘In Defense of Sacrifice: Gender, Selfhood, and the Binding of Isaac’, in Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda M. Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 28ff. See also Ruth Groenhout, ‘Kenosis and Feminist Theory,’ in Exploring Kenotic Christology, ed. C. Stephen Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 303; Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice, 87, 91; and O’Collins, Jesus our Redeemer, 169. 59. Mercedes, Power for, 68f. 60. On this and the following, see Dalferth, ‘Self-Sacrifice,’ 83. See also Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte: Zur Grammatik der Christologie, and ‘Opfer als Glückfall des Lebens,’ in Opfer: Verschenktes Leben, ed. Hans-Jürgen Luibl and Sabine Scheuter (Zürich: Pano, 2001). A similar view is found in Boff, Passion of Christ, 45, 64, 72, and more recently in Jan-Olav Henriksen, Desire, Gift, and Recognition: Christology and Postmodern Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 235, 288, and Gregory Anderson Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross: How the Nonviolent God Saves us through the Cross of Christ (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 254.

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himself did not intend. His death was an expression of the risk he accepted when agreeing to unfold God’s love in a world mired in violence.61 Whereas, for instance, Dorothee Sölle, Mary Grey, Cynthia Crysdale, Catherine Keller and Julia Meszaros are among those feminist theologians who have been inclined to follow a line of thought similar to that of Dalferth, for Brown and Parker (and others) these conceptual adjustments fail because of their moral implications.62 First of all, accepting unintended suffering becomes the mark of true love.63 Secondly, the case of Jesus accepting (the risk of) such suffering is construed as the result of his willingness to submit to the Father’s will. If we, for the moment, leave aside the accusation that this sounds dangerously like the consent victimizers construe in their victims, the problem remains that if Jesus agreed to take upon himself the risky mission assigned to him by his Father, then his suffering was not, as Farley claims, ‘innocent’.64 Parker writes, ‘Obedience is not a virtue. It is an evasion of our responsibility.’65 It makes the virtue of revolt against victimization morally suspect. This critical comment is all the more relevant to theologians who insist, like for instance Moltmann, that Jesus learnt obedience through his

61. For elaborations of a similar perspective, see Boff, Passion of Christ, 45f., 94; When Theology Listens to the Poor (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 113ff.; Brock, Journeys, 94; Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 42ff., 155; Vítor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 85ff.; Kreinecker, Das Leben bejahen, 39ff.; Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 84; O’Collins, Jesus our Redeemer, 170f., 188ff.; Love, Love, Violence and the Cross, 128f., 157; and Jeff B. Pool, God’s Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2011), 304f. 62. Sölle, Thinking about God, 131ff.; Sölle, Suffering, 139, 175; Mary C. Grey, Feminism, Redemption, and the Christian Tradition (Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1990), 170; Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 155; Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 2003), 120; Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 220; Katherine Sonderegger, ‘The Humility of the Son of God,’ in Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013); Scott R. Swain and Michael Allen, ‘The Obedience of the Eternal Son,’ ibid.; and Julia Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self,’ in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, ed. Johannes Zachhuber and Julia Meszaros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 79. 63. See also Helga Sorge, ‘Wer Leiden will muss Lieben: Feministische Gedanken über die Liebe der christlichen Vorstellung vom gekreuzigten Gott,’ Feministische Studien 2, no. 1 (1983), and Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 61, 80. 64. Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, 162. 65. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 31. See also Heyward, Saving Jesus, 79ff.; Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York: Continuum, 1994), 102, and Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 35, 58f.

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acceptance of becoming the medium of the Father’s compassionate suffering.66 In either case, self-sacrifice is an immoral act of violence done, or allowed to be done, to oneself in order to avoid destructive violence to be committed to others: ‘When theology presents Jesus’s death as God’s sacrifice for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive.’67 For Brown and Parker, justice will not be achieved if one neglects the well-being of oneself for the benefit of victimizers.68 To empty oneself is to deny oneself justice, and by accepting suffering as virtuous it perpetuates violence. For this very reason, they also reject theologies of sacrifice arguing along the lines of the so-called moral-influence theories of atonement, like that of Abelard (in some respects), the Socinians, Schleiermacher, Ritschl or Bushnell. Even if the Son of God accepted suffering and death to show his solidarity with our suffering, this is not in itself redemptive: ‘It is not acceptance of suffering that gives life; it is commitment to life that gives life. The question, moreover, is not, Am I willing to suffer? But Do I desire fully to live?’69 While asking the former question pacifies the victim, the latter constitutes an impulse to transformative social action that struggle to end suffering. This will come to expression as transformative resistance. Parker says, Resistance can disrupt an oppressive system and when widespread enough it can bring it down. Resistance is a transforming act. But it is not the abuse inflicted on resisters that brings about the transformation. It is their refusal to cooperate with injustice. Direct action saves people; not the violence of oppressors. The violence directed against activists and revolutionaries must evoke grief not adulation. Making the pain of backlash and repression positive cloaks perpetrators. Perpetrators should not be hidden by language that praises the death of martyrs as nourishment for the world. Courageous resistance and hope nourish and change the world. This is what redeems and transforms.70

66. See also Barth, CD 4-I, 164, 202; and Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, trans. Harold et.al. Knight, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 311 (henceforth, CD 3); von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 105ff., 208f.; and more recently Bruce A. Ware, ‘Christ’s Atonement: A Work of the Trinity’, in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, ed. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007), 160ff., and Swain and Allen, The Obedience of the Eternal Son. 67. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 25. 68. Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 12; Brock, ‘And a Little Child Will Lead Us,’ 53f., 70; Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 8f., 58f., 93; Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 18ff., 156; Hampson, After Christianity, 145, 157f., 270; and Parker, Blessing the World, 8f. 69. Brown and Parker, For God so Loved the World?, 20. See also Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 31. Their argument is supported by Helga Sorge, Delores Williams and Rosemary Ruether. Sorge, ‘Wer Leiden will muss Lieben,’ 68; Williams, Sisters; and Rosemary Ruether, Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000), 104ff. 70. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 40.

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Following this train of thought, Parker emphasizes that the greatness of Jesus comes to expression in his creative prophetic critique of religious and political violence (widely understood).71 The blood shed on the cross was not constitutive of the meaning of his redemptive mission, but its contingent and tragic consequence. Jesus was no saviour because of the cross, but despite the cross. Rita N. Brock writes, ‘The doctrines of salvific death do not make sense. There is no mystery here. Connection cannot come from disconnection any more than love can come from hate.’72 God’s presence in Jesus does not come to expression in his active endurance of suffering for the sake of love (Abelard, Ritschl, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann), nor in his conquest of death (Gregory of Nazianzus), but rather in his prophetic resistance to all the countless varieties of self-destruction: materialism and monopolistic power, social and religious exclusivism (etc.).73 In opposition to Bonhoeffer’s insistence that only a suffering God can help humanity out of its misery, Daphne Hampson asks: why could not God’s compassionate power of love consist precisely in the ability to lift human beings out of suffering without Godself necessarily suffering in the same way?74 Yet even if they reject that suffering in itself is redemptive, some feminists are prone to accentuate the fact that love entails vulnerability to suffering. Brock, for instance, finds God’s love in the vulnerability of God’s presence in the child, further emphasizing that while a life lived in solidarity with victims of abuse and for the cause of justice may involve suffering, it is not a life lived in self-denying love.75 Rather it is a self-aware life in which one affirms oneself as living with and for others fully conscious of the risks of suffering it involves. She writes: Love is not without pain. Love involves change and to change involves risk. We face the limits of love in the finite circumstances of our lives, the experiences which have nurtured and wounded us. Love requires the courage for risk-taking and self-possession, not self-sacrifice. The more we love, the more loss carves into our souls. Pain is the risk of loving, not the basis of love.76

What distinguishes immoral from moral suffering is whether or not it is intended, affirms one’s selfhood and aims at overcoming suffering and pain.

71. Parker, Blessing the World, 13. See also Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus against Christianity, 318ff., passim, and Weaver, ‘Narrative Christus Victor,’ 23. 72. Brock, Journeys, xiii. 73. See also Williams, Sisters, 166. It should be noted that Brock here is reluctant to describe moral resistance as prophetic because it implies the unilateral power of the prophet (who acts on behalf of God). Brock, Journeys, 65. 74. Hampson, After Christianity, 146. 75. Brock, ‘And a Little Child Will Lead Us,’ 54, 57. See also Hampson, After Christianity, 274; Heyward, Saving Jesus, 156f.; and Sölle, Suffering, 164. 76. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 158.

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I am not sure how Rebecca Parker would respond to these suggestions, yet I find some reasons to think that she would agree insofar as it categorically rejects instrumentalizing suffering. Her argument is that it is not the vulnerability, the loss, or the suffering themselves that are redemptive, for example, by moving the perpetrator to convert from his or her evil ways, or by fanning the flames of compassionate resistance to injustice. Redemptive are only those aspects of a course of action that are not self-sacrificial, but rather constitutive of a living resistance to the suffering of loss for the sake of some higher good.77 Parker would surely endorse Sharon Welch’s claim that ‘choosing not to resist injustice would be the ultimate loss itself ’.78 Nevertheless, both Brock and Parker affirm that the relation between love and suffering is contingent (one of probability, not necessity), and insist that it is not the bearing of pain itself that lifts people out of suffering, but collective resistance.79 Compassionate acceptance of unintended and unjust suffering is not intrinsic to love, resistance to suffering is. Responding to the line of argument developed by Parker and Brown, Cynthia Crysdale insists that acceptance of suffering is an inevitable consequence of the non-violent resistance that Jesus embodied. She writes, ‘It is essential to grasp that Jesus chose suffering only as the indirect consequence of choosing to be himself, to fulfil his mission, to love the world. Suffering, sacrifice, ransom, were not objects of choice. Jesus accepted suffering, he did not choose it.’80 For Brown and Parker this distinction just clouds the issue. Accepting suffering is a choice. Jesus could just as well have resisted suffering. By making the acceptance of suffering intrinsic to love this kind of reasoning risks putting ‘ concern for the evildoer ahead of the concern for the victim of evil’.81 It is not acceptance of abuse that transforms victimizers.

77. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 41. In the context of this later publication, Brock seems to fall in line with Parker on this point. Ibid., 124. See also Parker, Blessing the World, 9, 33. 78. Sharon D. Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990), 165. 79. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 110ff. See also Parker, Blessing the World, 13f. 80. Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 155. Italics in the original. See also ibid., 2, 29, 138, Similar claims are made by Sölle, Suffering, 141; ‘Der Erstgeborene aus dem Tod,’ 67; Heyward, The Redemption of God, 54; Boff, Passion of Christ, 45; Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice, 90; O’Collins, Jesus our Redeemer, 170f., 188ff.; Inge van Nistelrooij, Self-Sacrifice: A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice (BOXPress, 2014), passim. A more moderate endorsement of the notion that acceptance of suffering can be redemptive is found in Esther McIntosh, ‘The Concept of Sacrifice: A Reconsideration of the Feminist Critique,’ International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007): 226ff. 81. Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 20. See also Williams, Sisters, 200; Regula Strobel, ‘Opfer als Zeichen der Widerstandes?: Kritische Blick auf problematische Interpretationen der Kreuzigung Jesu’, in Erinnern und Aufstehen: Antworten auf Kreuzestheologien, ed. Claudia Janssen and Benita Joswig (Mainz: Grünewald Verlag, 2000), 77, and Magdalene Frettlöh, ‘Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte und die überlebenden sexueller

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Such acceptance merely feeds into the victimizer’s perverse projection of assent onto the victim.82 Conversion (or repentance) is only achieved by identifying their acts as morally wrong and by holding them accountable for their actions.83 Only an unreserved will to life and justice for all is redemptive. This amounts to ‘ rejecting and denying the abuse that is the foundation of the throne of sacrifice’.84 In contrast, Crysdale endorses this concern for the victim writing that ‘resurrection life for the crucified means claiming a voice, naming victimization, claiming human dignity and then discerning responsibility’.85 She insists that the meaning of the cross and resurrection cannot be reduced to the meaning it holds for victims of sin. It addresses both the victim and the victimizer: the victimizer is brought to the recognition that he or she, by destroying others, is in fact also destroying him or herself; the victim comes to see him or herself as victim who through the power of God will regain dignity.86 Although recognizing the value of the promise of life beyond violent destruction inherent in the resurrection, for Parker and Brown there is also a danger in this story insofar as in it the restitution of the victim comes too late: ‘The promise of resurrection persuades us to endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom.’87 It becomes, so to speak, the people’s opium/the opium for the people. If Jesus’s compassion resulted in him accepting becoming a mirror of the destructive pain of his victimizers, then he lacked a feeling for self that balanced his empathy – such a Jesus becomes bound to his victimizers by a bond of misery, not of love. It is not the mirroring of sin that saves, but resistance and the affirmation to break out of the abuse. In accepting victimization for the sake of love, Jesus lacked what Brock describes as self-protective anger: Anger that frees us to claim ourselves must be recognized and embraced as an aspect of ourselves. In embracing it, rather than in allowing others to feel our anger for us or in venting it on others, anger can become an important tool that

Gewalt: Kreuzestheologie genderspezifisch wahr genommen,’ in Das Kreuz Jesu: Gewalt, Opfer, Sühne, ed. Rudolf Weth (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), 98. 82. Regula Strobel, ‘Gekreuzigt für uns - Zum Heil der Welt?,’ in Opfer: Verschenktes Leben, ed. Regula Strobel (Zürich: Pano Verlag, 2001), 128. 83. See also Fortune, The Transformation of Suffering, 144. 84. Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?,’ 27. 85. Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 17. See also Sölle, Suffering, 150, and Deanna A. Thompson, Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 151. 86. Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 8ff., 20 See also Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: Universal Affirmation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 132ff.; Boff, Passion of Christ, 130ff.; and Tück, ‘Am Ort der Verlorenheit,’ 52ff. 87. Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?,’ 37. See also Parker, Blessing the World, 132.; Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 250; and also Sölle, Suffering, 173.

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God as Sacrificial Love helps us understand our own pain and to determine what, in our relationships, is acceptable or unacceptable for our well-being.88

The acceptance of suffering is not needed by love to avoid an existential selfcontradiction. Rather it is itself a contradiction of goal and means that requires resistance and the affirmation of self that leads out of the abuse and secures survival. The problem is that in the case of Jesus such resistance comes too late, as a kind of ‘delayed gratification’.89 To sacrifice one’s current well-being for the sake of a vague hope in a future joy is ethically unsound. The alternative indicated is not that redemption is brought about through self-defensive counter-violence: ‘The most violence can do is to stop something, like a violent aggressor, but it can never create. It can never bring peace into being. It can never repair what has been lost.’90 It is only non-violent love that can secure human flourishing.91 Furthermore, the need for a mirror of sin is also identified as the problem behind the idea that the suffering and death of Jesus was vicarious. When Luther stated that ‘Christ mirrors our sin, demonstrating what should have happened to us,’ he is not confronting us with our sins, but constructs a mirror that protects human beings from the punishment of God by projecting their failures onto another, who in dying for us kills by reflection what human beings dare not face themselves.92 Against Girard’s notion of the saving surrogate victim, Christine Gudorf has argued that the vicarious suffering of an innocent does not break the cycle of violence but merely re-channels it, and by so doing protects the violent

88. Brock, Journeys, 21. Here Brock in fact echoes a point already made in Aristotle (Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 231), and rehearsed by Kant (Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Lauchlan Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 416f.), and Hume (David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. SelbyBigge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 605). See also Parker, Blessing the World, 11, and Anca Gheaus, ‘Is Unconditional Forgiveness Ever Good?’ in New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson (London: Springer, 2010), 57ff. 89. Harrison and Heyward, ‘Pain and Pleasure,’ 154. See also Brock, Journeys, xi. 90. Parker, Blessing the World, 14. 91. So, also Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus against Christianity, 318ff. 92. Luther quoted after Deanna A. Thompson, ‘Becoming a Feminist Theologian of the Cross,’ in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 86. It is unclear to me from which work by Luther this quote is drawn, but the point is at least clearly formulated by Luther in ‘Ein Sermon von der Betrachtung des heyligen Leydens Christi,’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. J. R. J. Knaake, vol. 2 (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus, 1884), 137ff. See further Ralf Frisch and Martin Hailer, ‘Ich ist ein Anderer: Zur Rede von Stellvertretung und Opfer in der Christologie,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41, no. 1 (1999): 65f.

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subject(s) from the protest of the victims for which the surrogate stands.93 On a similar note, Delores Williams points to the socio-historical problem with the idea of substitutionary atonement: it sacralizes both coerced and willed surrogacy of (many black) women, the former because it makes the salvation of some dependent on the suffering of others, and the latter because it construes Christ as accepting victimization for the benefit of others.94 My analysis of the two families of critiques has touched upon a complex range of interwoven issues. I will conclude by identifying what I see to be the distinctive marks of these two families of critiques of the traditional doctrinal notions of God as sacrificial love, namely their differing understandings of what kind of relational dynamics of power that promotes good living in just relationships. The first line of critique argues that the Christian tradition can contribute to reaching this goal by taking its departure in the structure of the intra-Trinitarian relationships, and explicate the relationship between God and humanity in Christ in terms of self-emptying, self-sacrifice or self-giving. God is not a self-sufficient, self-assertive God who stands in opposition to humanity with demands of justice, while at the same time solving the problem by sacrificing another (Jesus) in a paternalizing act of love for humanity. There are two relational power-dynamics that are promoted. The first one is the notion of a (Father) God who sacrifices himself in the other (Jesus), who gives up ‘his’ position of dominance in favour of the beloved. Rosemary Ruether, for instance, speaks of the incarnation as ‘the kenosis of patriarchy ’.95 The second one, represented above by Farley and Coakley, reverses this relational dynamic portraying Jesus as recognizing the need for him as a human being to open himself up to divine empowerment. Within these kenotic frameworks, the self-sacrifice of Jesus attains a positive significance – a witness to the non-violent empowering love of God committed to love of others no matter the price. They conceive of Jesus as presenting the morally transformed human heart as a gift to God. Understood in this way, the death of Jesus is indeed sacred bloodshed: by exemplifying the rejection of dominance through violence it consecrates humanity and by so doing incorporates it into the holy. The second line of critique rejects that just relationships will ever be established if we depart from explicating the relationships in God, and between God and humanity, by recourse to such relational dynamics. If self-sacrifice means selfemptying (or selflessness) it is a relational problem, not a solution.96 Insofar as true love requires the existence of relaters who are truly other to each other,

93. Christine Gudorf, Victimization: Examining Christian Complicity (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1992), 14f. See also Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 76, and Brock, Journeys, 91. 94. Williams, ‘Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience’, and further Sisters, 161ff. From a different perspective, see also Love, Love,Violence and the Cross, 114f. 95. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 137. Italics in the original. 96. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 36ff., 47, 157f., and Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 155.

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the absorption of one of the relaters into the other makes true love impossible. What we need then is a notion of God, the relational life of whom is one of strict mutuality (or equality), both in relation to Godself and in relation to humanity.97 Good living in a just society is only secured by mutual relationships of what Daphne Hampson calls ‘centred selves’.98 While acknowledging the problem of the isolated self in hubris, Brown, Parker and Hampson emphasize that the total effacement of the self in self-sacrifice is equally problematic: true mutuality will not be achieved by taking any of these two paths. True love (or justice) will only be actualized where two (or more) persons give to each other without giving up anything of that which constitutes them as persons, that is, their capacity to pursue their own aims in freedom.99 This will neither be achieved if we base our moral lives on a Trinitarian theology according to which the Son gives himself up to the Father, the Father gives up his Son, or where the Father gives up himself in the Son.100 Correspondingly, the Christological problem is that neither a Christ emptying himself of his humanity, nor of his divinity, will actualize true mutuality. True mutuality is only present where the personhood and equality of all involved are preserved and nourished. The sacrifice of Jesus thus becomes an expression of his failure to present a self-sustaining protest against the evil he encountered in the political and religious authorities, tasks to which he was assigned by his Father.101 Similarly, critics of Brown’s and Parker’s cast are reluctant to accept Christ as exclusive divine incarnate, the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as the notion of a God creating out of nothing because they believe these imply a relational structure of domination and submission.102 Both the traditional Christian notions of

97. See also Heyward, The Redemption of God, passim, and Saving Jesus, 55ff. The principle upon which this critique is based is already found in Schleiermacher’s critique of the notion that the Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 743f. 98. Hampson, After Christianity, 145, 163. 99. Ibid., 160f., Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 42. 100. Parker reacts intensely to Moltmann’s insistence that the Father suffers in the child, writing that ‘This is what the abuser does. He requires the other to feel pain and then imagines the other is himself. He finds life by externalizing his pain and then embraces the one he tortures’. Ibid., 198. 101. Ibid., 37. 102. Hampson, After Christianity, 16ff., 119ff.; Theology and Feminism, 151ff.; Mary Daly, ‘After the Death of God the Father: Women’s Liberation and the Transformation of Christian Consciousness’, in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & and Row, 1979), 58f. Others restrict themselves to the claim that Jesus was not unique in his divinity. See Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?’ 27; Brock, Journeys, 28, 52ff.; Heyward, The Redemption of God, 31, 44; Saving Jesus, 57, 66; Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 34; and Keller, Face of the Deep, 220f. For a condensed outline of the feminist critiques directed at the classical doctrine of the Trinity, see Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Trinity and Feminism,’ in The Cambridge

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creation, salvation and sanctification (or deification) rely on a notion of God as creating out of nothing, that is, of unilateral power. Recall Luther’s much quoted words in the Heidelberg disputation: ‘The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.’103 And as we read in 1 Jn 4.10, ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ Within this relational life everything depends on God. This notion is imported into the divine life where the Father is distinguished from the Son and the Spirit by being the eternal origin of the latter two. Soteriologically this intraTrinitarian asymmetry comes to expression where the divinity of the human being Jesus is thought to consist in his obedience to the will of the Father, regardless of whether this obedience is required by the Father or freely offered by the Son.104 Its power-dynamic is asymmetrical insofar as the saving power of Jesus is presented as dependent upon his relationship to the Father and not vice versa, as the resurrection clearly shows. This one-way dependency is transposed into the relationship between God and humanity where Jesus is confessed as having a unique transcendent source of power, making him a ‘superman’, a knight in shining armour who solves all of humanity’s problems by a paternalizing act of grace, without any human participation.105 As Darby Ray notes with reference to Anselm’s conception ‘we are to blame for an infinite transgression, but we are powerless to mend the situation. If God is all-powerful king, then we are abject subjects, completely helpless and utterly dependent. God’s power requires our powerlessness.’106 The basic problem behind the theological and Christological ones then seems to be that the notion of God as sacrificial love presents God as a paternalizing creator unable to actualize a relationship of true mutuality, neither within Godself, nor in relation to humanity. For these critics, love is never a power that someone possesses, and may therefore never be unilateral.107 It is generated

Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 136ff. 103. Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation,’ 57. 104. Brock, Journeys, 57, and Regula Strobel, ‘Feministische Kritik an Traditionellen Kreuzestheologien,’ in Vom Verlangen nach Heilwerden: Christologie in FeministischTheologischer Sicht, ed. Doris Strahm (Fribourg: Exodus, 1991), 57f. 105. See Heyward, The Redemption of God, 166ff., 192, 197f.; Brock, Journeys, passim; Mary Grey, ‘Jesus – einsamer Held oder Offenbarung beziehungshafter Macht?: Eine Untersuchung feministischer Erlösungsmodelle,’ in Vom Verlangen nach Heilwerden: Christologie in feministisch-theologischer Sicht, ed. Doris Strahm and Regula Strobel (Fribourg: Exodus, 1991); Julie Hopkins, ‘Sind Christologie und Feminismus Unvereinbar?: Zur Debatte zwischen Daphne Hampson und Rosemary Radford Ruether,’ ibid., 206; Sorge, ‘Wer leiden will muss Lieben,’ 61; Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 66f.; and Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 160, 163. 106. Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 38. 107. Brock, Journeys, 34, 52, 54.

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by connectedness, and thus always bi- or multi-lateral. If God is love then the relationship between God and the ones God loves is mutually constitutive: ‘“In the beginning was the relation”, a mutual relation between Creator and created.’108 How are we to evaluate these multilayered critiques? Before moving on to systematically develop my own answer, I will present a sample of a distinct countercritique seeking to critically re-appropriate several elements of more traditional theologies of sacrifice of Protestant cast.

4.3 The ‘Tübinger Antithese’ – A Partially Failed Counter-critique An attempt to counter some of the main assumptions of the critiques presented in the previous section is found among representatives of the Tübinger Antithese – a family of positions resembling that held by several prominent Christian theologians today.109 Their strategy consists in showing how the above critiques

108. Heyward, Saving Jesus, 149f. See also Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 75f.; Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (New York: Continuum, 1994), 84f.; Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 258f., 274; Parker, Blessing the World, 157ff.; and Marit Trelstad, ‘Putting the Cross in Context: Atonement through Covenant,’ in Transformative Lutheran Theologies, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 115f. 109. Its main proponents are Hartmut Gese, Peter Stuhlmacher and Martin Hengel. See especially Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1981), 93ff.; Stuhlmacher, ‘Zur Predigt am Karfreitag’; Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 302ff.; and Martin Hengel, The Atonement: The Origins of the Doctrine in the New Testament (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1981). The name derives from the fact that it was developed as a reaction against the position championed by Rudolph Bultmann. Although he affirmed the traditional historical critique by pointing to the mythical character of semantics of sacrifice as a hindrance to contemporary readers of the Bible, exegetical and hermeneutical reasons primarily undergirded his rejection of doctrinal interpretations of the significance of the life and death of Jesus exclusively based on notions of consummate sacrifice. (Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology: The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of its Re-Interpretation,’ in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (London: SPCK., 1953), 35f., and ‘A Reply to the Theses of J. Schniewind,’ in Kergyma and Myth, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (London: SPCK, 1953), 108f.) Bultmann’s critique was aimed at a specific doctrinal use made of such notions, namely the one presenting Jesus as a high priest providing sacrificial satisfaction or propitiation to God (Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, 7f., and developed somewhat further by Käsemann Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom, trans. Frank Clarke (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1970), 112ff.). Although recognizing both Bultmann’s critique of sacrificial atonement understood in terms of sacrificial satisfaction or propitiation, and his insistence on the plurality of imagery used by NT authors to spell out the meaning of the death of Jesus, the representatives of the Tübinger Antithese insisted that the notion of atoning sacrifice, properly understood, is the only Biblical notion able to

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are either in-authentically Christian, based on a misreading of the Bible or on a sentimental unwillingness to take sin and God’s judgement seriously.110 While it originally took shape as an exegetically oriented biblical hermeneutics of sacrifice, I will reconstruct its systematic theological implications. Following the lead of Hartmut Gese, Peter Stuhlmacher affirmed the close continuity between the notion of sacrificial atonement found in the Hebrews Scriptures, and the way in which NT authors interpreted the death of Jesus. He claimed that this is the only NT-notion that can integrate the juridical, commercial and personal metaphors also used to express the basic meaning of his death.111 Gese’s and Stuhlmacher’s common point of departure was the claim first made by Klaus Koch, that according to the old Hebrew world view where justice reigns there is an internal connection between actions carried out and their consequences, so that the latter follows with necessity from the former. Stuhlmacher frames this internal connection between sin and its consequences not as a law of nature laid down by God in creation,112 but as a juridical relation that reflects the justice of God as laid down in the stipulated patterns of interaction found in the covenant law.113 Thus it cannot simply be bypassed, not even by God. Here Stuhlmacher echoes Anselm’s insistence that a God who did so would be

articulate the full saving significance of the death of Jesus. For a good summary presentation of the original conception of the Tübinger Antithese, see Dalferth, ‘Dogmatische Erwägungen,’ 171ff. On contemporary positions of a similar cast, see for instance Ulrich Wilckens, Der Brief and die Römer (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1978), 233ff.; Gerhard Barth, Der Tod Jesu Christi im Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1992), 68ff., Jüngel, Das Evangelium, 131ff.; Henri Blocher, ‘The Sacrifice of Christ: The Current Theological Situation,’ European Journal of Theology 8, no. 1 (1999): 29ff.; George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 361ff.; Otfried Hofius, ‘Sühne IV: Neues Testament,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 346; Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 169ff.; Thomas Söding, ‘Sühne durch Stellvertretung: Zur zentralen Deutung des Todes Jesu im Römerbrief,’ in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); and Bernd Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?: Zwölf Fragen zum Gottesbild des Alten Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Theologie, 2013). The list could be extended much further. 110. Peter Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 304, 313ff. See also Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 204f., and Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?. 111. On this and the following, see Peter Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 3rd. edn, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 127ff. 112. As in Hugh R. Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 169. 113. Klaus Koch, ‘Gibt es ein Vegeltungsdogma im Alten Testament?,’ in Um das Prinzip der Vergeltung in Religion und Recht des Alten Testaments, ed. Klaus Koch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972). See also Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 60ff., Bernd Janowski, ‘Die Tat kehrt zum Täter zurück: Offene Fragen im Umkreis des “Tun-

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a God who does not take the relational damage caused by sin seriously. A God who does not confront the disturber of the relationships with the damages done, but unconditionally welcomes him or her into God’s arms, is no God of love. A God of love must be a just God who recognizes human responsibility to preserve that which secures good relationships with God and within the human world. If sin did not require God’s judgement, God would make sin harmless, and good relational life would be impossible.114 In this way, Stuhlmacher, Parker and Brown are in agreement regarding the basic principle that a God of love is a God of justice holding humanity accountable for their sins. However, the problem for critics of the mould of Parker and Brown is the way in which God is said to do so by requiring the vicarious death of an innocent. In distinction from Anselm as well as the critiques presented in the previous section, Stuhlmacher affirms Gese’s basic thesis that, in the Bible, atonement is achieved through Jesus’s vicarious suffering of the death-sentence incurred by sinful human beings.115 As in the theology of the reformers, salvation requires vicarious death because there is a fundamental tension between God’s holiness and human sin that cannot simply be overlooked by a divine act of mercy. Justice must be served, yet humanity is unable to satisfy the requirements of God’s justice, so God expresses God’s love for humanity in that God pays the ransom required by divine justice (or holiness).116 If the ransom is paid, the life of humanity can be (re-) incorporated into the holy. If the ransom is not paid, humanity will perish when confronted with the holiness of God. These juridical and commercial metaphors are constitutive of the meaning of sacrificial atonement, according to which the sacred bloodshed of Jesus is a symbolic recognition of the fact that human beings must pass through death, the ultimate consequence of sin, in order to be incorporated into the holy. Jesus was symbolically (or vicariously) punished because the holy love of God cannot secure life without judging sin, and the ultimate judgement of sin is that of sacred bloodshed. Janowski (with a quote from Karl Barth) says, ‘Reconciliation occurs at the place of reconciliation through blood, through the solemn remembrance that God brings to life by killing.’117

Ergehen-Zusammenhangs”’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 91 (1994): 256ff., and Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 82ff. 114. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 304f., 315. See also Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 58f., 170ff., and a similar position in Tony Lane, ‘The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God’, in Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 2001). 115. Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 114; Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 55, 57; Biblische Theologie 1, 137. See also Otfried Hofius, Paulusstudien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989), 45f. 116. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1, 127f., 137f., and Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 311. See also Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 210, 214f. 117. Bernd Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen: Studien zur Sühnetheologie der Priesterschrift und zur Wurzel kpr im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament (Neukirchen-

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At this point, the reader might well wonder whether this position represents an alternative to the views of Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas or the Protestant reformers. Yet Gese, Stuhlmacher, as well as Janowski all wish to distance themselves from Anselm’s notion of satisfaction and the idea of propitiation developed by Abelard, Aquinas and the reformers.118 Jesus did not appease God’s wrath, nor did he render satisfaction for God’s lost honour. The sacred bloodshed of Jesus was not an instance of do-ut-des, that is, a sacrifice provided to make a wrathful God more favourable towards humanity.119 The justice of God is an expression of God’s love for human beings.120 It is human beings who need atonement, not God. The point of the death of Jesus was not the killing as such, but that it provided the symbolic material through which life is incorporated into the holy once and for all. While Hartmut Gese sometimes spoke of atonement as achieved through sacrificial ‘payment’, the main thrust of his argument was oriented around the idea that biblical ‘sacrifice of life is not a mere killing, a sending of life into nothingness, but it is a surrender of life to what is holy, and at the same time an incorporation into the holy’.121 Sacrificial bloodshed is here a symbolic recognition that all human life is dependent on God.122 This insistence makes the Tübinger understanding of the sacrifice of Jesus similar to that ascribed to Barth in Section 2.3, according to which the death of Jesus reveals the ultimate penalty of sin, and so brings human beings to recognize God as their source of life.123 This re-interpretation of sacrifice is significantly different from Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas and the reformers.124 Furthermore, Stuhlmacher attempts to determine more precisely that which, according to Anselm, constituted the efficacy of the blood (i.e. life) of Jesus. It was not the moral perfection of Jesus in itself that made it so. Rather the moral quality manifest in the way in which he willingly endured his suffering and accepted death attested to his participation in divine life.125 His bloodshed was sacred, and thus had an atoning effect, because his life revealed that he lived with and from God.

Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1982), 362. Italics in the original. Author’s translation. See also Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 108. 118. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 303ff., 312ff.; Biblische Theologie 1, 129; Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen, 354; and Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 286, 315f. See also Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 173. 119. For a classic clarification of the do-ut-des-formula, see Gerardus van der Leeuw, ‘Die do-ut-des Formel in der Opfertheorie,’ Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 20 (1920–1). 120. See also Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 58f., 171f., 316. 121. Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 99, and ibid., 107. 122. van der Leeuw, ‘Die do-ut-des Formel,’ 252. 123. From a Catholic perspective, Hans Urs von Balthasar formulated a similar view. Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, and Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory IV: The Action, trans. G. Harrison, vol. 4 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 338ff. 124. Dalferth, ‘Dogmatische Erwägungen,’ 176. 125. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1, 126. See also Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 296f.

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Even so, because humanity may only be incorporated into the holy by participating in the moral perfection of Jesus, God required the death of an innocent. When summing up the view of the Tübinger Antithese, I will return to the analytical questions introduced in Chapter 2. The initiator of the sacrificial mission of Jesus is God the Father, and insofar as Jesus (as Son) endorsed this initiative, they together provided the object of the sacrifice. Even if the concrete executors of the sacrifice were the religious and political authorities, they carried out the judgement of God and so the indirect executor is God.126 The motivation behind the sacrifice of Jesus was to bring humanity into a life-giving relationship with the holy. Because a just God cannot make this happen by simply overlooking human sin, judgement is required. Through his death, Jesus suffers the required penalty in humanity’s stead, saving it from the final judgement. The blood of Jesus had the capacity to incorporate life into the holy because it flowed from the divine life itself. In other words, the sacrifice of Jesus was atoning because it was the selfsacrifice of God. Now, how are we to evaluate this position in light of the critiques presented above? The basic conception of the Tübinger Antithese can be assessed from different perspectives. First, we could ask if the historical assumptions on which it rests are adequate.127 As my perspective on the present topic is systematic, I will limit myself to a few methodological remarks in this regard. What cannot be denied, no matter which interpretation of the death of Jesus one professes, is that the saving significance of this event is articulated in terms of sacred bloodshed in the NT literature (especially so in Hebrews). Yet, stating this fact is one thing, articulating its doctrinal import another. Quoting biblical passages is not a theological argument per se. Furthermore, while it is important to critically investigate the exegetical and hermeneutical presuppositions on which various doctrinal uses of theological terms are based, such an endeavour does not decide if biblical notions of vicarious sacred bloodshed are coherent. Even if such an investigation revealed that the notion was among the latest and/ or most evolved attempts to spell out the significance of the death of Jesus, this cannot be a decisive argument against the claim that such a vocabulary does not offer a coherent conceptual scheme for doing so. Nor is the opposite the case. Even if Jesus himself were understood to interpret his own death in terms of

126. Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 58. 127. Ingolf Dalferth distinguishes between three such assumptions: 1) The exegetical thesis of Otfried Hofius according to which the saving significance of the death of Jesus articulated in 2 Cor. 5.21 is only adequately expressed by utilizing the notion of an atoning sacrifice. 2) The genetical thesis of Martin Hengel according to which the saving significance of the death of Jesus originated in the interpretation of his death as a vicarious atoning sacrifice, and his insistence that the meaning of his death is constitutively bound to this origin. 3) The historical-evolutionary thesis of Peter Stuhlmacher according to which the notion of a vicarious atoning sacrifice represents the ultimate expression (ger. Sprachgestalt) of the saving significance of the death of Jesus. Dalferth, ‘Dogmatische Erwägungen,’ 180f.

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divine self-sacrifice, this would not be an argument for its theoretical validity. Doctrinal criteria cannot be connected to what is more original, most evolved, most prevalent or not. A theological statement is not true simply because it is truly biblical. It is true insofar as it is possible to integrate it into a theological construal more coherent than its alternatives. A criterion of authenticity must not be confused with a criterion of truth. From a systematic point of view, the main problem with the Tübinger position is its fundamental ambiguity concerning the receiver of the sacrifice of Jesus. On the one hand, with Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Bushnell and Bultmann they explicitly rejected the view that the self-sacrifice of Jesus satisfied or propitiated God. On the other, at least Stuhlmacher’s argument relies heavily on the notion of ‘ransom’ used in Mk 10.45 interpreted within the juridical framework suggested by Exod. 21.30 where it is said to be required of someone sentenced to death as a compensation for their life.128 The question then becomes who is the one requiring this compensation, and why.129 Insofar as Stuhlmacher thinks the setting is that of the final judgement (reading Mk 8.37 on the background of Ps. 49.7-9), the only real option is God.130 It is to God that humanity remains guilty. But, in Stuhlmacher’s conception, God does not act against God’s justice. The love of God consists in Godself fulfilling God’s requirements. As noted, God cannot simply ignore the internal connection between sinful acts and their consequences. In a societal life existing coram deo, actions have consequences predetermined by the justice of God. In fact, Stuhlmacher admits that this justice comes to expression as wrath, but hastens to add that he does not understand God’s wrath in terms of rage or hatred, but as an incessant will to resist injustice.131 This point has recently been made with considerable argumentative force by Bernd Janowski.132 The question is whether this last qualification actually allows Stuhlmacher and Janowski to avoid the problematic notion of God implied in the penal-substitionary view of the reformers, or whether they, against their own intentions, indirectly commit themselves to just such a position.133

128. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1, 127, and Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 307f. On this point, he draws on Bernd Janowski, Gottes Gegenwart in Israel: Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments, vol. 1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1993), 5ff. See also Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 95, 99. 129. It is not at all obvious that Jesus is suffering a ‘divine penalty’ as Craig A. Evans argues (Craig A. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 121. Mark neither states who the receiver is, whether this debt has to be paid, nor why it has to be paid. The subject behind the suffering is also ambivalent if it is indeed Isa. 53.10-12 that lies behind Mark’s formulation (see Isa. 53. 4-5a). 130. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1, 128f., and Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 311. 131. Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 315. 132. Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 58f., 171f. 133. Confronted with the critiques articulated in the previous paragraph, Stuhlmacher and Janowski have responded somewhat differently. While Stuhlmacher has discarded these

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Now, recall Ritschl’s critique of the penal-substitutionary view of the reformers and the Protestant orthodoxy: the notion of a judge who exacts a death-penalty from an innocent in place of the guilty is an incoherent juridical construct, because a deathpenalty can only be exacted from the guilty party.134 Causing someone to suffer and die can legitimately be termed a penalty only if the sufferer is guilty, something Jesus was not. In doing so they become subject to the contradiction of goal and means that lies at the core of the traditional logical (and implicitly also the theological) critique of sacrifice: how can a perfectly loving God solve the problem of injustice by actively committing, or passively allowing, injustice? Violence is accepted/exercised for violence to be eradicated. Is this the only way that God can confront human beings with their sins? There are several biblical texts which clearly indicate that God has the capacity to do so without the need of a vicarious self-sacrifice (e.g. Ps. 103. 3, 10; Jer. 31. 33f.; Jon. 3.10; Mic. 7.18f.; Mt. 18.27; Mk 2.5; Lk. 7.47-49; 15. 20, 22; 19.8).135 As some of these passages show, Jesus at the very least had the capacity to confront and embrace sinners before his suffering and death (against Heb. 9.22), and by doing so also transforming the way they related to themselves, to God and to other human beings. The insistence that a passage through the deathpenalty is necessary for the sinner to be able to turn to God reveals a neglect of the transformative power of God’s love in the life of Jesus as a whole.136 As noted, while Parker and Brown would agree with Stuhlmacher and Janowski in their insistence on the importance of holding humanity accountable for their sins, they would strongly oppose making the vicarious self-sacrifice of an innocent the symbolic means for doing so. According to them, this would be to put the concern of the evildoer ahead of that of the victim, and that is never redemptive. And what is even worse: insofar as the indirect executor of the sacrifice of Jesus is God, God becomes the evildoer.137 This implication also follows from the Barthian position presented above.138

critiques by simply restating his former position (Stuhlmacher, ‘Zur Predigt Am Karfreitag’ and Biblische Theologie und Evangelium, 303ff., 312ff.), Janowski has endeavoured to supply the juridical-economic paradigm from which most of the problems articulated above arise with soteriological notions resembling those of critics of the first mould presented above (Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 315f.). Whether this solves the problems stated in this paragraph is hard to tell because Janowski has not developed a detailed systematic position on the issue, particularly when it comes to the significance of the death of Jesus for ‘der brennende Ernst der Gericht (Heb. 10.27)’. Ibid., 344. 134. While milder penalties may be taken on by the innocent party on behalf of the guilty (e.g. a speeding-ticket), death-penalty cannot. 135. Wilfried Härle, Dogmatik, 4th edn (Berlin: De Grutyer, 2012), 334. 136. See also Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 295 for further critical remarks against Barth on this point. 137. It should be noted that Janowski explicitly rejects the thought that God is the executor of Jesus. Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 296f. 138. For further critical remarks against Barth on this point, see Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 295ff.

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Moreover, the idea of a ransom being paid to God implies an idea of ‘penal suffering’ that retains the quasi-transactional economic logic of cultic sacrifice rather than dissolving it.139 If the efficacy of the ransom was dependent on Jesus actively sacrificing himself (Heb. 9.22) we would be sedimenting the meritorious logic of the cultic framework which Jesus sought to dissolve.140 Atonement is

139. More recently Günter Röhser, (Stellvertretung im Neuen Testament (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2002), 98ff.), and Jacob Nordhofen (Durch das Opfer erlöst?, 83f.) have followed Stulmacher in their interpretation of the ransom-saying in Mk. 10. 45. In contrast, Ulrich Wilckens, among others, has claimed that λύτρον is a rendering of the Hebrew cultic term  ‫( אשׁם‬guilt-offering). Wilckens, Der Brief and die Römer, 239. See also Klaus Koch, ‘Sühne und Sündenvergebung um die Wende von der exilischen zur nachexilischen Zeit,’ Evangelische Theologie 26 (1966): 235, footnote 30, and Joachim Jeremias, Abba: Studien zur neutestamentlische Theologie und Zeitgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), 227. Adela Yarbro Collins also interprets the ransomsaying in terms the language of the OT sacrificial cult, but treats it as a synonym to ἱλαστήριον (Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 502ff.). Building on Exod. 21.30, Bernd Janowski goes beyond the restriction of cultic usage claiming that in Israel a ransom came to be treated as equivalent to life, that is, required of someone sentenced to death as compensation for their life (Bernd Janowski, ‘Auslösung des verwirkten Lebens: Zur Geschichte und Struktur der biblischen Lösegeldvorstellung’ in Gottes Gegenwart in Israel: Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments, ed. Bernd Janowski (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1993), 5ff. See also Gese, Essays on Biblical Theology, 99). In his reading, Peter Stuhlmacher follows Janowski, and supports his interpretation by referring to Mk. 8.37 (and Ps. 49. 7-9) where human beings are said to be unable to provide such a ransom (Peter Stuhlmacher, Reconciliation, Law, and Righteousness: Essays in Biblical Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1986), 23ff. and ‘Zur Predigt Am Karfreitag,’ 23ff.). Even if the OT background of the term supports such a reading, the metaphorical character of Mark’s statement should warn us against reducing the meaning of the term to this (see Friedrich Büchsel, ‘Das nt.liche lútron-Wort,’ in Theologische Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1942), and Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (London: SCM Press, 1980), 480ff.). In Tit. 2.14 and 1 Pet. 1.18, for instance, Jesus’s ransom is not said to save people from death, but from an empty and wicked life. Metaphorization is a semantic process in which some aspects of previous (or different) usage are retained, but new ones are also added. In Mark, the ransom must be taken as a metaphor referring to the atoning action through which humanity is ‘freed’ from the consequences of sin. When read together with other instances of the ransom metaphor, the consequence of this liberation is the adoption by the author of life to be stewards of God’s love (see especially, Rev. 1.5f.; 5.9f., but also 1 Cor. 6.20; 7.23; Gal. 3.13; 4.15; 1 Pet. 1.18; 4,1ff.). 140. Falk Wagner, ‘Die christliche Revolutionierung des Gottesgedankens als End und Aufhebung menschlicher Opfer,’ in Zur Theorie des Opfers, ed. Richard Schenk (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 262.

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not a sacrifice provided in order to satisfy a legitimate juridical-transactional requirement established by God. The notion of the ransom should not be understood in cultic terms as a sacrificial transaction through which God pays a debt to Godself. Not only does this make God’s act of love in Christ an event that occurs completely external to the persons involved, such a literal reading is an anthropomorphic distortion that makes God into a small-minded sadomasochistic materialist.141 An impulse towards meeting the challenge posed by this critique can be found in an aspect of Luther’s soteriological conception. Luther insisted that the death of Jesus achieved atonement because as the law punishes Jesus unjustly it loses its dominion over him.142 It becomes a contradiction in terms, the law reveals itself as injustice. By fulfilling the law by living justly, Jesus dissolves the law (reveals its injustice).143 By being based on requirements that must be satisfied without thereby securing a good relationship between God and humanity, it loses its saving power. Only an action that gifts humanity this relationship anew can do so. Below I will be building on this insight, and combine it with the claim that the incarnation is an expression of God’s endeavour to sustain life even in the face of misguided love. In doing so, I will have to move beyond the vocabulary of the juridical and commercial paradigms. I need to say something different, and something more, than these allow me to say. The question to be pursued below then is whether the notion of God as sacrificial love can be coherently integrated into such an attempt. Before doing so I will, however, elaborate a bit further on the critical note made above regarding the hermeneutical strategy upon which Gese and Stuhlmacher rely (Janowski is here an exception),144 and which makes them blind to the voices of the biblical texts according to which God has the capacity to lift people out of their sin without the need for a vicarious suffering of the death-penalty. This strategy becomes apparent if we take a critical look at the way

141. Finlan, Problems, 81f. See also Sorge, ‘Wer leiden will muss lieben.’ 142. Luther, Lectures on Galatians: 1-4, 26, 369ff. Augustine followed a similar reasoning: Insofar as Jesus had never sinned, his death could not be justly claimed. By accepting the innocent blood of Jesus as the price for the release of humanity, the devil carried out an injustice: claiming the life of someone upon which he had no just claim (Augustine, The Trinity, 357f.). Thus, justice is already fulfilled upon the cross. As Leo the Great said, ‘By virtue of his going after more than what justice allowed, the sum of the entire debt is canceled’ (Leo the Great, Sermons, trans. Jane P. Freeland and Agnes J. Conway. (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 85). See further Laurence W. Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement (London: The University of Manchester Press, 1920), 46ff, and T. Scott Daniels, ‘Response to Hans Boersma,’ in Atonement and Violence: A Theological Conversation, ed. John Sanders (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006), 85. 143. It should be noted that this is a different law compared to that good law that, according to Luther, is to regulate the Christian life. 144. Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 316.

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in which they locate the sacrifice of Christ. According to the view of Gese and Stuhlmacher reconstructed above, the sacrifice of Jesus takes place exclusively in his death. Against this I would argue that we should align ourselves with the early Christian writer’s insistence, reemphasized especially by Schleiermacher, that God’s mission to re-establish a living fellowship between humanity and God (or ‘incorporation into the holy’) is co-extensive with the incarnation.145 However, this does not in itself amount to a decisive counter-argument against the claim that the meaning of the Gospel story as a whole is ‘cruciform’. Lutherscholar Gerhard Forde says: Luther … projects for us an inescapable awareness of being drawn into the event. … Thus the cross story becomes our story. It presses itself upon us so that it becomes inescapable. … The cross thereby becomes the key to the biblical story and opens up new possibilities for appropriating – or better, being appropriated by – the entire story.146

Forde here echoes the perspective of Paul who, in the context of the specific challenges faced in Corinth, orients his whole rhetorical strategy around ‘the message of the Cross’ (1 Cor. 1, 18), to the degree that it seems to absorb the total significance of the person Jesus of Nazareth.147 When wanting to develop an optimally differentiated and coherent soteriological notion of sacrifice, a theology of the cross must indeed be developed. Yet, an attempt to do so will fail if it is unable to connect the meaning of Jesus’s suffering and death to his pre-Easter ministry and his resurrection.148 The angel’s warning to Jesus’s parents has theological significance (Mt. 2.13). If what God wanted was simply the bloodshed of an innocent as ransom, this warning would make no sense. Jesus was not born only to be murdered.

145. This complies with Janowski’s view (ibid.). It should be noted, however, that most early Christian writers paid little attention to the specific details of Jesus’s life when unfolding their understanding of salvation. For them, the act of incarnation referred to the moment of divine conception in Mary. 146. Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 8. We could also recall Luther’s often quoted statement: ‘CRUX sola est nostra theologia’ - the cross alone is our theology. Martin Luther, ‘Operationes in Psalmos,’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. Paul Pietsch, vol. 5 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1892), 176. 147. That this focus is conditioned by contextual circumstances is obvious if we compare the wording in the letters to the Corinthians and Galatians with that of Romans, where Paul desists from referring to the Cross except on a single occasion (Rom. 6.6: συνεσταυρώθη), without thereby lacking vocabulary to spell out the saving significance of the death of Jesus. 148. Pannenberg claims that this weakness is readily apparent in Luther. Pannenberg, Jesus, 278f.

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Those who have attempted to develop non-sacrificial interpretations of the death of Jesus, often deviate from the hermeneutical strategy of traditional Lutheran theologies of the cross. For instance, in his interesting critical study of traditional atonement theories, Anabaptist theologian J. Denny Weaver argues that the event of Jesus’s death cut off from the full story of his life stands in danger of becoming the kind of one-sided obsessive glorification of suffering and weakness as the one witnessed in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. In this movie, the life of Jesus only appears as fragmented flashes, merely visible in the midst of the intense account of his suffering and death.149 In Weaver’s opinion this is hermeneutically unsatisfactory because the substantial meaning of the death of Jesus is only decipherable from the point of view of his life before his passion and crucifixion.150 Furthermore, if the full significance of Jesus is found in his vicarious suffering of our death-penalty, then why was the resurrection even necessary, and what was the point of his life before the crucifixion? A third option is to adopt a hermeneutic approach in which we spell out the significance of the death of Jesus exclusively from the point of view of his resurrection. Even if this is indeed the point of view from which the Gospel stories are told, the meaning of the resurrection is equally hard to decipher if we do not take Jesus’s message as a whole into consideration. If we exclusively adopt this approach, it would prevent us from taking proper account of the crucial soteriological connection between his death and our death.151 Each moment of the life of Jesus – his birth, life and death – together offer more resources for understanding human life than each taken by itself.152 It is only by taking account of the internal dynamics of Jesus’s earthly fate as a whole that we are able to articulate a comprehensive theology of atonement. The death and resurrection of Jesus happened to a historical figure with a distinct message, and a specific purpose, actualized in a particular way of living and dying. His birth, earthly path, death and resurrection are ‘variations on the same theme, the life of Jesus’.153 Christof Gestrich articulates a differentiated epistemological rule for

149. According to Rita Nakashima Brock, we should ponder the fact that Jesus was absent from artistic depictions of the cross until the fifth century AD, and images of a suffering Jesus did not appear until a thousand years after his death. Not until violence became an integral part of Christian mission was a tortured and dead Christ portrayed on the cross, telling the pagans of God’s just punishment on their sins. Brock, ‘The Cross of Resurrection and Communal Redemption,’ 242ff. 150. Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 35ff., 74 and ‘Violence in Christian Theology,’ 231ff. 151. See Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 216, and recently Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 182, 193, 203, 215, 240f. 152. Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 131. 153. Ibid., 130. Author’s translation.

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doing Christology to which I hold affinity also when it comes to a comprehensive systematic theology of sacrifice:154 1. Only from the point of view of the death and resurrection of Jesus do we reach a proper understanding of his earthly life. 2. Only from the point of view of his death and earthly life do we correctly understand the Easter event. 3. Only from the point of view of Easter and the earthly life of Jesus are we able to properly articulate the significance of his death. The systematic implications of this epistemological rule will be evident from the way in which I develop my theology of sacrifice in the rest of this book. Before moving on, however, some further critical remarks should be made in relation to how the Tübinger biblical scholars understood the significance of the death of Jesus. The question that should be asked is whether Jesus actually experiences the penalty of sin on the cross, or whether the death he suffered signified something else. To begin with, I will argue that death, as such, is no penalty. It is simply a consequence of being a finite human. Furthermore, Jesus did not experience death as absolute ontological separation from God.155 Rather his death and resurrection revealed the only relational power able to transform the meaning of mortality as an existential condition of humanity in a way that overcomes it as the ultimate threat to fellowship.156 Jesus did not die the death of a sinner, but died in God, and so ‘by the power of an indestructible life’, he freed those ‘who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death’ (Heb. 7.16; 2.14b, Mk 5.36; 1 Jn 4.17). Does this mean that the death and resurrection of Jesus do not confront human beings with their sin(s)? No, but this confrontation is not related to the manner of his death on the cross, but to his prophetic critique of injustice, his practice of healing and forgiveness, and in his resurrection from the dead. Also, and importantly, the resurrection of Jesus is not only that of someone who died, but also that of a murder-victim. The way in which Jesus died was an expression of someone becoming the object of sin (Rom. 8.3). It was not a divine penalty, but an affliction brought on him exclusively by the hands of human beings. God’s ultimate judgement upon sin did not manifest itself in Jesus’s suffering on the cross, but in

154. Christof Gestrich, Christentum und Stellvertretung: Religionsphilosophische Untersuchungen zum Heilsverständnis und zur Grundlegung der Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 390. 155. This insistence is also directed against Moltmann who writes that ‘the cup of eternal death does not pass him [Jesus] by’ (Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Praying with Open Eyes’ in Passion for God: Theology in Two Voices (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 58). See also The Crucified God, 287; The Trinity, 80; and Barth, CD 1-2, 403. For a contrary view, see Härle, Dogmatik, 340. 156. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 296.

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the empty grave. However, with respect to both his murder and his death, God revealed God’s responsibility for sustaining and nurturing creation despite its inherent destructive forces (that human beings are but partly responsible for). For his followers, his murder was not a proof of his divinity – quite the contrary. They fled into seclusion mourning and weeping (Mk 14.50; 16.10; Lk. 24.20f.; Jn 20.19). The comfort of God comes with the joy of Easter morning. I will endeavour to further substantiate this line of argument below. Secondly, Stuhlmacher leaves it unclear whether the crucifixion of Jesus was a ‘positive’ (or direct) punishment or a negative expression of what it means for humanity to move away from the power of love that creates and sustains the finite world, that is, self-exclusion (or self-violence). Thirdly, the relational power-dynamics of the Trinitarian and the Christological perspective are severely underdeveloped, and leave numerous critical questions formulated in the previous section unanswered. What has become evident from my critical comments on the Tübinger Antithese is that they have not been able to offer a coherent counter-critique to the logical and theological critiques presented in Chapter 3 and in the previous section. All these remarks indicate why I find this position lacking the conceptual sophistication needed to clearly distinguish between those aspects of the suffering and death of Jesus that express (absolute and relative) victimization, self-limitation, selfsacrifice and self-giving. Below I will develop a conceptual scheme that will allow us to both clarify the problems levied against theological uses of semantics of sacrifice, and to develop more cogent answers to these problems. Having said this, I would also like to accentuate some valuable intuitions found in the Tübinger position, intuitions that can be integrated into a more coherent counter-critique. First, as noted in section 3.2, I will be affirming the hermeneuticalcriteriological thesis upon which it is based, according to which biblical notions of atoning sacrifice are a hermeneutic key for understanding the significance of the person Jesus.157 Second, semantics of sacrifice offer resources for understanding how the meaning of our death is transformed through the death of Jesus in a way which reveals how life can be sustained in death. Third, I will be acknowledging the vicarious character of life and death of Jesus. Fourth, the Triune God is the source of good life and thus of salvation and human flourishing. Fifth, I would argue that even though talk about the wrath of God may be rhetorically misguided, there are some important theological matters that would be given insufficient attention if we did not attempt to explicate this notion. The full systematic significance of these suggestions will be discussed in what follows.

157. Dalferth, ‘Dogmatische Erwägungen,’ 185.

Chapter 5 GOD AND SACRED BLOODSHED

The overarching question that will be discussed in the following sections is whether or not sacred bloodshed can be coherently thought of as an expression of a relational life of true love and thus as inherently life-sustaining and lifeenhancing. I cannot move on to a systematic consideration of this question unless I first develop a fine-grained conceptual cartography for this realm of phenomena. The need for conceptual clarity has become abundantly clear from my overview of the critiques of the claim that God is involved in sacred bloodshed. And even though my heuristic point of departure was a configurational semantic according to which sacrifices have no essence, as noted in the introduction, a theoretical presentation must employ a strategy of reductive idealization if it is to be explanatory and open to critical assessment. What follows are some regulative definitions that will be constitutive of the systematic argument to be developed in due course. That these definitions are regulative means that they determine the direction of this study without being reductionist (or essentialist). They are restricted to the context of personal relationships, and while heuristically based on some phenomenological intuitions, they are not confined by them. How then, are we to understand the relation between the concept of self-sacrifice and those of victimization, self-limitation, self-destruction, self-annihilation, self-giving and self-emptying (or kenosis)?1

5.1 Sacred Bloodshed and Self-sacrifice – Some Conceptual Clarifications I will start out by distinguishing self-sacrifice from that of being victimized. While a self-sacrificing person actively and reflectively accepts loss because of his or her selfconscious commitment to a particular value (e.g. the actualization of love), a human being is a victim when suffering losses unwillingly. This means that the willed selfvictimization of Jesus which we heard René Girard speak of above, and Crysdale’s

1. The following conceptual elaborations are further developments of the conceptual scheme developed in Groenhout, ‘Kenosis,’ 296ff.

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talk of Jesus as accepting victimization, become contradictions in terms.2 Likewise Moltmann’s description of Jesus’s death as an act of solidarity is incompatible with describing Jesus as a victim. A victim is, however, rarely completely passive (as when losing one’s life in a car accident, in a natural disaster or when being murdered). Victimhood is most often constituted by a tension between how persons relate to one another: the victimizer treating someone as a mere object for his or her selfactualization, the victim resisting to be treated in such a manner.3 Whereas victims are passive regarding the situation of suffering in which they find themselves, they are not passive about how they relate to this situation. Victims remain free in the sense that they have free will, but their range of possible actions has been restricted in a way that makes them incapable of avoiding violence.4 To be a victim is constituted by a will to protect a range of values against the attempt of another person to negate it. This freedom of will may be expressed in different ways; s/he can attempt to break free or kill the victimizer, commit suicide, forgive the victimizer, verbalize anger, sadness, or staying silent (etc.). Thus, what distinguishes the victimizer from the victimized is not freedom of will or freedom of action as such, but that the victim has neither chosen, nor accepted, to become a victim. A person who deliberately chooses to suffer violence, or accepts being made an object of violence in the presence of other alternatives is not a victim, strictly speaking.5 Yet, whether a genuine deliberate choice is in fact present is, indeed must be, controversial. What to the acting subject may be a deliberate choice, might be interpreted by an observer as an instance of cultural (-psychological) violence. For instance, whereas a Muslim woman wearing a head-scarf may deliberately choose to do so, a western feminist observer would say that she is seduced, by the norms prevalent in the culture to which she belongs, into doing so and into thinking that doing so is a virtue. Similarly, the horrible case of child rape told by Rebecca Parker in Proverbs of Ashes could be taken

2. Nicholas Harvey, Gerald O’Collins, Walter Sparn, Christina Kreinecker, and Jeff Pool similarly describe Jesus self-sacrifice/self-giving as an instance of letting oneself be victimized. Nicholas Peter Harvey, Morals and the Meaning of Jesus: Reflections on the Hard Sayings (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrims Press, 1993), 80ff.; O’Collins, Jesus our Redeemer, 159; Walter Sparn, ‘´Eph’ Hapax...`: Historische und systematische Aspekte des christlichen Opferbegriffs,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50, no. 3 (2008): 231; Kreinecker, ‘Das Leben bejahen’; and Pool, God’s Wounds 2, 364. 3. Absolute passivity does not necessarily involve losing one’s life. Victims of extreme trauma (e.g. near-lethal sexual assaults) may become completely paralysed making any reference to willed resistance meaningless. Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 45f. 4. It should be noted that there are also cases of victimization where someone is forced to harm oneself and/or others. 5. Maria Katharina Moser, Opfer zwischen Affirmation und Ablehnung: Feministischethische Analysen zu einer politischen und theologischen Kategorie (Wien: LIT, 2007), 470. See also Zachhuber, ‘Modern Discourse,’ 13.

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as an instance of cultural violence.6 While the child thinks that she is doing her rapist a favour, to the observer she is obviously seduced into doing so because of subconscious psychological mechanisms acquired through the symbolic framework of a surrounding (Christian) culture according to which self-sacrificial love is lauded.7 Although these are important matters of ethical discourse, the tension itself is inherent to the multi-perspectival character of a human being, and cannot be dissolved. Finally, and importantly, the terms ‘victim’ and ‘victimizer’ are designations of a relational dynamic specific to particular situations (or actions). A person who in one situation regarding a certain set of actions is victimized may in another be the victimizer. When born into a finite world, every human being finds itself at risk of losing something. We become aware of our own needs and desires and become vulnerable to those of others. Insofar as our resources are limited, we are required to choose between courses of action that express commitments to different values: when a particular course is taken something else is given up, as for instance when someone prioritizes staying at home caring for children instead of pursuing a professional career. Yet the character of what is given up differs – some are more substantial than others. For some, the choice just mentioned is utopian (a non-space), finding themselves forced to choose between begging and prostituting themselves to secure survival for their families. At this point the distinction between selflimitation, self-sacrifice, self-destruction and self-annihilation becomes important to consider. Whereas a victim is defined by his or her failed attempt to protect his or her freedom of action against attempts to severely restrict it, when he or she limits him- or herself, he or she also aims to secure this freedom for others. Self-limitation denotes the freely chosen restriction of one’s physical, spiritual and emotional (etc.) space and time of freedom to preserve good and living relationships between self and others. Such courses of actions do not reduce one’s capacity to live with, for and from others. On the contrary, because self and other are co-constitutive, I receive myself only to the extent that I am capable of preserving the otherness of others. The otherness of others only appears as I limit myself. In other words: as the other receives him or herself, I receive myself in my very self-limitation. At the basis of actions that fall into this category lies the recognition that the failure to take the needs and

6. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 165ff. See also Darlene Fozard Weaver’s analysis of ‘the happy porn-worker’, and Nancy Hirschmann’s description of the situation of victims of domestic violence who ‘choose’ to stay in abusive relationships. Darlene Fozard Weaver, Self Love and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 172, 182f., and Nancy J. Hirschmann, ‘Domestic Violence and the Theoretical Discourse of Freedom,’ Frontiers 16, no. 1 (1996): 132ff. 7. Such cases are not always instances of seduction caused by the cultural framework. The cultural framework may sometimes function as a means for the victim to understand how one ended up being victimized. I am grateful to Ingolf Dalferth for making me aware of this distinction.

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desires of others into account would inhibit the establishment and development of good societal life. For example, in cases where someone seeks to consume an unlimited amount of goods without concern for the needs of others, societal life dissolves. Insofar as social living characterized by justice is good for everyone, selflimitation is not exclusively carried out for the benefit of one individual. Its receiver is the societal ‘we’. What specific kinds of actions and intentions self-limitation would include depend on the basic value-orientation of the subject, as well as that of others. What I consider to be penultimate values may be held as ultimate values by other people. Thus, although I may endeavour to limit myself in a certain way, others may want me to do so differently. But while self-limitation is negotiable, the limits set are ultimately recognized by the limiting subject itself. At the other end of the continuum of actions involving the giving up of something, there is self-destruction. When incessant, self-destructive actions inevitably result in the annihilation of one’s personal existence.8 In self-destructive courses of action, a person willingly incurs permanent losses of vital resources. Its end result can only be experienced by the acting subject in anticipation. When Rebecca Parker describes the possible consequences of self-sacrificial love as ‘simply pain, the diminishment of life, fragmentation of the soul, abasement and shame’, within my preferred vocabulary what she is describing is the consequences of victimization or self-destruction.9 Self-sacrifice is the middle term between self-limitation and self-destruction. Unlike self-limitation, self-sacrifice involves a temporary loss of values recognized as constitutive of one’s personhood,10 and unlike self-destruction and selfannihilation it is carried out to preserve the relationships between oneself and others.11 Whereas self-sacrifice includes self-limitation, self-limitation never involves self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is an intensification of self-limitation to the point in which the interests that serve the immediate flourishing of our personhoods

8. This does not necessarily imply absolute cessation of existence. In some variants of Hinduism, for instance, the end of personal existence is not the end of existence. 9. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 25. In a similar vein, Pamela Sue Anderson equates self-sacrificial love with self-destructive love. Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Sacrifice as Self-Destructive Love: Why Autonomy should still Matter to Feminists,’ in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, ed. Johannes Zachhuber and Julia Meszaros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10. Erin Lothes Biviano’s definition of sacrifice as ‘a willingness to accept material or intangible losses’ offers us an insufficient criterion to distinguish between self-limitation and self-sacrifice. Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice, 4. The same can be said of Julia Meszaros’s understanding of self-sacrifice as ‘to clench our teeth and offer up certain personal desires precisely in order to help others to become free and strong subjects capable of genuine love and mutual care’. Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self,’ 68. 11. See Eliszbeth Amoah, ‘Sacrifice/Self-Negation,’ in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarksom (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).

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are temporarily set aside in the conviction that our relationships to others will be somehow sustained, or their quality increased.12 Thus self-sacrifice is not exclusively concerned with the well-being of others, as in Anselm’s understanding of sacrifice as vicarious satisfaction, in the reformer’s understanding of vicarious punishment, or more recently in, for instance, Boff, Coakley and Dalferth.13 Nor do I sacrifice myself when I am the only one who gains something from the loss.14 As with acts of self-limitation, truly self-sacrificial actions are based on the conviction that good living with, for and from others is actualized through the mutuality of persons: because others have given me the identity and freedom that constitutes my dignity as a person I am also the source of the very same gift to those for whom I am an other. This does not mean that mutuality among persons primordially arises through the actions of a subject or its other. It is rather the very mode of relation through which both self and other originally appear.15 Mutuality is the moral-ontological ‘between’ that connects every finite being with every other.16 Every consequent self-sacrificial action is carried out based on the (implicit or explicit) recognition of this fact. It is important in this context that we introduce a distinction that is completely lacking in the critiques of theologies of sacrifice formulated above, namely that between mutuality and reciprocity. If understood as an instance of the latter relational modality, self-sacrifices take place within a structure of quasi-economical transactions in which either I sacrifice myself for others in order to gain something for myself (do-ut-des) or do so because the other has sacrificed him- or herself for me (do-quia-dedisti).17 Here giving and receiving

12. This presupposes that a person cannot sacrifice him- or herself if s/he does not recognize the inherent value of him- or herself, that is, self-haters cannot sacrifice themselves. 13. Boff, Passion of Christ, 20; Dalferth, ‘Opfer als Glückfall des Lebens,’ 133; and Coakley, Sacrifice Regained, 26f. 14. Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self,’ 72. 15. See Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 140ff. and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald, Meridian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 73ff. 16. Jeff B. Pool, God’s Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 236. On the notion of moral-ontological values, see Lorenz B. Puntel, ‘Der Wahrheitsbegriff in der Ethik: Versuch einer Klärung,’ in Abwägende Vernunft: Praktische Rationalität in Historischer, systematischer und religionsphilosophischer Perspektive (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), and Structure and Being, 298ff. 17. This understanding of the structure of sacrificial actions was first formulated by Marcell Mauss (Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), and Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (Glencoe: Free press, 1954), and has more recently been re-appropriated by Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 137f.

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comes with an obligation to give back: if I give you give, and vice versa. My understanding of self-sacrificial actions differs from this in that it is taken as events instantiating mutuality. Self-sacrifice unfolds where two or more relaters give themselves up because they assume responsibility for the flourishing of relationships between free persons. While reciprocity seeks out equilibrium in a balanced ‘give-and-take’ interaction, mutuality does not. It is ‘aneconomical’ insofar as it does not unfold in terms of a mutually obliging circular exchange of this for that (quid pro quo), that is, collaborative egoism.18 Yet, neither is it self-effacing altruism. If we do not analyse self-sacrificial actions from the perspective of the pure phenomenal ideality of gift-giving as in Derrida (where pure giving can be experienced only as impossibility),19 but within the concrete communicative practices in which they take place, the benefactor of self-sacrificial actions is in a deep sense a communal ‘we’.20 Self-sacrificial actions bring to expression that which is the presupposition of the genesis and flourishing of everyone, namely love itself. When a person accepts that he must lose himself to preserve love he is himself preserved as lover and the

18. I allude here to the terms used by Miroslav Volf, ‘Being as God is: Trinity and Generosity’ in God’s Life in Trinity, ed. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 12. 19. Derrida, Given Time, 7ff. See also The Gift of Death, 95ff., and the illuminating discussion between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida recounted in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 56ff. Contrary to the claim, made by for instance Inge van Nistelrooij or Miroslav Volf, that pure giving is phenomenologically possible (van Nistelrooij, Self-sacrifice, 251, and Volf, ‘Being as God is’ 8), from Derrida’s particular perspective the aporia seems to me to be irrefutable. Pure giving constitutes a nonrelational relation which is an incoherent notion. As soon as the presenter of a sacrificial gift becomes aware that this is in fact what s/he is doing, the giving-up becomes gain, and is thus always ‘impure’ from the point of view of phenomenal ideality. When searching for a coherent characterization of (sacrificial) love within concrete social relationships, the search for such purity is futile (on this point, see also Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 61f.). In fact, Derrida explicitly recognizes this possibility stating that his deconstructive phenomenology of the gift is an attempt to demonstrate the limits of phenomenology from within phenomenology, without thereby concluding that there is not something more to be said concerning gift-giving beyond such a methodological approach (see Derrida’s comments in Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift, and Post-modernism, 66, 71, 75f.). 20. On the necessity of this methodological reorientation in treating gift-giving, see John Milbank, ‘The Midwinter Sacrifice,’ in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 122ff.; Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘Umsonst: vom Schenken, Geben und Bekommen,’ Studia Theologica 59, no. 1 (2005): 89; Tanner, Economy of Grace, 61f.; and most recently Olli Pyyhtinen, The Gift and Its Paradoxes: Beyond Mauss (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 8.

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others as beloved.21 More formally, the trajectory of a self-sacrificial process should be described as follows: when A, because of the specific demands of a particular situation, recognizes that his responsibility for the life and freedom of B, C and D (etc.)22 can only be actualized in (temporarily) giving himself up, A becomes a sacrificial lover, and B, C and D become sacrificially beloved. Their concrete status as relators is simply given in their very mode of relating: the one who freely loves despite loss of self receives what he gives and becomes what he does.23 This does not mean, however, that he becomes a lover because of the loss, but that he remains so despite the loss. Whereas a person cannot love unless he limits himself, he can love without sacrificing himself. Selfsacrificial love is the relational modality only sometimes required for love to be generated and sustained within a world inhabited by beings capable of only finite forms of relating. The vulnerability of each loving person in relation to others comes from the fact that love can only flourish in freedom. Thus, when a loving person freely gives him- or herself up for others, the latter remains free to return with love, share it with others or desist from doing either.24 Selfsacrifice is the radical expression of the fact that my freedom most radically depends on its affirmation by others. They occur when a person’s attempt to preserve living mutuality are met with attempts to negate it (sometimes by just ignoring it). In these situations, finite life together sometimes means that I must give up myself. As Sigrid Brandt underlines, an ordinary gift-exchange involves non-vital resources belonging to a self (or collective of selves) and as such it is an expression of living with one another. Providing sacrifices, on the other hand, means living from one another, that is, it actualizes a flow of resources constitutive of

21. Claudia Welz, ‘Love as Gift and Self-Sacrifice,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50, no. 3 (2008): 257. 22. Ultimately, because self-sacrificial actions are without preference for someone in particular, they intend universal mutuality among free persons. It is a relational mode in which we see in every other our neighbour (as another I am also included in this category). The universal character of actions carried out in true love is brilliantly formulated in Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 58. See further Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 172f. 23. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 281. See further Welz, ‘Love as Gift and Self-Sacrifice,’ 257, and Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self,’ 81. This does not mean that the self-sacrificing subject is not aware of the loss suffered because of the self-forgetfulness that characterizes spontaneous love (see Mt. 6.3). If the experience of loss were not present, it would not be a self-sacrificial action but something else. Self-sacrificial actions are what they are because they are so interpreted, and thus they cannot but remain a self-conscious activity. 24. Thus, it is not an instance of do ut possis dare where one gives power in order that others may be able to give (Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice, 20f.). What should also be noted is that this is a moral claim, not an ontological one. Ontologically, relationships are given in the primordial experience of being mutually responsible for the freedom of others.

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living fellowship.25 Self-sacrifice is not merely expenditure. It always involves a substantial loss, a forfeiture of self.26 It is this element that emphatically connects the understanding of sacrifice as gift-giving to that of violence. What is important to emphasize, however, is that sacrificial giving is not only loss. The sacrificial gift is not the loss, as Robert Spaemann claims.27 And while it may be irreversible, it is not self-destructive. As soon as the presenter of a sacrificial gift becomes aware that this is in fact what he or she is doing, the giving-up becomes gain. The gain is the awareness of the love that is sustained and nurtured despite the loss. Yet, what makes value-judgements concerning actions involving such loss so controversial is that it is only possible in retrospect to determine whether an act intended as self-sacrifice is indeed so, and not an instance of self-destruction or, as we shall later see, self-giving. Furthermore, because our conceptions of what constitutes the (distinct) personhood of a human being develops over time, it is equally hard to distinguish clearly between self-limitation, self-sacrifice and self-giving (on this last notion, see below). What I may at one point consider to be a loss of an aspect of my personhood may over time, or in a different context, come to be recognized as an insignificant loss, or even an illusory one (e.g. Mt. 16.25 par. or Phil. 3.7f.). Thus, our designation of a course of action as self-giving, self-limitation, self-sacrifice and self-destruction is intimately connected to what we take to be the fulfilment of human personhood in a particular situation. One last note on the relation between self-sacrifice, self-destruction and selfannihilation must be made. Whereas in self-sacrifice the relationship between self and other remains interactional, because of self-destructive acts, a relationship is only retained as a memory in others. While both forms of relationship may well be alive (and spiritual) in some sense, there is a qualitative difference between the living memory of a person, and a living person. What we are left with then is the phenomenon in which the acting self is forgotten, or where the self-destructive actions done for the good of others remain unknown to everyone except oneself. Only in the last case are we talking about absolute self-annihilation. In the face of the classic enlightenment and recent liberationist and feminist critiques of the Christian use of semantics of sacrifice, some contemporary theologians have sought a way out of the conundrum turning their attention to sacrifices in which forfeiture, loss and destruction are not essential elements, but

25. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 357f., ‘Hat es sachlich und theologisch Sinn, von “Opfer” zu reden?’ in Opfer: Theologische und kulturelle Kontexte, ed. Bernd Janowski and Michael Welker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 256. See also Horst Bürkle, ‘Die religionsphenomenologische Sicht des Opfers und ihre theologische Relevanz,’ in Zur Theorie des Opfers, ed. Richard Schenk (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 160f. 26. Pyyhtinen, The Gift, 26. 27. Robert Spaemann, ‘Einleitende Bemerkungen zum Opferbegriff,’ in Zur Theorie des Opfers: Ein interdiziplinäres Gespräch, ed. Richard Schenk (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 22f.

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rather contingent prerequisites for gift-giving.28 How are we to understand the relation between acts of self-sacrifice and self-giving? Self-sacrifice and self-giving are different kinds of giving.29 While self-sacrifice and self-limitation involve giving up something, self-giving refers to instances where something good is given without being given up.30 Self-giving is here understood to be made possible by the superabundance of that which is given – the source of the gift is inexhaustible. An interesting question thus becomes whether self-giving can provide others with an aspect constitutive of the identity of a self in its well-being, or whether such giving is inherently sacrificial. Finally, before closing this conceptual tour, I will make a short stop on the concept of kenosis, a concept to which so many theologians have recently reached to find a constructive way out of the critical impasses that arose in the wake of modern critiques of understanding Jesus in terms of sacrifice.31 How does this

28. M. F. C. Bourdillon, ‘Introduction’ in Sacrifice, ed. M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes (London: Academic Press, 1980), 17ff.; Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 124f., 135, 140f.; Brita L. Gill-Austern, ‘Love Understood as Self-Sacrifice and Self-Denial: What does it do to Women?’ in Through the Eyes of Women, ed. Jeanne Stevenson Moessner (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 316ff.; Christian Eberhart, Studien zur Bedeutung der Opfer im Alten Testament: Die Signifikanz von Blut- und Verbrennungsriten im kultischen Rahmen (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2002); Risto Saarinen, God and the Gift: An Ecumenical Theology of Giving (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005); Markus Mühling-Schlapkohl, Versöhnendes Handeln – Handeln in Versöhnung: Gottes Opfer an die Menschen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 329; Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, and to a considerable degree also Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice, and John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body: Biblical Anthropology and Christian Self-Understanding (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013). This paradigmatic change of focus was initiated by the anthropological studies of Edward B. Tylor. See Edward B. Tylor, Religion in Primitive Culture, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1958), 461ff. 29. Whereas Markus Mühling is claiming that loss is a contingent feature of a sacrificial act, I would say that loss is the feature that distinguishes self-sacrifice from self-giving. The latter distinction is lacking in Mühling’s otherwise excellent reflections on Christian soteriologies of sacrifice. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 328f. Robert Daly is also a prominent example of someone who lacks this crucial distinction. In his suggestive work on sacrifice, self-sacrifice/self-offering and self-giving are used interchangeably, that is, as synonyms. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled. See also Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 32f. and Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body, 162, passim. 30. Welz, ‘Love as Gift and Self-Sacrifice,’ 250f. Similarly, the widespread tendency to understand self-giving as synonymous to self-abnegation or self-humiliation simply intensifies the confusion of the matter. See for instance Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 173; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus, 102; Joh, Heart of the Cross, 128; and O’Collins, Jesus our Redeemer, 159f. 31. See for example von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 23ff.; Theo-Drama 4, 332ff.; Coakley, Powers and Submissions; and Mercedes, Power for.

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concept relate to the conceptual distinctions made in this paragraph? It can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can be taken as synonymous with self-destruction in which the self initiates a course of action through which it ceases to exist, that is, completely empty of that which constitutes its personhood. Secondly, it can be taken as a synonym for every act that involves giving up something. Thus, it may mean everything from self-limitation through self-sacrifice to self-destruction and self-annihilation.32 Which mode of self-other-relation comes to expression in the sacred bloodshed of Jesus? In the sections to follow, I will answer this question by reconstructing various aspects of God’s action in Christ by recourse to the conceptual apparatus now developed.

5.2 The Incarnation as Compassionate Self-limitation The conceptual framework needed to provide a nuanced characterization of the relational life that brings humanity and God to fulfilment is now set. For the moment, I will, however, leave aside the socio-historical aspects of the above critiques, and concentrate my attention on the logical and theological problem. I will not address the various critiques formulated in Chapter 4 head on, but systematically unfold an argument that will challenge them at the various points where they become relevant. The first clarification that must be made concerns the question of whether God actualized God’s love for humanity because of the cross, as in the first family of critiques formulated above or, as Parker and Brown (etc.) argue, that it was so actualized despite the cross. Because of the logical contradiction of goal (love, justice) and means (innocent suffering and murder) entailed in the former, Parker and Brown chose the second option: any instrumentalization of suffering and death is theologically suspect. To properly evaluate this critique, several distinctions must be made. First of all, the suffering of God that resulted from God’s empathy with the victims of violence must be distinguished from the suffering that Jesus underwent under the violent hands of the religious and imperial authorities. The former was an expression of a love that is vulnerable in its eternal openness to the needs and experiences of a universe that suffers.33 Love is affectivity, that is, the capacity for receiving the feelings of other beings, be

32. Groenhout, ‘Kenosis,’ 296ff., and Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice, 216ff. Although in some respects interesting, Biviano’s book is a good example of the failure to consistently differentiate between these different concepts. 33. This does not mean that the Son became flesh because humanity needed him to. Moltmann is right when writing that ‘the beloved’s need [or better: desire] is only the occasion (occasio) for divine love, not its reason (causa)’ (Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 115.) The reason for love is love itself.

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it suffering or joy.34 While love is not an affective state existing prior to the establishment of loving fellowship, affections are constitutive of personal love. The affective dimension of being united in difference without opposition is compassion, that is, the desire to live well with, for and from the perspective of another person. In compassion, God is faithful to God’s eternal will to share fellowship. In this restricted sense, Schleiermacher and Ritschl were on the right track when insisting that Jesus suffered out of faithfulness to his calling, and Moltmann was equally right in his insistence that God is not otiose, but a God who opens Godself to the suffering of humanity (Mk 6.34; 8. 2; Mt. 9.36; 14.14a; 15.32; 20.34; Lk. 7.13; 15.20).35 This openness is not an expression of lack, but of the superabundance of a divine love which unfolds in the choice to create, sustain and share good relationships with finite beings living in a universe with potentialities such as ours.36 Insofar as God could have (or even perhaps has) created universes with possibilities of divine self-unfolding different from that of ours, God can be said to limit Godself when creating the universe in which we live.37 The incarnation is a further restriction in one of the divine persons of the specific kind of power, presence and knowledge that God actualized in the act of creation. Christ was not divine because he retained these characteristics potentially or kept them in reserve for the Word

34. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 237f.; The Trinity, 23; and The Way of Jesus Christ, 179. See also Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 50f. 35. On the notion of ‘vocational suffering’ see Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 435ff., 457ff., Ritschl, Justification, 442ff., 569f. See further also Wenz, Geschichte 1, 101ff. and Geschichte 2, 55. For Moltmann’s response to his critics on this point, see Jürgen Moltmann, ‘The Crucified God Yesterday and Today: 1972–2002’ in Passion for God: Theology in Two Voices (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 74ff. 36. Does this mean that we must leave the notion of an immutable God behind? That depends on how we understand immutability in this particular context, that is, in which precise respect God is immutable. God is (internally) immutable in the sense that God is capable of loving in and through all (external, contingent) change. God’s love is perfect, but not completed in the sense that its unfolding is at an end (Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 93ff. who in this context refers to Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for our Time (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967), 16, 18f.). It is completed in and through the history of finite creation who is invited to creatively cooperate in the establishment of good relationships. As the condition of genuine creativity, time is a necessary presupposition of the fulfilment of love. See also Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 227, 231, and Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 26ff. For a contrary view, see Oliver Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126f. 37. An elaboration of this point can be found in Ward, Christ and the Cosmos. This specific kind of self-limitation also means that certain modes of divine self-unfolding are only possible within our world.

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as such by not giving his human nature access to them,38 but because he was not severed from the eternal living fellowship of love that constitutes the Triune life. The incarnation revealed that a divine being can partake in this relational life even when becoming a finite being not capable of exercising the kind of power, presence and knowledge that enabled God to create our universe.39 In Christ, we come to see that God is capable of loving as a human being without giving Godself up. The incarnation was divine self-limitation, not (self-)sacrifice.40 In this self-limitation, God fulfilled Godself as the God of humanity.41 The incarnation was the expression of an actively responding Triune relationship with its inherent shared concern for creation, sustenance and flourishing of our world. God’s compassion in Christ is the support that comes from the Triune God’s superabundant goodness (Jn 4.14; 10.10; 6.63; 20.22).42 Moltmann was thus right when writing that ‘God does not suffer, as we do, out of deficiency in being, but God does suffer from love for creation, which is the overflowing superabundance of God’s divine being’.43 Now, how are we to further characterize God’s compassionate act of incarnation? It was not simply an expression of the fact that God is capable of reproducing the emotional distress of human beings.44 In fact, Christ revealed that God is capable of overcoming victimization precisely because God does not suffer in exactly the same way as a human victim. By being ‘the humanity of God’ (Barth), Christ ‘suffers as God’, to borrow an expression from Johannes Brenz, one of the Lutheran

38. The latter is the argument by Oliver Crisp. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 147ff. 39. Crisp thinks that if Christ relinquished these attributes, he would no longer be a divine being (ibid., 136). The problem with this line of argument is that the specific kind of power, presence and knowledge God has in relation to our world is contingent in the sense that God may well display other kinds of power, presence, and knowledge in the immanent Trinity, and in relation to other universes (or worlds). Christ’s divinity is an expression of him being co-constitutive of the eternal love-life of God. 40. Many theologians employ the word sacrifice to describe an understanding of the incarnation quite like my own (e.g. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 29) As has become apparent from my conceptual clarifications, such use lacks necessary precision. 41. We could speak of a need that seeks fulfilment here only in the sense that it is a (perfect) need to seek fulfilment in sharing the infinite superabundance of love with genuine others. As Paul Fiddes claims: ‘It is because he [God] is perfect that he desires, rather than despite it’, Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 94. Compare ibid., 87f. For an elaboration of the notion of divine self-limitation in the act of creation, see Chapter 8. 42. Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 171. 43. Moltmann, ‘The Crucified God Yesterday and Today,’ 75. 44. This is the phenomenon of empathy which has been the subject of many recent evolutionary or neurobiological studies, and is thus more restricted than the notion of compassion. See Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 236ff.

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reformers.45 Paul Gavrilyuk formulates four characteristics of divine compassion as it comes to expression in Christ.46 First, as noted, the incarnation revealed that God is affected by the suffering of others. Second, Christ revealed that divine compassion is resolute and does not hesitate when confronted with a universe that suffers. Third, in Christ we encounter a God whose will is to secure the wellbeing of others, and fourth the incarnation involved God’s acceptance of the risk to suffer as a human being. Moved by empathy, and the power inherent in God’s superabundant life, the Word became flesh, healed sickness, social relationships, mistrust and ultimately the human fear of death (Mt. 28.5f.; Mk 5.36; Heb. 2.14b; 7.16; 9.14). It was decisively redemptive because it lifted, and still lifts, people out of suffering by affirming their dignity, that is, their capacity to actualize their freedom in a struggle against the forces that break good relational bonds.47 Given the fact of suffering in the human world, compassion was not a contingent feature of the life of Jesus. Yet, while compassion may entail suffering in the way the victim does, it does not necessarily do so. Daphne Hampson is right that compassionate love and suffering are not internally related so that only a God who suffers like human victims of violence can love (as in Bonhoeffer and Moltmann).48 A suffering lover who requires his or her supportive friend to suffer like him or her in order to qualify as a proper friend is a sadistic egoist.49 A true lover who suffers requires compassion from his or her friend, not that his or her friend should reproduce his or her suffering. In the words of Augustine: You must take on somewhat of the affliction from which you want the other person to be freed through your efforts, and you must take it on in this way for the purpose of being able to give help, not achieve the same degree of misery. Analogously, a man bends over and extends his hand to someone lying down, for he does not cast himself down so that they are both lying, but only bends down to raise up the one lying down.50

God’s compassion with humanity in the incarnation achieves healing because in it we encounter a God who bends down without breaking.51 It was genuine and

45. Brenz (Apol. ad Elect. 81) quoted in Baur, ‘Ubiquität,’ 244. Author’s translation. 46. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God, 10. 47. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 45ff. 48. Hampson, After Christianity, 146. 49. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God, 12. 50. Saint Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, trans. David L. Mosher (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 181. Italics are mine. 51. Some would perhaps argue, invoking Isa. 53, that the carrying of sins required Christ to suffer. Yet sin can also be carried away without implying that the one who carries away the sin himself must suffer. One of the few passages in which Isa. 53 is explicitly employed to interpret actions of Jesus is in Mt. 8.17 where Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Here Jesus takes away the infirmities without having to suffer like Peter’s mother.

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integral to the desire to end suffering (Lk. 4.18f.), secure human flourishing, and did not entail a contradiction of goal and means.52

5.3 The Murder of Jesus as Absolute Victimization Having said this, the kind of suffering that Parker and Brown (etc.) reject as redemptive is primarily that of the second kind identified above, that is, that which Jesus accepted by the hand of the religious and imperial authorities. In it Parker and Brown see a kind of self-destructive compassion through which Jesus attempted to convert the victimizer (or sinner) by mirroring his or her true self. I certainly agree that this kind of suffering was not a juridical necessity, a quasinatural necessity in the sense that his murder symbolically reflects the structure of nature according to which life is sustained only by consuming life,53 necessary for resolving the ambiguity concerning his identity,54 for the restitution of human dignity, or for the moral transformation of human beings.55 There is no saving significance to the way Jesus died. It would have been better had it never happened. While it is true that God’s compassion for humanity involved the risk of this kind of suffering, I agree with Rebecca Parker that ‘nobody has to suffer [in this way] for God to be made known to us’.56 Suffering in this way is not intrinsic to the

52. According to Moltmann, ‘the self-sacrifice of love is God’s eternal nature; (Moltmann, The Trinity, 32. The position is an echo of Barth (Barth, CD 1-2, 167, and is also re-appraised in Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 29ff., 135; Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 188; and more recently in Bacon, ‘Thinking the Trinity,’ 458). If this is true, there is no true comfort, no promise in love. Moltmann in fact recognizes this (Moltmann, The Trinity, 41f.), but seems to be unaware of the way in which it contradicts his statement that suffering love is constitutive of God’s eternal nature. For an elaboration of this critical point, see Boff, Passion of Christ, 113f. and further Johannes Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 132f. In contradistinction to Moltmann, we should affirm Bernard of Clairvaux’s insistence that the Father and the Spirit do not themselves suffer in, or as, the Son, but had compassion with him. See Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Canticles of Canticles, trans. A priest of Mount Melleray, vol. 1 (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1920), 287. 53. As is Joachim Negel’s thesis in Negel, Ambivalentes Opfer, 564, 582. See also Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice, 229, and Kevin Seasoltz, ‘Another Look at Sacrifice,’ Worship 74, no. 5 (2000): 394f. 54. The well-known thesis around which Wolfhart Pannenberg built his Christology. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 338, 374, and ‘Theology of the Cross,’ Word and World 8 (1988): 167ff. 55. The latter point also contra Brümmer, Atonement, 87f. 56. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 213. My italics. See also Schillebeeckx, Christ, 729. What is lacking in Schillebeeckx’s account is a distinction between the murder and

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revelation of the love of God. While the incarnation obviously means that Jesus was willing to die, it does not imply that he wanted to be crucified. This insistence goes against the biblical voices who speak, not merely of the historical inevitability of the destructive fate of the prophetic love Jesus embodied, but who affirm the divine necessity of the murder of Jesus (Mt. 16.21-23; Mk 8.31; Lk. 17. 25; 22.37b; 24.7, 26; Acts 4.28; 17.3).57 Converting the murder of Jesus into an act of selfsacrificial love in this way is absolutely fatal. If God needed the murder of Jesus as propitiation, satisfaction or for whatever other cause, the theological and logical problems formulated above announce themselves with full force.58 The crucifixion of Jesus was not an act of self-sacrificial or self-giving love because it generated no surplus in the form of an improved relationship between God and humanity. It was unjust and nothing but destructive.59 If the death of Jesus is not distinguished from his murder, then the divine initiative for salvation is indeed a dark mystery – a contradiction that cannot be rationally accounted for.60 If we for the sake of piety resign ourselves to the ‘mystery’ of this contradiction, we would for the sake of piety cloud the distinction between good and evil. To counter this critique, many theologians have argued that the crucifixion of Jesus was indeed necessary and self-sacrificial because Jesus in so doing revealed the gravity of sin. As noted above, this was a main claim in both Anselm, Aquinas, the Protestant reformers, Barth, Crysdale and also in Girard’s scapegoat-theory.61

death of Christ. From the perspective of the fact of death, death had to be suffered to be transformed. Although Jeff Pool is among those who perhaps most closely resemble my own position on this issue, his conceptual apparatus is sometimes confused. On the one hand, he rejects that God willed the murder of Jesus (see e.g. God’s Wounds 1, 290ff.), yet on the other states that the cross was voluntary self-victimization (Pool, God’s Wounds 2, 306) – a contradiction in terms. 57. Mk 10.45 could also be quoted in support of such a view, but here the context implies that the ransom refers to a specific form of life that rescues people from wickedness by making them servants of fellow human beings (see Tit. 2.14 and 1 Pet. 1.18, and footnote 139, Section 4.3). When Acts 2.23a speaks of divine predetermination it does not refer specifically to his murder but to an act of God making it possible. For a recent argument for the divine necessity of the murder for Jesus, see John Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, vol. 1 (London: T. & T. Clark, 2016), 151. 58. A grotesque alternative is found in Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice, 253f. Bradley suggests that God needs suffering because it evokes compassion. If this is true, God is a sadistic egoist requiring human masochism. 59. Hart, Beauty, 393. 60. This distinction is rich with consequences, the most important of which is further elaborated upon in the following section. 61. For Crysdale’s position, see Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 8, 31. Similar views are also found in Frisch and Hailer, ‘Ich ist ein Anderer’; Fiddes, Participating in God, 139; Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 328; Westhelle, The Scandalous God, 105ff.; and Joh, Heart of the Cross, 74, 76, 81, 97; and most recently in Pool, God’s Wounds 2, 329.

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The problem with this claim according to Parker, so painfully embodied in her own experiences of sexual abuse, is that it binds God and humanity together by a bond of misery irresolvable by the good end proposed.62 This bond can only be broken by an act that identifies the violence suffered as wrong and not a necessary evil. If the suffering of the victim is made a necessary means for the victimizer to come to recognize the evil of his or her victimizing, the relationship remains in a paradoxical tension: victimizing violence is accepted in order for victimizing violence to be overcome. Victimization does not inspire love. It is radically destructive – an abyss of utter despair. Robert Sherman represents a quite common position when stating that the logical critique of Parker and Brown is avoided when we portray Jesus as the consummate sacrifice that ended the need for further sacrifices.63 This is not the case because it is precisely the tension in the notion of violence accepted to end violence, a contradiction of goal and means, which creates a tension in the concept of God. The victimization of Jesus does not become good simply because God is thought to use it to overcome victimization.64 It is this God who easily becomes ‘the patron of human executioners and torturers’ who legitimate their acts by pointing to the higher good to which their actions contribute.65 God becomes one among those who Paul sharply condemns because they ‘do evil so that good may come’ (Rom. 3.8). What must be asked then is whether the crucifiers of Jesus could be held accountable for their actions in a way that overcomes this contradiction, revealing a way out of the broken relationship by means other than sacred bloodshed. In accordance with the conceptual framework proposed above, a victim is characterized by the fact that he has been forced into a situation of abuse that he actively resists in an attempt to protect his space of freedom (unless of course it is an absolute victim). A person who accepts the abuse without resistance complies with the violence, and is thus part of the violent subject.66 Acceptance of suffering

62. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 174ff. 63. Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 203f., 211. See also Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 147, and Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 295. 64. Brandt, Opfer Als Gedächtnis, 319. 65. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation, 192. Perhaps belief in such a God could explain the words and acts of the Christian torturer which Dorothee Sölle tells us about in Sölle, Thinking about God, 124f. 66. What must be emphasized, however, is that a person is not complicit to abuse simply because s/he does not attempt to fight the abuser. This is either an effect of paralysation (Brison, Aftermath, 45f.) or a conscious strategy of survival and thus of resistance. A person is complicit only when choosing to be put in this situation with other options available (see Christina Thürmer-Rohr, ‘Frauen in Gewaltverhältnissen: Zur Generalisierung des Opferbegriffs’ in Mittäterschaft und Entdeckungslust (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1989), 28f., 32). Thus, Jesus’s refusal to fight the religious and imperial authorities when on trial by means of physical and/or verbal resistance can be seen not only as an attempt to survive,

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is not an inherent characteristic of true love; only resistance to suffering is. In cases of incest, many children think they actualize love by accepting the abuse when what love really requires is resistance towards the abuse. What Parker, especially, finds so offensive in the crucifixion of Jesus is this lack of resistance, his lack of self-affirmation in the face of abuse. Even if motivated by his compassion with the victimizer (sinner), as a passive mirror of the victimizer’s sin he established a bond of destructive misery. Although I agree with Parker that Jesus’s resistance to violence is not found in the way in which his suffering passively mirrored the gravity of human sin, there is a transforming resistance at work in the way in which God reacted to the abuse he suffered – an active kind of mirroring if you will. It is found in Jesus’s prophetic critique of victimization (Lk.23.28–31), the creative power inherent in God’s willingness to enter into a process of forgiveness (Lk. 23.34; see also Mt. 18.27; Lk. 7. 47–49; 15. 20, 22; 19.8–10), and in the challenge God posed in and with Jesus’s resurrection from the dead (Acts 3.13–15; 4.10; 5.30). These are the aspects of the reactions of God that made Jesus a revolutionary victim of violence. I will dwell for a moment on the relational power-dynamics constitutive of the second, returning in due course to the significance of the first and last aspects.

5.4 Offering Forgiveness: From Relative Victimization to Self-limitation ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ (Lk. 23.34). These words are incomprehensible if the murder of Jesus is understood as an enactment of God’s will that Jesus should vicariously suffer the penalty of sin. Why should Jesus ask the Father to forgive those who actualized ‘His’ will?67 How can Jesus’s victimizers be held accountable for a course of action that God anticipated (some would even say predetermined) and required?68 Indeed, ‘Against such an image of

but also to be posing a moral challenge to the victimizer. In withdrawing into himself the abuser is left alone in his abuse. 67. One could argue that Jesus’s plea of forgiveness can be explained by defenders of a forensic view by referring to the difference between the motivation behind the Father’s will that Jesus should be crucified and the human motivation to do so; the former is good, while the latter not (Abelard, Ethics, 29). But this does not detract from the fact that the murder itself as murder was necessitated by both God and human beings in a forensic account of the cross. To state that Jesus’s words of forgiveness concern the bad intentions of his murderers must not cloud the fact that in a forensic interpretation God needed the cross to happen. Against the insistence that the cross was a condition of God’s forgiveness (e.g. David T. Williams, ‘Towards a Unified Theory of the Atonement.’ in The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of the Atonement, ed. Derek Tidball, David Hilborn and Justin Thacker (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 234), I will argue that God forgave despite the cross, not because of it. 68. Calvin’s talk of Satan as the servant of God’s wrath is firmly situated within this logic. Calvin, Institutes 1, 309ff.

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God the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.’69 Not only does this passage problematize a forensic interpretation of the murder of Jesus, but it also offers us the impetus to develop a nuanced understanding of the relational power-dynamic that Jesus embodied in life and death. As noted above, Anselm (and others in his wake) argued that God would act unjustly if God simply forgave human beings without requiring any kind of satisfaction. Anselm’s claim presupposes that an offer of forgiveness conflates the difference between the just and unjust. This is a misunderstanding of the complex relational power-dynamics that unfolded in the process of forgiveness as manifest in Jesus. To begin with, Jesus did not face his enemies by silently accepting suffering, but extended an invitation to enter into a dynamic relational process that had the capacity to break the bond of misery that existed between himself and his victimizers and re-establish the relationship as a life-giving one. Had he always stayed silent in the face of his enemies, his response to victimization would have played into the hands of his victimizers, condoning their violence.70 In contrast to such a response, Jesus’s attempt at relational healing simultaneously identified the violence as morally wrong and provided the possibility of a future beyond the wounds that violence had inflicted on the relationship. Yet, Jesus’s practice of forgiveness was not restricted to the above-quoted words uttered on the cross. Nor was it restricted to his explicit invitation to enter into a process of forgiveness. His extending of friendship to sinners filled his entire life. This life of forgiveness had three dimensions. First, it involved compassion. In forgiving victimizers, Jesus compassionately entered into their destructive self-isolation providing them with an opportunity to make a corresponding journey into their victims’ emotional life.71 Jesus knew that unless a victimizer comes to experience the capacity of the victim to feel with

69. Walter Wink, The Powers that be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 89. 70. Silence may well be a component of resistance in the sense that a withdrawal into oneself leaves the victimizer alone in his abuse (see footnote 66), thus confronting him and calling him to turn from his path, as a universal strategy it does not suffice. It rarely succeeds. For a defence of silence as the proper response to being treated unjustly, see Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 288ff., and Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘on the Trinity’ (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 342ff. It should be noted, however, that Kierkegaard also emphasizes the distinct challenge posed in forgiveness. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 155f., and further Deidre Nicole Green, ‘Works of Love in a World of Violence: Kierkegaard, Feminism, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice,’ Hypatia 28, no. 3 (2013): 579ff. 71. Fiddes, Participating in God, 195ff., and ‘Memory, Forgetting, and the Problem of Forgiveness: Reflecting on Volf, Derrida, and Ricoeur,’ in Forgiving and Forgetting: Theology and the Margins of Soteriology, ed. Hartmut Von Sass and Johannes Zachhuber (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 130ff.

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him in his isolation, the forgiver will remain nothing but a harsh critic and will not be able ‘to revive, to give the depressed patient (that stranger withdrawn into his wound) a new start, and give him the possibility of new encounter’.72 Secondly, Jesus’s practice of forgiveness involved indignation (or resentment).73 Indignation is not merely the experience of having been physically or psychologically harmed, but of having been treated unjustly.74 In forgiving, Jesus did not call right what is wrong. He told the truth (Jn 18.17).75 Jesus’s forgiveness was not indiscriminate. Identification of others as victimizers was inherent to it.76 By so counteracting the meaning conveyed by a victimizing action, truth-telling was recognized as inherent to a victim’s assertion of self-worth. But while indignation towards one’s enemy may lead to an incessant will to revenge, in the path chosen by Jesus it became a chapter in a story of forgiveness.77 The third dimension of the relational dynamic of forgiveness Jesus embodied was that of letting go of resentment.78 These aspects of forgiveness are prefigured in the father’s reaction upon the homecoming of the Prodigal Son. The father compassionately recognized the lost status of his Son and simultaneously expressed the joy of renewed fellowship (Lk. 15.32). In the story of Jesus, this dynamic arc of forgiveness reached its culmination in the double significance of his question to Peter in Jn 21.15ff.: ‘Do you love me more than these?’ Here the risen Christ both expresses indignation towards the lack of love shown in Peter’s betrayal, and at the same time challenging him to sincerely renew,

72. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 189. Italics in the original. 73. Although I prefer to use the term ‘indignation’, I follow Charles Griswold in his analysis of ‘resentment’ in a process of forgiveness. Charles L. Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7, 26, 39f., 45. The word ‘indignation’ better captures the source of the moral outrage: the attempted negation of personal dignity. 74. The justice spoken of here is not that of juridical justice. A person who is forgiven for his injustice (by God or his human victim) may still be legitimately subject to judicial punishment within the stipulations of societal law. Confer the points made by Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 230f., and Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), 43ff. 75. Griswold, Forgiveness, xxiv, 29, 107f., 195ff. 76. Boff, Passion of Christ, 20. 77. Understood as an invitation to the unjust, forgiveness becomes a synonym for justification. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation, 87. 78. Griswold, Forgiveness, 81, and P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), 6. This letting go is rarely achieved instantaneously but requires (often considerable) passage of time. Griswold also offers a convincing account of the limits and possibilities of such ‘letting go’ in cases of extreme violence. Griswold, Forgiveness, 90ff.

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and intensify, his love: ‘In coming back to life Christ indicates to the faithful that He is not leaving them. “I come to you”, he seems to say, “understand that I forgive you”.’79 In Acts 3.26 we read: ‘When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways.’ His offer of forgiveness was not simply extended to remove enmity. It was an invitation to renew love.80 Thus, the way in which Jesus related to his victimizers did not express a lack of self-respect, as Brock argues. While his offer of forgiveness was costly, it did not require him to deny himself.81 Neither did it, as Anselm claimed, express a lack of respect for the dignity of others. His offer of forgiveness affirmed his own responsibility for the freedom of others, that is, his dignity.82 Thus, Jesus reacted in a way that both expressed self-regard and regard of the other. At this point, an important nuance must be introduced. In the rendering of Jesus’s words on the cross, the forgiving subjectivity is explicitly split. Although Jesus is the one who appeals for the forgiveness of his enemies, he does so by drawing upon the Father’s capacity and will for forgiveness (see also Jn 17.5). Charles Griswold terms this an instance of ‘third-party’ forgiveness where someone not directly affected by the violence has a standing to forgive the victimizer because of his or her intimate relationship with the victim.83 Yet, this notion does not fully grasp what took place, because in the case of Jesus it was not the third party who took the initiative, but the victim himself who drew upon the forgiving capacity and will of a third party. Thus, it is an instance of cooperative forgiveness. In any case, if Jesus’s suffering was a lessening of his ability to act, then his offer of forgiveness was its counterforce. Insofar as Jesus remained the primary subject, there lay a profound self-affirmation in this, namely that ‘I am/we are the source of my/our victimizer’s freedom – a place in which s/he may be anew’.84 When offering forgiveness Jesus moves from victimhood to carry out an act of self-limitation, ‘a limitation that knows the crime and does not forget it, but without being blinded as to its horror, banks on a new departure’.85 While affirming his own freedom,

79. Kristeva, Black Sun, 192. 80. Brümmer, Atonement, 43. 81. Contra ibid., 78. 82. Without buying into all of his presuppositions, Lévinas was surely right that: ‘Selfassertion is responsibility for everyone’ and that ‘to be oneself … is always to have … the responsibility for the responsibility of the other’. Emmanuel Lévinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 191, and Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 117. 83. Griswold, Forgiveness, 34 footnote 46, 117ff. 84. For a further elucidation of forgiveness in relation to the question of vicarious death, see Section 5.4, and in inter-human relationships, see Chapter 10. 85. Kristeva, Black Sun, 203. Here I depart from those who term Jesus’s words of forgiveness on the cross as an act of self-sacrifice. See for example Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice, 245; Worthington, A Just Forgiveness, 34, 47; and Pool, God’s Wounds 2, 329.

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he did so by refusing to make his freedom the unfreedom of the other.86 If he had not done so, he would simply have become the mirror image of his enemies. Contrary to this, his offer of forgiveness was the refusal to negate the freedom of the other, be it through control or neglect. It was an expression of his responsibility to preserve a communal life characterized by justice. As such it was simultaneously an expression of his dignity and his regard of others. The murder of Jesus was a testimony to the fact that he refused to actualize divine power through physical or psychological (counter-)violence. However, in Jesus’s offer of forgiveness there is also a serious warning: if you destroy me you will destroy your own freedom, and ultimately be left alone. While there is no antecedent condition for offering forgiveness, there is a consequent one with a retroactive effect: if you do not change your ways you will lose your neighbour, and along with him or her yourself (Mt. 6.12,14f.; 18.23–35; Lk. 3.28– 31; 5.35f.).87 In this sense, forgiveness does not come cheap. A threat of exclusion is intrinsic to it. It is in this recognition that the gravity of sin comes to expression. Still, offering forgiveness is also the recognition of the victimizer as the source of my freedom. Freedom is interdependent, and thus requires mutual self-limitation to be preserved. The forgiveness offered by Jesus is a call to recognize this moralontological fact.88 The murder of Jesus was the failure of his opponents to do just this. Jesus’s condemnation of sin was met by an intensification of the violent initiative that made Jesus a victim (or object) of sin (Rom. 8.3).89 Whereas an

86. Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 56f. 87. Thus, I agree with Derrida that an offer of forgiveness is unconditional by nature (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 34ff.), but this does not mean that the state of reconciliation that characterizes the relationship between the subject and receiver of forgiveness unconditionally preserves itself. 88. This does not mean that unjust suffering of Jesus was not a constitutive element of the process of forgiveness into which he entered. Because he had been physically and psychologically harmed it was surely painful for him to forgive. Yet, the suffering that occasioned the forgiveness of Jesus was a contingent feature of his life. To reiterate: it would have been better had it never happened. 89. This interpretation of the term ‘sin-offering’ (ἁμαρτία) is supported by Bradley H. McLean, ‘The Absence of an Atoning Sacrifice in Paul’s Soteriology,’ New Testament Studies 38 (1992): 540ff. Some see a similar line of thought articulated in 2. Cor. 5.21 where Paul tells us that ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’. But this is disputed. In traditional Levitital thought, the sin-offering left the sacrificial victim ‘most holy’ (Lev. 6.24.29; 7.1, 6). It did not itself become defiled with sin (ibid.: 540). The question is here whether Paul is creatively combining different motives. Jesus remained incorporated into the holy because he himself did not sin. In this way, his death retained an aspect of the logic of the sin-offering. But in contrast to how the object of the sin-offerings was conceived, Paul construes Jesus as the holy object of sin. Similarly, I find it inadequate to describe the death of Jesus as a descent into hell (i.e. eternal separation). Rather, Jesus is made the object of a hellish initiative.

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offering of forgiveness is based on the recognition that the violent subject can act differently, the murder of Jesus was witness to the fact that an offer of forgiveness does not automatically bring about a change of course for the victimizer.90 As Esther McIntosh notes, often ‘the very fact that the oppressor does what she or he does suggests that she or he is sufficiently lacking in virtue as to fail to be moved by the suffering that she or he sees.’91 For the victimizer, the success of his or her violence affirms his or her superiority. And this is not the only reason why an offer to enter into a process of forgiveness is rejected. As Paul Tillich observed, many human beings simply do not have ‘the courage to accept oneself as accepted’, for a host of different reasons.92 Such responses to an offer of forgiveness are expressions of the fact that human beings are created in a way that allows them to continue to exercise their freedom in ways that are destructive of both self and other. The risk of victimization comes with the human condition.93 Yet, the cause for the failure of Jesus’s attempt to re-establish the relationship on other terms cannot be sufficiently explained as the refusal of the victimizers to convert from their evil ways. It is also to be found in the affirmation of this possibility by God in creating a spacetime characterized by genuine indeterminacy. The power wielded by God in the creation, sustenance and fulfilment of the world is permanently self-limiting.94 It is, as Sarah Coakley says, always ‘non-coercive’.95 It is a power that sets creation free to create or de-create itself (at least, up to a certain point). Thus, to understand how this power can be an expression of divine love we must address the question of theodicy. This will be done in due course. At this point I will restrict myself to remind the reader of an important comment made above regarding the victimizing subject. As we know from experience, a victimizer is not totally defined by his or her abuse of others. A victimizing person is often him- or herself a victim of violence (including cultural forms).96 In fact, any human subject is a complex activity and passivity in relation to both suffering and violence in various situations. What I have said in this section does not mean that I draw a sharp line between victim and victimizer as distinct individuals or

90. For instance, because of dehumanizing strategies inherent in cultural violence. 91. McIntosh, The Concept of Sacrifice, 228. 92. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 164. 93. Günther Thomas, ‘Das Kreuz Christi als Risiko der Inkarnation,’ in Gegenwart Der Lebendigen Christus: Festschrift für Michael Welker zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Günther Thomas and Andreas Schüle (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2007). 94. If God had resisted in a way that prevented Jesus’s suffering altogether while at the same time allowing others to continue suffering, then the problem of theodicy would announce itself with full force. 95. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 5, 37. 96. As bell hooks notes, this insight has been empowering for many oppressed people. Recognizing that victimizers are also influenced by forces outside their control deconstructs the myth of the omnipotent victimizer. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 56.

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social locations. Neither have I been implying that victims should (always) take (some of) the blame for their victimization.97 I have been following Crysdale’s lead in trying to identify an aspect of Jesus’s life and death that is concerned with re-establishing a good living relationship with human beings who may be both victims and victimizers. In doing so, I have attempted to bring into sharper focus the aspects of the life of Jesus that made him a victim of violence, and at the same time to identify the self-affirmation that is present within the kind of resistance that he offered in inviting his enemies to enter into a process of forgiveness. What is left unanswered as of yet is whether the murder of Jesus is a momentous witness to the failure of his attempted resistance, and thus that his violators succeeded in destroying him, whether it was a self-sacrifice involving a loss of what constituted Jesus’s personhood that nevertheless resulted in the re-establishment of a broken relationship, or, finally, whether the loss was only apparent and, in reality, an instance of self-giving? To these questions we now turn.

97. We need only to think of cases of child abuse to recognize the obvious absurdity of such a position. For more on this topic, see Section 11.2.

Chapter 6 GOD, DEATH AND THE TRINITARIAN LOGIC OF SELF-GIVING

The next, and crucial, step in my critical reconstruction consists in making a distinction between the way in which Jesus died, and his death as such. Whereas the murder of Jesus was an immoral act of absolute victimization, his death was not.1 The murder was completely contingent. His death was not.2 It was neither, as is customary to say, a natural consequence of sin required by divine justice, nor necessitated by the need for a revolutionary scapegoat or simply the result of risky love.3 Like all human beings, Jesus had to die. Death is simply a fact of human existence and for the Word of God a result of God’s faithful compassion with humanity expressing itself in God’s self-unfolding in the incarnation. In relation to the problems explicated in Section 4.2, these distinctions make all the difference in the world. If Parker’s and Brown’s logical critique is adequately understood as the insistence that the love of God was consummated despite the murder of Jesus, I agree with them. If they, on the other hand, should be taken to say that God’s love for the world was consummated despite his death, I certainly disagree. Insofar as the whole life of the incarnate bears significance for human beings, Jesus did not die for nothing. In the following, I will develop a string of arguments supporting the claim that the death of Jesus was an expression of God’s love for humanity, and present some reasons for why this does not entail a contradiction of goal and means that leaves us with a tension in the concept of God. When considering the meaning of God’s action towards humanity in the death of Jesus, I will argue that it should be viewed as an instance of divine self-giving. In the conceptual scheme developed in Section 5.1, self-sacrifice was understood as an intensification of self-limitation to the point in which an acting subject incurs a temporary loss of aspects constitutive of the immediate flourishing of his or her personhood for the purpose of establishing, sustaining or nurturing a relationship of which him- or herself is a part. Thus, what must be discussed is if this is an adequate characterization of the death of Jesus. More accurately, the 1. Contra for instance, Kristeva, Black Sun, 130. 2. It could also be noted here that the point of the OT sin-offering was not the murder of the animal, but its death. 3. Except if the creation of the finite cosmos can be understood as an act of risky love. For more on this, see Chapter 8.

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question that must be asked is this: Did Christ in becoming incarnate and dying renounce that which constituted his true divinity and/or did he in dying give up that which made him truly human? I will start out by discussing the first part of this question from the perspective of the classical Christological question touched upon in my historical prelude: Did God die on the cross?

6.1 The Death of Christ as Self-giving As we have seen, Luther and later Hegel came to answer this question affirmatively. For both, Christ was not the eternal Son and a human person, but the eternal Son as a particular human person. Because for Luther the man Christ ‘signifies a divine person made flesh’, the eternal Son died as a human being on the cross.4 Yet while Luther at times denied the possibility of the eternal Son dying ἀσάρκος (i.e. as part of the impassible immanent Trinity), for Hegel, the ‘death’ of the impassible God ἀσάρκος was the presupposition of the death of God in the flesh of Christ (ἐνσάρκος) and the subsequent rise of an enriched God that is truly infinite, that is, a God to which finitude is not an external reality, but an internal constitutive moment of self-actualization. This does not mean that God suffered no real loss in the death of Christ. If we follow Hegel, real loss is inherent in Christ’s true divinity. Radical loss is part of that which makes God fully God.5 With this insight, Hegel, along with Schleiermacher’s critique of the classical two-natures doctrine, put forward a revolutionary challenge to the conceptual paradigm of classical (Chalcedonian) Christology.6 However evocative some of these Christological insights are, neither Hegel nor Luther developed a coherent answer to the question up for discussion in this section. The problem for Luther was his unwillingness to systematically (and philosophically) unfold his Christological interpretation of death. Not only did he formulate ambiguous statements concerning a God who is dead and not dead, he was also inconsistent when spelling out the precise character of the communication of attributes (between

4. Martin Luther, ‘Die Disputation de Sententia: Verbum Caro Factum est,’ in D. Martin Luthers Werke, ed. G. Bebermeyer, vol. 39 (2) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1932), 11. Author’s translation. See also ‘Die Disputation de Divinitate et Humanitate Christi,’ 117. For a contemporary formulation of a similar Christological position regarding the death of God, see Novello, Death as Transformation, 188ff. 5. Nicholas Adams, The Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 109f. This does not mean that I endorse Robert R. William’s insistence (against Cyril O’Regan who argues that in Hegel divine kenosis is in reality plerosis) that there is a real kenosis taking place in the death of God insofar as there is an immanent self-negation in God (Williams, Death of God, 303). The problem with this argument is that the death of God in Hegel is an expression of what it means for God to be fully God: kenosis is an immanent characteristic of a plerosis (that is not onto-theological). 6. See Section 2.3. See also Pannenberg, Jesus, 340ff.

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the natures or from the natures to the person).7 And to claim, as he did, that a philosophical absurdity may well be a theological truth is only adequate if it refers to a particular philosophical conceptual framework and not to philosophy as such.8 If the latter is the case, it must be rejected as a highly inadequate ad-hoc solution to a conceptual impasse, the result of which is fideistic irrationalism. Obviously, Hegel had no such issues with philosophy! For him the problem lies in the faulty logic upon which his whole philosophical and theological endeavour was based. Hegel’s theological understanding of death is built upon a logical procedure in which determined negations have semantic generative power.9 God, understood as pure (i.e. unmediated) life is a quasi-notion, because God is enriched by God’s self-negations in creation, incarnation and death.10 The death of God is a determined negation of the life that God appeared to have in and by Godself. When divine life is understood as containing death within itself it becomes ‘richer’ than the notion of unmediated divine life. If God is said to sublate death in the sense that God in Christ integrated absolute death (non-being, the sinner’s death) within Godself, we are left with an absolute contradiction (Widerspruch): God integrates that which God (as unrestricted life) in principle cannot integrate.11 Establishing this contradiction meant for Hegel that divinity/life and humanity/death are shown to be undeterminable as self-enclosed, that is, independently of their relation to one another. When the sinner’s death that characterizes humans living apart from God is brought into a determining relation to the unrestricted life of God (and vice versa) in Christ, God is determined as including God’s negation within Godself, and an impetus for a more differentiated positive concept of humanity and divinity, life and death, is given.

7. See also Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 410ff.; Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 198; Pannenberg, Jesus, 301; Moltmann, The Crucified God, 243; Lienhard, Luther, 355f.; and more recently Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 9ff. 8. Luther, ‘Verbum Caro Factum est,’ 3, 5. For a somewhat more elaborate account of Luther’s understanding of the relation between philosophy and theology in the context of Christology, see Bayer, ‘Das Wort ward Fleisch,’ 19f. 9. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. Miller A.V. (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 28, 54, 73f., 417ff., 536, 834f., passim. See further Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 81ff. 10. According to Hegel, death is the moment of determined negation within the natural sphere. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Determinate Religion, trans. R.F. Brown et al., ed. Peter C. Hodgson, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 623. 11. That Hegel construes the contradiction as absolute is obvious when he speaks of the death of God as meaning ‘that all that is eternal, all that is true is not’. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E.B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, vol. 3 (London: Paul Kegan, 1895), 91.

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The fundamental problem with this dialectical procedure is that these ‘richer’ concepts also integrate their determined negations within themselves, and so the contradiction is merely repeated. If any divine self-determination is a self-negation, then this is also the case for the ‘higher’ or ‘richer’ notion of God (i.e. as negating the negation of death). Against Hegel’s own explicit insistence, his dialectical logic becomes entangled in a problem of infinite regress where no higher or richer concepts of God are ever produced.12 Rather than providing us with a notion of a God who is enriched in losing his abstract immortal self in absolute death, Hegel leaves us with an empty one.13 More radically I would argue with Dale Schlitt that Hegel’s theoretical explication of God never even gets off the ground.14 Within his logical procedure, there cannot be any positive determinations of divinity and humanity or life and death. Consequently, the logical relations between these concepts cannot be adequately understood dialectically. What must be sought then is a theoretical framework in which we can develop a more coherent Christological interpretation of death. The core elements of such a framework were outlined in Chapter 1. In the context of Christology, this amounts to understanding the relation between death and life and between Christ’s divinity and his humanity by situating these notions within a pre-given unrestricted two-dimensional semantic-ontological space in which their extensions are positively and negatively determinable.15 This amounts to clarifying what falls under them and what does not, in my case by recourse to the criterion of coherence. Only by doing so will we be able to answer the question initially posed asking whether Christ in dying renounced that which made him divine, and/or that which made him human. However, this does not preclude the possibility that some of Hegel’s (and Luther’s) theological intuitions can guide us in a constructive direction when carrying out this task.16

12. This fundamental problem of the structure of Hegelian logic is aptly unravelled in Lorenz B. Puntel, ‘Läst sich der Begriff der Dialektik klären?’ Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 27, no. 1 (1996): 6ff. 13. Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 308f. 14. See Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 44ff. and Schulz, Sein und Trinität, 252ff. Comp. Hegel, Science of Logic, 832ff. 15. See Puntel, ‘Begriff der Dialektik,’ 10f., ‘Hegel’s Wahrheitskonzeption: Kritische Rekonstruktion und eine “analytische” Alternative’, in Deutschen Idealismus und die analytische Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), and also Schulz, Sein und Trinität, 262ff. It is incoherent to ask what lies beyond this ‘space’ because that is in principle not determinable. It is an origin without origin. On this point confer also Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 319ff. 16. According to Thomas Lewis, Hegel would deem any attempt to systematize religious representations as futile because they lacked the precision of a philosophical vocabulary (Lewis, Religion, Modernity and Politics, 212). Whether or not Hegel was right remains to be seen from what follows.

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One positive intuition to be extracted from Hegel’s (and partly also Luther’s) Christology is its relational orientation. First of all, the divinity and humanity of Christ cannot be understood as (abstract) secondary substances17 that are determinable independently from one another, but as semantic-ontological configurations mutually determining one another as constituent parts of his concrete person. The semantic relation between them is not accidental18 but internally necessary. Secondly, this relational orientation is also relevant to the way in which we should understand the doctrine of the personhood of Christ as an expression of divinity and humanity. Hegel formulated an insight that remains of considerable importance in this regard: ‘It is the character of the person, the subject, to surrender its isolation and separateness. … The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.’19 If this is true, the personhood of Christ cannot be determined independently of his relationships.20 While Hegel, in his philosophical reflections upon theology, developed this insight in a problematic manner as dialectical moments of an absolute subjectivity progressively enriching itself, it can also be developed along a different trajectory, one that makes the Triune persons constitutive of each other as persons while remaining extensionally distinct.21

17. Following Aristotle’s use in the Categories, ‘primary substance’ is the concrete individuality that exists independently of other things of the same kind, and ‘secondary substance’ is, according to his Metaphysics, the abstract determination that makes the primary substance belong to a specific genus/species (Aristotle, ‘Categories’ in The Complete Works of Aristotle, trans. J.L. Ackrill, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 4ff., and Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. Hippοcrates G. Apostle (London: Indiana University Press, 1966), 111ff.). For a concise overview of this vocabulary, see Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, Substance: Its Nature and Existence (London: Routledge, 1997), 14f., and in the context of Christology Oliver D. Crisp, ‘Desiderata for Models of the Hypostatic Union,’ in Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crips and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 33ff. 18. As in Aristotle, ‘Categories’, 13f. See also Benedictus de Spinoza, The Ethics and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982), 31, and further Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, Substance, 25. 19. Hegel, LPR 3, 285f. See also ibid., 311f., 315, and further Pannenberg, Jesus, 181ff., 296; The Idea of God and Human Freedom, trans. R.A. Wilson (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1973), 166ff., and Grundfragen systematischer Theologie, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 411ff. On the concept of ‘person’ in Luther, see the fine analysis in Lienhard, Luther, 230ff. 20. For a thorough argument of the social constitution of personhood, see Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 21. Hegel, LPR, 3, 78f. See also Jörg Splett, Die Trinitätslehre G. W. F. Hegels (München: Alber, 1965), 145ff.; Pannenberg, Grundfragen 2, 86ff., 101ff.; and Schulz, Sein und Trinität, 405, 421, 488.

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The latter trajectory will form the centrepiece of the thoroughly (social) Trinitarian Christological interpretation of death I will develop in what follows.22 In such a conception, divinity and humanity do not refer to abstract kinds (i.e. natures, universals, classes) instantiated by the person of Christ, but constitute two families of concrete determinations, the precise configuration of which made him unique (i.e. an individual).23 An answer to the question of what made him unique can only be found through investigating the relational structure that constituted his particular personhood.24 The person of Christ is here not understood as the ‘bearer’ (i.e. subject) of relationships, but as identical to a particular configuration of such relationships.25 Christ receives his name from the unique concurrence of two groups of relationships.26 First, his divinity came to expression in the unique mode in which he related to the one he called his Father and the Spirit, and the unique way in which they related to him. Jesus came to know who he was by being recognized as the eternal beloved/loving other of the Father and the Spirit (as the latter two came to know who they were as the eternal beloved/loving others of

22. The crucial relationship here is not that between Jesus and the eternal Son, but between the Son, the Father and the Spirit. 23. Puntel, Structure and Being, 204f. The determinations that made him divine/ human are not natures to which one either belongs fully or not, but designation of a group of individuals who share a (high) number of semantic determinations. There is no ‘pure divinity’ and no ‘pure humanity’ in absolute contradiction, but only similarities and differences. 24. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Thesen zur Grundlegung der Christologie’ in Unterwegs zur Sache: Theologische Bermerkungen, ed. Ernst Wolf (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1972), 277, thesis 5.21. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that natures cannot communicate anything to each other (as we have seen Luther claim). If so, then natures become personalized to the degree that we have two personal subjects in Christ. The latter is, for instance, implied when Oswald Bayer, in an attempt to defend Luther, claims that we should replace the concept of nature with that of ‘persons’. Bayer, ‘Das Wort ward Fleisch,’ 31. 25. I say this in order to distance myself from the traditional framework of substanceontology according to which the person of Christ or the eternal Son is understood as subject of predication (i.e. that which unifies the predications so that they become one individual/act), of which recent prominent examples can be found in Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, and Ward, Christ and the Cosmos. My preferred ontological framework is the configurational ontology developed by Lorenz Puntel according to which the notion of substance is incoherent. Puntel, Structure and Being, 190ff. 26. On the notion of concurrent relations, see Telford C. Work, ‘Jesus’ New Relationships with the Holy Spirit, and ours: How Biblical Spirit-Christology Helps Resolve a Chalcedonian Dilemma’ in Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 175ff. This notion avoids speaking of a transferal of attributes (communicatio idiomatum), as in Luther.

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the Son/Spirit and Father/Son respectively).27 Secondly, corresponding with this relational configuration, Jesus was the activity of this eternal other in the mode of a created human person. Luther’s Christological insistence must be affirmed: a divine person became flesh, without reserve (Jn 1.14; Col. 2.9): neque logos extra carnem, neque carno extra logon. No parallel substance of the λόγος existed outside the flesh of Christ (i.e. ἀσάρκος) as a part that could not suffer and die.28 This does not mean that the eternal λόγος transcended the boundary between self-enclosed infinitude and self-enclosed finitude in the sense that it became identical to human beings in all respects including that of being sinners (Heb. 4.15), but that he as mortal flesh revealed the relational life that fulfils human personhood, namely to exist as finite in a living fellowship of love with God.29 If we are to truly understand the phenomenon of human death we should not turn to the first Adam, but to the second, in whom that which made him the eternal beloved/loving other of the Father and the Spirit and that which made him a created human person reveal themselves as non-contradictory.30 Now, in order to clarify whether or not the death of Jesus is to be understood as self-limitation, self-destruction, selfannihilation, self-sacrifice or self-giving, we have to ask how these relationships unfolded in this death. In Hegel, the contradiction between humanity and divinity revealed in the death of Christ is never resolved. That would amount to a return to

27. Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 237. Such inter-personal vocabulary remains for Hegel on the level of religion (as ‘representations’), and is sublated in speculative reason into three moments of spirit (Hegel, Phenomenology, 479ff., and further Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 239f). Furthermore, as I develop this conception in Section 6.3, I construe these relationships as mutually constitutive, that is, that they are the condition of the divinity of each of the Triune persons. 28. As was the case in John Damascenes’s original use of the notion of perichoresis in De fide orthodoxa 3, 7 (John of Damascus, ‘An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,’ in Saint John of Damascus: Writings, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (New York: Fathers of the Church Inc., 1958), 284). A similar view was re-appropriated in Calvin (Calvin, Institutes 1, 463f., 81). Insofar as a nature cannot will anything, this also implies that there is only one will in Christ (Garrett DeWeese, ‘One Person, Two Natures: Two Metaphysical Models of the Incarnation,’ in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, ed. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007), 144ff.). Oliver Crisp refers to Lk. 22.42 as biblical support that there two wills in Christ (Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 49). This move fails because Christ is not referring to another will within himself, but to the will of the Father. Against dyothelitism, I would argue that the actions of Christ express the will of the eternal Word, or more precisely: the will of Christ is the will of the Word in the mode of human being. 29. Insofar as the true human being is revealed as the image of a Triune God (imago Dei), it is not that of an individual being, but as the fellowship of human beings unfolding the love of God. Novello, Death as Transformation, 92. 30. Ibid., 211.

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an understanding of his humanity and his divinity as self-enclosed natures. According to Hegel, this contradiction is rather reconciled.31 What takes place in the death of Jesus is the speculative establishment of a relation that reveals that, and how, these two natures (Hegel: moments of self-consciousness) mutually negate one another. In accordance with Luther’s notion of the paradoxical simultaneity of life/divinity and death/humanity on the cross, in Hegel the relation between these moments are reconciled as contradictions on Golgotha. They are coincidentia oppositorum.32 This is true only if God in Christ took non-existence up into Godself. To my mind this is an inadequate construal of the meaning of the death of Jesus. God cannot be within and outside the dimension of Being at the same time if Being means the same in these two claims.33 More specifically, insofar as God is the absolute-necessary dimension of Being as such (i.e. as creator) non-existence is not possible for God.34 To speak of divine death in these terms is to speak of a square circle. It is a category mistake. That God died as a human being in Jesus must be understood differently. In what follows, I will argue for the following thesis: in Christ, the natural death of a human being took place in God.35 The resurrection of Jesus revealed that the natural mortality constitutive of him as truly human did not exclude him from existing in living relationships with the Father and the Spirit. In Christ, we come to see that divine life is not fulfilled as complete in itself, but in eternal openness to its finite others, and vice versa; humanity is only fulfilled in its openness to God. While Hegel was right that the meaning of death was redoubled in the death of Jesus in the sense that natural death was distinguished from absolute death, that is, non-being (οὐκ ον), he was wrong in his insistence that Jesus suffered the latter

31. I am grateful to Ragnar Mogård Bergem for making me aware of this conceptual distinction. Yet it should be noted that it is a reconstruction of Hegel’s insight, and not a distinction applied consistently by Hegel himself. 32. According to Robert R. Williams, this means that reconciliation in Hegel is fundamentally tragic. Williams, Death of God, 351, 359. On the relationship between Luther and Hegel on this point, see O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, 212ff. 33. Similarly, contradictions arise if Jesus is said to suffer divine justice and injustice, divine dishonour and honour, divine evil and goodness on the cross. But this is not the case: Jesus suffered human injustice and divine justice, he was dishonoured by human beings, yet honoured by God, and became the relative victim of human evil yet raised from the dead by the power of God. 34. See Lorenz B. Puntel, Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with M. Heidegger, E. Levinas and J.-L. Marion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 225ff. 35. For an elaborate account of the distinction between divine death and human death, see Fred Sanders, ‘Introduction to Christology: Chalcedonian Categories for the Gospel Narrative’ in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, ed. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2007), 14ff.

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kind of death (‘absolute Zerissenheit’).36 The death of Jesus revealed that natural death is not contradictory to divine life. In so doing, natural death loses its finality and becomes a new possibility.37 Does this mean that Christ did not actually die? No. This is not Docetism. Even if Christ was not made unto nothing on the cross, like any human being he underwent natural death. Christ entered ‘the realm of death’ without moving towards nothingness or becoming nothing, and so revealed the impossibility of absolute non-being for those who die in God.38 In other words: in dying Christ gave up nothingness, which is to say that he did not give up anything (because absolute nothingness cannot be).39 Because he retained his relationships with the Father and the Spirit in death, Christ did not (temporarily) give up that which constituted his divinity, that is to say: his death was no divine self-destruction, self-annihilation or self-sacrifice.40 But did he give up his humanity, that is, that which made him a finite created person? According to Eberhard Jüngel, Hegel ended up answering this question affirmatively, first, because in Hegel the death of God meant the death of the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and secondly because Christ did not rise from death as a particular human being, the resurrection coming to actualize rather a general unification of humanity and God that conflated the difference between them.41 The space for the finite as finite opened up by the creation of the world, the incarnation and the death of Christ are finally negated: the finite is dissolved into the movement of the truly infinite absolute subject. Is this so? As Gunther Wenz points out, Hegel is admittedly ambiguous in his understanding of how the relationship between God and humanity unfolded in Christ. On the one hand, Hegel argues that it is human and divine existence as self-enclosed realities which are dissolved in Christ (and through the Spirit in the church), not finitude as such.42 Rather in Christ, finitude is truly determined,

36. This claim also goes against the common insistence of many theologians, see for instance the extensive account in von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 90, 168ff., and further also Schulz, Sein und Trinität, 938; Novello, Death as Transformation, 201f. The interpretation of Jesus as passing into non-being is also found in Barth (Barth, CD 4-1, 305). 37. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 213ff. 38. But this also means that nothingness receives its full determination in this event. Ibid., 219, and further Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes: Ein Plakat’ in Unterwegs zur Sache: Theologische Bemerkungen, ed. Wolf. E. (München: Kaiser, 1972); Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 198ff.; Participating in God, 242; and Novello, Death as Transformation, 203. 39. Puntel, Being and God, 228f. 40. Cyril of Alexandria was thus right when saying that ‘the Word was alive even when his holy flesh was tasting death’. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 115. 41. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 94f., 97. 42. Wenz, Geschichte 1, 336ff. See also Williams, Death of God, 182f., 188, 310f.

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and thus affirmed. On the other hand, the core idea of Hegel’s system is oriented around the self-unfolding of the divine subject that eternally returns to itself by way of a dialectical movement from (self-)identity through difference to enriched (self-)identity.43 His portrayal of the self-explication of God and humanity in Christ is reduced to a passing moment in a history that unfolds within the one divine subject.44 Humanity is not rendered truly other than God in the end, and the incarnation and death of Christ (understood as the sinner’s death) become simply a passive instrument for the self-actualization of God.45 Within this overarching trajectory, Hegel’s talk of the death of God ends up in the death of humankind as such.46 Against this, it could be argued that in Hegel the enriched divine subject ends up being identified with the collective human self-consciousness of the Church (i.e. absolute Spirit). If so, the death of the transcendent God culminates in the affirmation of humanity as a community of love. These different trajectories within Hegel’s system have given rise to a long-standing debate about whether Hegel is capable of preserving the genuine otherness of humanity/God.47 Some insist that the enriched divine subject in Hegel is humanity in its self-transcendence, while others claim that it is precisely the other way around: the freedom of created humanity is the expression of God in God’s self-transcendence. William Desmond

43. Wenz, Geschichte 1, 293f. See also Hegel, Philosophy of World History, 108f. For a concise construal of the structure of the dialectical logic of Hegel in the context of Christology, see Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit , 59ff., 255. 44. This overarching trajectory of Hegel displays his close kinship to the Lutheran insistence on the ‘Alleinwirksamkeit Gottes’. Splett, Die Trinitätslehre Hegels, 139. 45. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundfragen 2, 105ff., Human Freedom, 163ff., Metaphysics, trans. Philip Clayton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), 152, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 376f. The general thrust of this critique of Hegel is found among many postmodern philosophers and theologians. See for instance Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 36f., 196f. and Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass and Henri Ronse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 43f. See also the critique of Michael Schulz formulated from a Catholic point of view in Sein und Trinität, 935f., and recently with considerable argumentative force by William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 4f., 121, passim. and God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 92, 105f. 46. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 314, and Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 94. In ascribing the death of Jesus exclusively to Jesus as human being, and understanding it as a giving up of finitude, Gunther Wenz claims that Karl Barth makes a similar mistake to that of Hegel (Wenz, Geschichte 2, 253f.). For a discussion of the general problem of alterity in Hegel’s conception of the Trinity, see Splett, Die Trinitätslehre Hegels, 145ff., and Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim, 41. 47. For a peek into the discussion, see for example Williams, Death of God, 173ff., 309ff., 352ff., 371.

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has persistently argued that the genuine otherness of the relators is not preserved in either case.48 However, with regard to Hegel, this debate shows what is at stake, namely the development of an understanding of the relationship between God and humanity as the fulfilling mutuality of genuine others.49 Only where such a relationship is actualized can a transformation of the meaning of death into an expression of love be said to take place in and through the death of Jesus.50 This can only be done if we develop our position non-dialectically. As Hegel emphasized, the otherness of a person is directly proportional to its freedom.51 He also knew that freedom does not presuppose separation, but is a social category according to which I can only be free if other persons limit themselves vis-à-vis me (i.e. take responsibility for my freedom), and other persons are free only if I limit myself with regard to them. True otherness only arises in the mutual recognition of each relator as a distinct source of free agency. This means that only in mutual self-limitation is the self-transcendence of relators possible. The logical structure of these claims could be given an even more precise formulation: in the mutuality of freedom (non-dialectically understood) good and living relationships between persons are intended. The question then becomes whether or not the death of Christ can be interpreted as an expression of such a relationship. In what follows, I will present an argument

48. Desmond, God and the Between, 92, 105f. 49. Peter Hodgson and Nicholas Adams are among those of the most recent Hegelscholars who attempt to show that Hegel succeeded in this (Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, 248ff. and Adams, The Eclipse of Grace, 15, 79, 208). I am more doubtful. Insofar as the whole dialectical procedure of Hegel is based upon finite moments of subjectivity, it is hard to see how it could produce a notion of God as truly transcendent (Hegel: truly infinite). In Hegel, the otherness of God increases in direct proportionality to God becoming human to the point where God becomes identical to collective human self-consciousness. Lorenz B. Puntel, ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Unity of Hegel’s Philosophy: A Systematic Reappraisal’ in Still Reading Hegel: 200 Years after the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Edmundo B. Pires (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009), 191ff. 50. Wenz, Geschichte 2, 253, 315. Rebecca Parker rejects the view that the meaning of death is transformed in the person of Jesus (Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 213). I agree with her in the sense that Jesus’s interpretation of death is not in radical discontinuity with the religion of the Hebrews (e.g. Isa. 25. 6–8; 26.14, 19; Ps. 22.38–30; Dan. 12.1–4). As his prophetic critique of sacrificial practices in the Hebrew cult and his commandment to love both God and neighbour had roots deep in the Hebrew Scriptures, so also Jesus’s understanding of death. This does not mean that the meaning of death as it is interpreted by the biblical authors does not tell us something more about death than was previously known, as shown especially in N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003), 272ff., 372ff., 448f. 477ff. 51. Hegel, Phenomenology, 111, LPR 3, 292, and Philosophy of Mind, 176f. See further Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 10, 69, passim.

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in favour of a positive answer to this question. I will elaborate further the Trinitarian theology that underlies it in the subsequent section. The life of God becomes manifest as true mutuality in the death of Jesus because the Father and the Spirit freely give themselves to the Son just as the Son and the Spirit freely gave themselves to the Father in his death: Jesus is risen! In the very recognition of the finitude that he was, in the immediacy of his humanity, Jesus recognized that the source of eternal life is to be found in the life-giving power of Father and Spirit, and in recognizing the humanity of the Son by raising his body from the dead, the Triune God reveals Godself as the God of humanity.52 By thus renouncing to determine and actualize themselves in absolute immediacy, that is, exclusively in and through themselves, in Christ God and humanity open up a space of freedom for each other that excludes any relationship of domination and submission which we have seen has been the object of so much critique from feminist and liberationist theologians. In this relational space, there is no self-destruction, no self-sacrifice, and no victimhood. While a relationship is strictly mutual only where the relators are truly other in relation to one another, Christologically the relationship need not be construed as absolutely (a-)symmetrical. The active and passive aspects of the death of Christ that Schleiermacher and Ritschl so vigorously strove to understand could be rearticulated as a relation between that without which the person of Christ would not be the divine Word – his relationship to the Father and the Spirit – and that without which the person would not be a created being – the concrete historical and finite relationships that made him Jesus of Nazareth.53 The passive and active aspects of Jesus’s life also come to expression in the mode in which his personhood comes to expression.54 In eternally dedicating himself actively to the Father and the Spirit, he receives himself as a distinct free person from them.55 In other words: Christ is the self-limitation and self-giving of the creator in the created, and vice versa. If the human death of Jesus is understood as divine death, then the death of Jesus would imply that God ceased to be on the cross because God only exists as a loving interaction between three (extensionally distinct) divine persons. As a result, the cross would become the self-destruction of God and the resurrection

52. This does not mean that the finite body of Jesus was simply revivified or recreated ex nihilo. The finite body that rises is transfigured by the Triune creative δύναμις – a creatio ex vetere. 53. Jesus never said he was dependent on the eternal Son (or Logos) for his existence. Rather by affirming his dependence on the Father, he was revealed as the Son. Pannenberg, Jesus, 339. 54. Einar Duenger B øhn, ‘The Logic of the Incarnation’ in Logic in Orthodox Christian Thinking, ed. Andrew Schumann (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2013), and Pannenberg, Jesus, 344. 55. Insofar as the Word did not become a person as it became flesh, it is only this relationship that is essential to its personhood. Crisp, Desiderata, 36f.

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the self-divinization of a human being.56 A solution to this problem claiming that God is capable of preserving Godself independently of the Triune relationships, would end up assuming a fourth subject as constitutive of the divine life.57 Thus I find good reasons to agree with Pannenberg that Hegel’s talk of the death of God is insufficiently Trinitarian (as is the case also in Jüngel and Moltmann).58 To avoid these problematic implications, God (the Father) cannot be said to differentiate Godself from God (the Son) in the dead Jesus as Eberhard Jüngel does.59 The centurion recognized Jesus as the Son of God in Mk 15.39 because there Jesus differentiated himself from God as Father (v. 34), and the Father differentiated ‘himself ’ from the Son in the resurrection by recognizing his true humanity.60 Only by thus being a relationship of genuine others is it mutually fulfilling and truly living. Rita N. Brock is thus right in her insistence quoted above that ‘connection cannot come from disconnection any more than love can come from hate’.61 The death and resurrection of Jesus must together be understood as God’s affirmation that Jesus as a finite human being was not temporarily disconnected from God in death. Considered exclusively in terms of his relationship with God, his death was not self-sacrificial. In Gal. 3.13, Paul reflects on a common Jewish objection

56. Moltmann seems to accept this principle, but contradicts himself when speaking of the Son as ‘sinking into nothingness’ and suffering ‘eternal death’. (Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 167, The Trinity, 80, and The Crucified God, 197, 206ff., 251ff., 287). Similar critical points can be found in Markus Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe: Studien zum Verständnis der Liebe als Modell des trinitarischen Redens von Gott (Marburg: Elwert, 2000), 310, 312, 317. Insofar as Moltmann, in accordance with Jüngel, speaks of the cross as the event which constitutes the Triune relationships (Moltmann, The Crucified God, 243ff., 54f., and The Way of Jesus Christ, 175), he also risks presupposing God as an acting subject independently of these relationships. Admittedly, Moltmann at times formulated himself more carefully speaking of the cross as revealing the Triune God. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution of Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Harper & Row, 1977), 96. 57. The critique against Jüngel on this point was formulated by Pannenberg in Pannenberg, Grundfragen 2, 107f. See also Section 6.3. 58. Jüngel, ‘Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes’, and God as the Mystery of the World, 55ff. See also Oswald Bayer, ‘Das Wort vom Kreuz,’ in Autorität und Kritik: Zu Hermeneutik und Wissenschaftstheorie, ed. Oswald Bayer (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), 122f. Moltmann prefers to speak of death in God instead of the death of God because of the lack of Trinitarian distinction in the latter notion. However, insofar as the latter follows from the former because of the principle of mutual constitution in the Trinity, he ends up implying that God really is dead. For a discussion of this principle, see Section 6.3. 59. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 372, 379, 385 and ‘Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes’ 118, 122. 60. Wenz, Geschichte 2, 474. 61. Brock, Journeys, xiii.

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against the belief in a crucified Messiah, quoting Deut. 21.23: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.’ This does not mean that Jesus was cursed by the Father, as Moltmann claims.62 The early Christian response was naturally that God had not brought about the death of Jesus, but conspiring Jews and the Roman authority: Jesus was not cursed by God, but by men (see also Heb. 12.1–3a). Jesus became the object of sin (Rom. 8.3b).63 As the experience of his resurrection makes clear, God did not leave the victimized Jesus alone, but freed him ‘from the agony of death’ (Acts 2.24; see also Mk 9.31), and thus confirmed his divinity as eternal beloved/ loving other of the Father and the Spirit and his humanity as non-contradictory to participation in the divine life of love. But what are we then to make of Jesus’s desperate cry of dereliction on the cross: ‘My God, My God why have you forsaken me?’ (Mk 15.34; Ps. 22.1)? Were the Father and the Son ontologically separated on the cross, as Moltmann claims?64 The answer must be no. Moltmann commits himself to a contradiction when arguing that the Father and the Son are both ontologically connected (in the Spirit) and disconnected in the cross event.65 If death is understood as an absolute ontological separation (i.e. as non-being: οὐκ ον) then connection is logically excluded from the relationship. Not even the Holy Spirit can ‘bridge’ this contradiction!66 Should we then follow the lead of Luther and claim that while the Father and the Spirit were epistemically hidden from Jesus on the cross, they were not ontologically so?67 While this perspective offers a valuable insight, we must

62. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 79f. 63. Grammatical reasons for preferring this reading of Gal. 3.13 can be found in McLean, Atoning Sacrifice, 539. 64. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 33, 52, 151ff., 197f., 251, The Trinity, 75ff. and The Way of Jesus Christ, 166f. See also Boff, Passion of Christ, 51. 65. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 252f., The Trinity, 80ff., and The Way of Jesus Christ, 174. Moltmann envisions the Son as ‘sinking into nothingness’ (ibid., 167.), and describes the death of Jesus as ‘absolute’ and ‘eternal’ (The Crucified God, 254f., 287, and ‘Praying with Open Eyes,’ 58). In fact, Moltmann himself readily acknowledges that this is a paradox to be protected as precisely that (The Way of Jesus Christ, 166f.). Furthermore, Moltmann repeatedly speaks of the Father rejecting the Son, while at the same time stating that ‘the Father himself suffers the death of his Son’ (The Crucified God, 197, see also 287). How can a father who rejects his Son do so ‘in the infinite grief of love’ (ibid., 251)? That he wants to become ‘Father of the forsaken’ is no good excuse (The Way of Jesus Christ, 175). And if it is true, as Moltmann states, that the Father and the Son agree on the necessity of the cross, then why does he always speak of the Father as the one who forsakes his Son (The Crucified God, 253, passim), and not the Son who forsakes his Father or himself? 66. Moltmann is not alone in his insistence that the Spirit is so capable. See for instance Westhelle, The Scandalous God, 32. 67. On the distinction between divine hiddenness as epistemic versus ontological in Luther, see Section 2.2. This presupposes that I take Luther’s understanding of Jesus as being made to be sin (2 Cor. 5,21), as an epistemic process, not an ontological one.

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be careful to accurately grasp the complexity of what took place. First, we must distinguish between the experience of God’s absence as God’s non-existence and the experience of God’s absence as ‘hidden presence’.68 The death of Christ is not a manifestation of the former but of the latter. Eberhard Jüngel writes: Presence and absence are determinations of that which exists, which refer to this existence always in relationship to human existence. If I say that of God that he is present and absent, then I am not just saying that ‘he is’, but rather I am thinking of his being as related to me either positively or negatively. He is either this way or that way.69

Jesus’s desperate cry was not that of someone who had lost faith in the existence of God, but of someone who reached out to God even in the experience of God’s hiddenness. Only a person who believed God to be present to him would address God in this way in that situation.70 This interpretation explains how some of the bystanders thought he was calling for someone, and that the centurion present at the crucifixion drew the conclusion that this human being was the Son of God (Mk 15.35–39). Jesus did not misunderstand his relationship to the Father, nor was he a liar, as Moltmann claims is the implication of rejecting ontological separation.71 He simply did not know how his relationship with the Father and the Spirit would unfold in death (Mk 13.23, par.), that he, at least in the Gospel of Mark, approached death in real uncertainty (Mt. 26.38f. par.; Lk. 12.50; Heb. 5.7), yet turned towards the one he recognized as his Father: in despair, protest and hope.72 In these reactions lies his very dignity, his love of life.73 Thus, in this context it is misleading to speak of Jesus as experiencing the hell of relationlessness in his death on the cross, as many theologians have been prone to do.74 Jesus’s cry of dereliction was his defence against relationlessness. Neither was his experience of hell that of

68. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of the Presence of God (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 51. 69. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 54. See also Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 205, and Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘God, Time, and Orientation: “Presence” and “Absence” in Religious and Everyday Discourse’, in The Presence and Absence of God, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 9, 11. 70. Here I confess some affinity with Schleiermacher’s insistence on Jesus’s perfect Godconsciousness also in death. See Section 2.3. 71. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 154. 72. From a more principal point of view, it would be no problem for Christology to even claim that others may have understood better what took place on the cross than Jesus himself did. Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 88f. 73. Sölle, Suffering, 80. 74. See for instance Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978), 224ff.; Eberhard Jüngel, ‘The Christian Understanding of Suffering,’ Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 65 (1988): 10; Johnson,

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an ‘absolute paradox’ of personal relationship and ontological separation.75 The Father (and the Spirit) was present as hidden as Jesus approached death. In the apt words of Gerard Rossé, the cross was ‘the night of faith of the incarnate Son’.76 Yet, did the Father and the Spirit turn away from the Son as he turned to them? Did the Father reject the Son on the Cross, as Moltmann argued?77 Again, the answer must be no. If the Son, on the one hand, and the Father and the Spirit, on the other, were ontologically separated on the cross, there would be nothing but silence (or not even that). There is not: ‘he was heard’ by the ones who could save him from absolute death (Heb. 5.7). The Father and the Spirit responded to Jesus’s desperate question with a soothing: ‘we are here’. How? First of all, the divine power that raised Jesus from the dead is manifest immediately in an outpour of life-giving spirit.78 Mark tells us that Jesus’s desperate last gasp for lifegiving breath is a breathing out (ἐξέπνευσεν) of spirit that resulted in the templecurtain being torn in half, releasing divine life upon the whole earth (Mk 15.37f.). Matthew expands this motif by telling of the resurrection of many holy people as a result of this happening. And as both Matthew’s and Luke’s descriptions of the sky makes clear, the moment of Jesus’s death is the moment at which darkness makes way to light (Mt. 27.45; Lk. 23.44). In these events, we see analogies to the release of life-giving energy (Spirit) effected by the sacrificial act in Hebrew symbolics. All events implicitly include the transformation of despair into that of praise taking place in the Psalm Jesus refers to. In Luke and John, however, Jesus himself approached death as taking place in the divine life. Upon having promised bringing the criminal hanging beside with him into the divine life, Luke has Jesus crying: ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Lk. 23.46a), and in John, Jesus utters the words of the creator upon the completion of creation: ‘it is finished.’ (19.30; Isa. 55.11) Here death is not experienced by Jesus as an absolute separation from Father and Spirit but as taking place within a life-giving Triune ‘dynamis’ (see also Ps. 31.5f.). In fact, John emphatically affirms the presence of the Father in the death of Jesus: ‘I am not alone, for the Father is with me.’ (16.32; see also 14.2f.,12; 16. 5,28; 17.11, 13) From its thoroughgoing point of view of Easter, the Gospel of

She Who Is, 158; Fiddes, Participating in God; and Welker, God the Revealed: Christology, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 189. 75. von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 52, 148ff., and Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory V – The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison, vol. 5 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 263. Henry Novello claims that von Balthasar, in distinction from Moltmann, never speaks of an ontological separation in the Trinity. If so the determination ‘absolute paradox’ used by von Balthasar is misleading. Novello, Death as Transformation, 130, especially foonote 52. 76. Rossé, The Cry of Jesus, 111. Italics are mine. See also Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Mark (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1970), 353. A contrary view is found in for instance Aquinas, ST 4, 2061. 77. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 60. 78. Stuhlmacher, ‘Zur Predigt am Karfreitag,’ 42f.

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John portrays his death as intra-Triune mutual self-exultation (Jn 3.3f., passim).79 In a death caused by human sin, God is revealed as its ultimate non-violent counterforce: ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ (Jn 10.10). Even if this saying offers an illuminating contrast to the character of the Roman imperial rule, the context in which it occurs is not that of political discourse.80 The scene is cultic. The Festival of Dedication is approaching, and the sheep pen within the temple courtyard is filled with sheep made available for ritual slaughter. Here Jesus introduces himself as the gate through which the herd may leave and so be saved from becoming victims of sacred violence (θύσῃ, v. 10). He constitutes the gate for two reasons; first because his love unites the shattered sheep (11.51f.), and secondly because the love that he shares with the Father does not recognize death as its limit (v. 17f.; 11.25f.). The irony of the Johannine story is that the one who saves his herd from absolute death (Jn 18.15; 19.14, 36) is himself driven into the temple courtyard as a sacrificial lamb. The death of Jesus opens the way to inclusive fellowship (6.39; 18.14). While those who die in their sin (i.e. mistrusting Jesus) die as strangers to the family of life (8.21,24, 34f.), those who die, having entrusted their lives to him as the Son, will experience death as a transition to the joy of eternal life. John does not present the death of Jesus as that of a martyr if this means that his divinity revealed itself in his self-made decision not to be. The grand plan of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of John only consisted in dying because the overcoming of the fear of death meant the ultimate actualization of divine love (Jn 1.16f.: 3.16; see also 1 Jn 4.17). The Lamb of God carries the sins (i.e. misguided love) of the world unto the cross only insofar as his resurrection provides us with the ultimate reason for a hope that reaches beyond victimization and death (Jn 1.29; 3. 16).81 In John, the divine character of Jesus is revealed in the complete trust Jesus had in the life-giving power of the Triune relationships, an attitude tested and confirmed as legitimate in the one event (‘the hour’) of his death and resurrection. Thus, there is ample biblical support for the view that Jesus did not experience natural death as a transition to non-existence but as an event that could not separate him, as a human being, from the divine Father and Spirit.82 While the Father and the Spirit were momentarily epistemically hidden (i.e. present as absent), they were never ontologically separated. The resurrection shows that

79. See below, Sections 6.2 and 6.3. 80. Jörg Frey, ‘Probleme der Deutung des Todes Jesu in der neutestamentlischen Wissenschaft: Streiflichter zur exegetischen Diskussion,’ in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 40. 81. For an understanding of sin as misguided love, see Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 316. 82. Though different on significant details, this view has also been defended by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, ST 1, 2278, and more recently by Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 107. See further Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 176f.

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the abandonment feared by Jesus (according to the Markan account) did not materialize. In death, Jesus was not ontologically detached from God only to be re-attached to God in the resurrection. Rather Jesus experienced God’s attachment to him in and through the victimization that led to his premature natural death.83 He only experienced death as love if he experienced it as taking place in the infinite life of God. As David B. Hart writes, ‘“My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” – is enfolded within and overcome by the ever greater distance and always indissoluble unity of God’s Triune love: “Father into thy hands I commend my Spirit”.’84 While his abusers made the end of his earthly life a ‘living hell’ and attempted to push him into the realm of eternal silence, Jesus did not himself fall into this state, but rather ‘descended’ into the divine life.85 This is why Jesus can be said to proclaim the victory of God over death in death (1 Pet. 4.6; 3.18f.). From a systematic perspective, this conclusion is supported by the ontological claim that the relationship between the Triune persons are mutually constitutive, and that absolute non-being is not possible for those who die in God. There cannot be any absolute ontological separation in God. If Moltmann is right that the death of Jesus meant a ‘breakdown of the relationship that constitutes the very life of the Trinity’, there would be no God. God would end up as a ‘supreme self-executioner’, and the resurrection would be the self-divinization of a human being.86 Against Luther, Hegel, Jüngel and Moltmann, we should insist with Pannenberg that: ‘God does not die, but he let the man who is connected with him die, in order to hold onto him in death’.87 Does this mean that the Son did not die as λόγος ἀσάρκος? No, here we must affirm that Jesus was the self-unfolding of the divine Son in the flesh: ‘For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.’88 This is not the self-explication of two subjects: a

83. So also Boff, Passion of Christ, 69, 72, 111ff. 84. Hart, Beauty, 360. 85. It is also inaccurate to state that Jesus was totally abandoned by humanity on the cross (Henriksen, Desire, 328, or Welker, Christology, 186f.). Mary Magdalene, Salome and ‘many other women’ neither left him at the cross, nor in death (Mk 15.40; 16.1. See also Lk. 23.42f., Jn 19. 25–27). They were the ones who in the flesh manifested the faithfulness of the Father and the Spirit to the Son in his suffering and death. 86. Compare Moltmann, The Trinity, 80, and Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 137. Yet Fiddes himself is unable to avoid this implication because he allows ‘the relationlessness of death entering into the very heart of the Trinity’ (ibid., 203). If the inner-Trinitarian relationships are broken at some point, there is no God because the relationships are constitutive of God’s existence. 87. Pannenberg, Grundfragen 2, 157. Author’s translation. See also Systematic Theology 1, 314. 88. Italics are mine. On this point, Pannenberg is ambiguous. On the one hand, he describes the suffering of Jesus as the result of the self-sacrificial action of the Son, and on the other, as passively undergone by the human being Jesus (Systematic Theology 2, 442). This contradicts the principle that the self-explication of the former is the self-explication

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divine person and the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Rather the self-explication of a divine person in the flesh, and the self-explication of Jesus as divine person, is the self-explication of one person: Christ. The Gospels do not portray the relation between finitude and infinitude in God as one of inverse proportionality, so that the more finite God becomes the less infinite God is. Rather they construe the relation as one of direct proportionality. The more finite God becomes the more infinite God is, because God’s infinitude consists in God’s capacity to embrace finite creation in love. The more God actualizes God’s love finitely, the more infinite God becomes (Mk 1.15; Lk. 17.21; Jn 1.14–18). The death and resurrection of Jesus are part of the self-explication of the Son as participating in a relational life that is truly infinite, that is, as capable of uniting with the finite without opposing it and without becoming identical to it. It is as the true human being Jesus rises as the truly divine person, and vice versa. Thus, while Karl Barth was certainly right that God in Christ gave Godself without giving Godself up, this was not only true of Christ as a divine person.89 When considering his relationship to God, this was also true of Christ as a human being. Christ did not give up that which made him divine (i.e. his eternal relationship of love with the Father and the Spirit), nor did he give up his humanity to God, becoming only divine. Rather Christ gave his infinitude to humanity by giving his finitude to the Father and the Spirit. Insofar as the incarnation is the self-giving of the Son to the Father and the Spirit as a particular flesh, it is a gift simultaneously presented to humanity and to the Father and the Spirit.90 Rather than God and humanity emptying themselves in Christ, they are mutually fulfilled. The death of Jesus is the revelation of the imago Dei for which humanity is destined, an eternal fellowship of life and love in God, a fellowship that, in its ultimate form, cannot be destroyed by the immoral machinations of human beings.91 Thus, when considering his relationship to God death involved no temporary loss of what constituted the personhood of Christ, that is, there was no self-sacrifice involved. The personal unity of the different without opposition is transformed in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus so that it may through the Spirit become a living presence in the person of the Christian believer. It is this fact

of the latter, and vice versa, that is, the fact that the human being Jesus is the eternal Son in the flesh, a principle which Pannenberg often aligns himself with. Jesus, 323ff. and further Raymund Schwager, ‘Religionswissenschaft und Theologie: Wolfhart Pannenberg und René Girard,’ Kerygma und Dogma 44 (1998): 185. 89. See Section 2.2. So also Tück, Am Ort der Verlorenheit, 49. 90. On this specific point, see also Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 333. 91. Novello, Death as Transformation, 206f., 216. One could argue that this negates the freedom of human beings to deny participation in this fellowship. The problem with this argument is that you are never free to do so unless you understand what is relationally at stake. When you come to recognize that God is the only one capable of preserving your freedom, no human being will deny God, that is, human freedom vis-à-vis God is restricted in the sense that it is ultimately incapable of negating itself.

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that makes the Christian fellowship the body of Christ, the heir of eternal life: ‘For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.’ (Rom. 14.7– 9) When the Christian dies, he or she dies in Christ (1 Thess. 4.16; 1 Cor.15.18; Acts 14.13), a death taken up into Godself. This death is constitutive of the life of every Christian.92 It is the death that the Christian is baptized into (Rom. 6) and participates in and through the Christian meal. From the perspective of Easter, death comes into view as taking place within the realm of God’s love. The baptism sharing of Christ’s death becomes a surrender into the hands of the divine love that is identical to divine life, and the sharing of life-giving bread and wine becomes sharing the death that takes place in divine life. It is from this perspective that we can affirm that God obtained the church with his own blood (Acts 20.28), and with Paul be convinced ‘that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 8.38). This is the powerful significance of the death of Jesus. Does this theology of death diminish the seriousness of the pain of loss people experience when their loved ones die? Paul Fiddes would presumably think so: Any Christian minister knows that even for people with the strongest faith there is a sense of loss when loved ones die; funerals cannot be conducted in a triumphalist manner. If the fact of death is not faced up to and admitted in mourning, seeds of trouble are sown and suppressed grief may break out later in more dangerous ways. This experience tells us that there is no security in ourselves in the face of death; the future is not ready made and there are elements of the unknown for which we have to trust God.93

While this is indeed true, it is important to distinguish between loss coram mundo/ hominibus, and loss coram deo. My argument in this section has been exclusively concerned with the latter. This does not exclude the fact that the Word in becoming human assumed a form of life in which death involves losing qualities essential to the kind of relationships that defined his personhood within the human world. Still, while these losses are genuine when interpreted within the horizon of pure immanence, when interpreted as events taking place in God they reveal themselves to be temporary.94 Only thus can we face death in grief and protest as well as hope:

92. Jüngel, ‘Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes,’ 124. 93. Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 194f. Lévinas also accused Christian interpretations of death based on Jesus’s death on the cross as softening its misery. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 104. 94. When we consider Jesus purely within the horizon of his historical relationships to other human beings, it is adequate to speak of his death as self-sacrificial.

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between the pain of uncertainty and the hope of eternal life. The mutual self-giving of the Trinity in Jesus’s death transforms our experience of death. It transforms abysmal despair into the grief of a resisting hope in the ‘true union [that] takes place only between living beings, with equal power, and thus in one another's eyes completely living beings; [which] in no respect is either dead for the other’.95

6.2 Resurrected Victim – A Meaningless Arabesque? God maintains God’s identity as the God of humanity by keeping promises to humanity despite everything that threatens their fulfilment. While in the Hebrew Scriptures God identifies Godself as the one who brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, the God of the NT is the one who raised Jesus from the dead (1 Thess. 1.10; Gal. 1.1; 1 Cor. 6.14; 15.15; 2 Cor. 4.14; Rom. 4.24; 8.11; 10.7, 9; Col. 2.12f.). These two ways of metaphorizing sacrifice are connected in the sense that Christ only represents the ultimate overcoming of redemptive violence insofar as he overcomes victimization and fear of death (perceived as ‘aggressive non-being’)96. The topic of resurrection is usually restricted to considering the response of the Father and the Spirit to the self-giving of the Son in death. In my view, this limits its meaning-potential. Jesus’s life as a whole is an expression of the power of Triune life that raised him from the dead. From beginning to end, Triune divine life confronted the forces of destruction and death. The relationally restorative power of forgiveness and the social, spiritual and bodily healing Jesus embodied were all expressions of the life-giving and life-affirming power of God. However, the ultimacy of this power was fully revealed at the end of his earthly life and it continues to unfold in the life of the Christian church. When considering the drama of Jesus’s last hours, it is important to emphasize that God’s will to salvation was not fulfilled on the cross. As Marit Trelstad states, ‘It is not the cross that saves; it is God’s response to the cross that saves.’97 God’s love was not fulfilled in Christ’s powerlessness (weakness, kenosis) on the cross, but in God’s resistance to it by ‘the power of his indestructible life’ (Heb. 7.16). Taken in isolation, the cross binds humanity and God together in a bond of unresolved opposition. A love that accepts the finality of victimization and death will not suffice to solve the problems of sin. It will merely intensify them. It is only a love that surpasses these

95. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 304. Here I also draw on Johann Baptist Metz who, in a slightly different context, defined grief as ‘hope in resistance’. Johannes Baptist Metz, Gottespassion: Zur Ordensexistenz Heute (Freiburg: Herder, 1991), 31. 96. Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 210ff., 267. 97. Marit Trelstad, ‘Lavish Love: A Covenantal Ontology,’ in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 124. See also Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 343ff., 412.

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that will do so: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.’ (1 Cor. 15.17; see also Rom. 4.25) While I have argued that the murder of Jesus was not necessary for the revelation of God’s love, God’s reaction to this contingent event is morally significant. First, the resurrection of Jesus named victimization.98 It was a revelation of who the blasphemers in truth were. The resurrection is God’s rejection of Jesus as a sacrifice to God and an affirmation of him as victim: ‘You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.’ (Acts 3.15; see also 4.10; 5.30)99 Thus, it was not the cross that manifested the judgement of the judged judge, but Easter morning (1 Tim. 3.16).100 The resurrected victim is the ultimate expression of God’s resentment against sin. This does not mean that the crucifixion was a necessary moment in God’s plan to reveal the violent injustice inherent in the human heart. Murder cannot be a revelatory act. It is never sacred. It is a sacrilege, and can only be illegitimately instrumentalized. As David B. Hart writes: ‘God’s judgment vindicates Christ … not the crucifixion.’101 Resurrection is God’s unique way of judging victimizers and vindicating victims. It cannot be replicated by human beings. Secondly, the risen Christ still bears the physical scars of the victim, and so the absolute victim becomes a ‘victim-survivor’.102 For survivors of violence ‘the empty cross is a symbol of God’s continuous empowerment.’103 The saving mirror of victims is not that of the crucifix in which they are confronted with their own violence, but the mirror of the empty cross and the empty tomb that witness against attempts to undo life. Thirdly, it reveals that God is outside the ‘omnipotent’ control of the victimizers, that God is capable of eternally sustaining God’s openness to them.104 The victim is the one with the power to give life to his crucifiers. In the resurrection, Jesus’s morality of enemy-love receives its ultimate affirmation as the way to true fellowship. Jesus did not return with vengeance upon the unfaithful among his friends as the owner of the vineyard did in Mk 12.1–12, but returned with the greeting ‘Peace be with you!’ (Lk. 24.36; Jn 20.19, 26) – a greeting manifesting Jesus’s admonition to respond to victimization by offering his enemies to enter into a process of forgiveness (Mt. 18.22) including the challenge to love again (Jn 21. 15ff.).105

98. On this and the following, see Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 17, 30f. 99. Henriksen, Desire, 285. 100. Barth, CD 4-1, 211ff., 316, and CD 1-2, 443ff. See further Thomas, Risiko, 176ff. 101. Hart, Beauty, 390. See also Boff, Passion of Christ, 3f. 102. Anna Mercedes, ‘Who Are You? Christ and the Imperative of Subjectivity,’ in Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 93. 103. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 125. 104. Ellen Stubbe, ‘Religionspsychologische Anmerkungen zum Opfer,’ in Opfer: Verschenktes Leben, ed. Hans-Jürgen Luibl and Sabine Scheuter (Zürich: Pano Verlag, 2001), 62. 105. This is a good example of why we should take great care in interpreting all details of a parable to say something about God and God’s relation to God’s creatures. A parable is an

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This moral dimension of his resurrection is connected to an ontological one in the sense that the boundless character of God’s love reveals natural death as an event taking place in the living God. Both dimensions reveal and actualize the will of a God as an unrestricted will to good living fellowship. In this way, the death of Jesus has no saving significance independent of the resurrection.106 Together these two events reveal the fullness of the love that incorporates humanity into the eternal love life of Godself. As Kathryn Tanner notes: ‘Life is being brought to Jesus on the cross, as his resurrection makes clear. To be sacrificed, so as to be sanctified, is now not to die but to live, in a perfected a purified form.’107 Although I have expressed some reservations towards employing the term sacrifice as a determination of what takes place between God and humanity in this event, Tanner is certainly right that the death and resurrection of Jesus signify sanctity (Jn 17.19). In it we come to see that Jesus is incorporated into the life of the holy, that is, that he is in truth the eternally beloved of Father and Spirit.108 Rom. 6. 8–10 together with 8.38f. says (see also Rom. 8. 9–11, Jn 3.16; Acts 2.23–32; Phil. 3.10): Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

It is because of this that we may be “convinced that neither death nor life … will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ” The resurrection is the source of the Christian trust that no evil, no darkness whatsoever can overcome the life-giving love of God. In Jesus, the truth of the human condition does not come alone. Along with it we witness someone for whose love death is no limit. The God revealed in Jesus is the God who has the capacity to transform the human experience of death from that of total abandonment into an experience of life-giving presence. In it God distinguishes death from nothingness. Jesus died in the protesting hope that God is not a God of the dead, but of the living (Mt. 22.32; Lk. 23.46; Ps. 31.6). Thus, the resurrection is not only a response to moral evil, but also has a cosmic dimension that concerns the natural and spiritual condition of the cosmos as a whole. As a finite human being, Jesus knew himself to be dependent on the Father and the Spirit for his life, revealing what is true for all finite beings. While God

extended metaphor, and metaphors are structures that identify both similarity/dissimilarity and identity/non-identity. 106. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 412. 107. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 269. 108. Although I agree with Pannenberg that the ambiguity of his personhood is resolved in the resurrection, it did not require that he be murdered (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 338, 374). His death was surely enough.

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made Adam a ‘living being’, God did so out of ‘the dust of the earth’ making Adam perishable. In his attempt to become God, Adam denied God as his source of life, a denial the ultimate consequence of which is the experience of death as finality. In committing his life into the hands of his life-giver(s), Jesus himself reveals his nature to be that of life-giving spirit – the second Adam – that ‘swallows death up in victory’ (1 Cor. 15.42ff.; see also 2 Cor. 5.4b). This does not mean that the resurrection is exclusively the uni- or bilateral work of the Father and/or the Spirit. Without the self-giving of Jesus to the Father and the Spirit, the resurrection would not be an expression of the dynamic mutuality constitutive of love. As the mutual self-giving of Son, Father and Spirit, the resurrection reveals that the love of God in Christ destroys our ‘last enemy’: the experience of natural death as finality (v. 26). In and through Christ, death lost its sting (v. 55). The experience of death as ultimate reality has now become past. The dramatic apocalyptic imagery of Rev. 19.11–20 brings this peculiar fact symbolically to expression.109 Christ has mounted the white horse that symbolizes victory before the battle has even begun. His enemies gather and prepare for the battle they think is about to take place, only to realize that Christ has already won. There is no battle to be fought. Even if the incarnation means that God shares in the condition of finite being, and suffers both contingent and necessary consequences inherent in such existence, God is not destroyed by doing so. Jesus prevailed because he commended his life to the Father and the Spirit, refusing to stop actualizing divine love even in the face of violence and death. This is the very reason why we may call Jesus saviour. By dying he transformed the meaning of the phenomenon of natural death from within so that what was initially portrayed as a punishment for sin becomes a revelation that nothing can separate humanity from God.110 The ultimate significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that he draws all human beings to himself (Jn 12.32; 1 Cor. 15.20–28; Isa. 45.24). This logic is reflected in a much-debated passage found in Paul’s letter to the Christian fellowship in Rome. Rom. 3.25 reads: ‘God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement [ἱλαστήριον], through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith.’ Does the term ἱλαστήριον portray Jesus as a ‘sacrifice of atonement’ (according to the rendering of NIV)? Philological evidence does not support such an interpretation. Neither in the LXX nor in Philo is ἱλαστήριον understood as an atoning sacrifice (ἱλαστήριον θῦμα), but as the place of God’s merciful presence (Exod. 25.17–22; Lev. 16.2, 13–15).111 This philological background shows us that

109. Ted Grimsrud, ‘Scapegoating No More: Christian Pacifism and New Testament Views of Jesus’ Death,’ in Violence Renounced: René Girard, Biblical Studies and Peacemaking, ed. Willard M. Swartley (Telford, PN: Pandora Press, 2000), 63. 110. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 187. 111. Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 313f. See further Gottfried Fitzer, ‘Der Ort der Versöhnung nach Paulus: Zu der Frage des “Sühnopfers Jesu,”’ Theologische Zeitschrift 22, no. 3 (1966): 167ff., and Daniel P. Bailey, Jesus as the Mercy Seat: The Semantics and Theology of Paul’s Use of Hilasterion in Romans 3:25 (Cambridge, UK: University of

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Paul is initiating a process of metaphorization similar to the one unfolding in Hebrews (see especially Heb. 9.5). The traditional Levitical delineation of the space in which God is present is here transformed: the person of Jesus becomes the place at which God breaks the power of sin and death (see also 2 Cor. 5.17). Even so, Paul clearly maintains that Christ became the place of God’s merciful presence ‘through the shedding of his blood’. Petra von Gemünden and Gerd Theissen argue that the result of the metaphorization taking place in Romans is that Christ both becomes the place of God’s presence and the sacrifice whose blood effects atonement.112 Accordingly, it is not the ἱλαστήριον as such that effects atonement, but the blood of Jesus. Still blood may be shed without it having a sacrificial and/or atoning function, and sacrifices may be provided without the shedding of blood.113 Thus, a possible reading is to see the shedding of blood as simply referring to the death of Jesus (Rom. 3.15; 5.9; Eph. 1.7; 2.13; Col. 1.20; 1 Pet. 1.18; Rev. 1.5). However, such a reading fails to fully account for the symbolic character of the NT usage of the expression ‘the blood of Christ’. Peculiar to the semantic function of a symbol is that it leaves us with a dispersed semantic field. In the case of blood, its ulterior meaning in the biblical literature is, among others, both death and life.114 This ambiguity clearly comes to expression in the context of priestly theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, where the sprinkling of the blood of the sacrificial animal upon the altar symbolized the renewal of life for the one on whose behalf the sacrifice was presented (Lev. 17.11; see also Deut. 12.23). As noted above, the spilling of blood is not thought to satisfy the just demands of a holy God. Rather in the Hebrew Scriptures, the provider of the sacrifice expresses his dependency on God as his life-giver. This symbolic background is important when attempting to understand how the Pauline literature conceives of the semantic connection between the blood of Christ and Christ as the place of God’s loving presence. From the point of view of the resurrection of Jesus, the blood of Jesus becomes the symbol of an event that places victimization and death within the realm of

Cambridge, 1999). This reading also makes sense of Paul using this term to communicate his point to a (at least in part) non-Jewish fellowship. The lack of the particle is also an indication that Paul here operates with a notion that has common connotations as a place for God’s merciful presence. For an overview of interpretative options, see Markus Tiwald, ‘Christ as Hilasterion (Rom 3:25): Pauline Theology on the Day of Atonement in the Mirror of Early Jewish Thought,’ in The Day of Atonement: Its Interpretation in Early Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Thomas Hieke and Tobias Nicklas (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 189ff. 112. Petra von Gemünden and Gerd Theissen, ‘Metaphorische Logik im Römerbrief: Beobachtungen zu dessen Bildsemantik und Aufbau,’ in Metapher und Wirklichkeit: Die Logik der Bildhaftigkeit im Reden von Gott, Mensch und Natur, ed. Reinhold Bernhardt and Ulrike Link-Wieczorek (Göttingen: FS D. Ritschl, 1999), 116ff., especially footnote 13. 113. Friedrich, Verkündigung, 78, and Fitzer, ‘Versöhnung,’ 172f. 114. See William K. Gilders, Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 181ff.

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the source of life (2 Cor. 5.4b). Jürgen Moltmann argues that an interpretation of Jesus’s death along the lines of a cultic sacrifice fails to comprehend how God’s loving presence is manifest in his death because it is completely incompatible with the notion of resurrection.115 While the function of the expiatory sacrifices of the Hebrew cults was to restore the righteousness of the Jewish people, resurrection concerns the beginning of a new life. Moltmann is joined by Gottfried Fitzer: ‘The whole notion of sacrifice becomes a farce when the victim is resurrected. If the sacrificial view were decisive for Paul's relation to the death of Jesus, then the resurrection would be a senseless arabesque.’116 The fact that Hebrews, so oriented around cultic notions of sacrifice, offers no direct mention of the earthly resurrection of Jesus supports Moltmann’s and Fitzer’s claims. Would it not be awkward to speak of Jesus as a perfected functional equivalent to cultic sacrifice in a reconstruction of the meaning of Jesus in which his resurrection is central (1 Cor. 15.55ff.)? I agree with Moltmann and Fitzer that this would be the case if the Hebrew sacrificial cults (including the scapegoat-ritual) were merely restorative, and that the significance of Jesus’s death was restricted to propitiation or satisfaction. But there is an aspect retained in the theologies of the Hebrew cults that does not leave the resurrection of Jesus ‘a senseless arabesque’. Neither in these cults, nor in the NT understanding of Jesus, is death primarily construed as satisfying the just demands of God, but as an affirmation that God is a superabundance of life capable of preserving and renewing fellowship even in the face of existential threats (Jn 4.14; 10.10; 6.63; 20.22). This renewal was symbolically manifest in the sacrificial rituals of the old Hebrew cults in the form of sacrificial meals. In Christ, it is manifest in the affirmation of divine–human communion: Jesus is risen! In Paul, the justification of human beings means participating in Christ’s participation in the life of the creator. The forgiveness of sin is not the presupposition of the incorporation and consecration of human life into the eternal life of the Creator, but its consequence.117 The resurrection of Christ makes his death an expression of the indestructible power of God’s love through which eternal fellowship with God and creation is secured. It is in following this logic that Paul claims that the blood of Christ justifies (Rom. 5.9f.; 3.25f.; 4.25), doing away with the fear of eternal death as the consequence of sin. There is no contradiction of goal and means here insofar as death and destruction, both in the Hebrew cults and in Paul, are accepted as experiences of breaking away from the life-giver, and thus as negative phenomena in an absolute sense, overcome only in and through an act that recognizes God as creator. As noted, the actualization of this will to fellowship is constitutive of the celebration of the Christian meal, and it is in this context we often come upon

115. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 187f., and The Way of Jesus Christ, 188. See also Ulrich Körtner, ‘Gott und das Opfer: Evangelische Perspektiven,’ in Gott – Ratlos vor dem Bösen?, ed. Wolfgang Beinert (Freiburg: Herder, 1999), 145f. 116. Fitzer, ‘Versöhnung,’ 179. Author’s translation. See also ibid., 314. 117. Against for instance Williams, ‘Atonement,’ 234.

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interpretations of the death of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice. Here the notion of atonement gets interwoven with that of a covenantal sacrifice.118 With the above reflections in mind, some clarification must be made regarding this connection. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, sins are atoned for because human beings witness the transformation of the meaning of death into something that takes place in God. God’s response to the violent killing of an innocent is Easter morning, a fellowship affirmed and renewed. Again, it can only be said to be life-giving insofar as it assigns to the death of Jesus the atoning function of removing the obstacle(s) that causes (epistemic) separation from God: the selfsufficient mistrust in the life-creating and life-sustaining power of divine love. On Easter morning, humanity is given a reason to abandon this self-destructive attitude by entrusting their lives into the hands of this creator. The overall aim is the re-establishment of a life-giving fellowship between humanity and God as the image of the eschatological feast articulates. Thus, the resurrection-event reaches its full significance in the response of the Christian community: God is proclaimed as the God of the living (Ps. 31.6; Mt. 22.32; Lk. 23.46; Rom. 14.7–9). As the story of Jesus’s appearance to the two travelling companions on the road to Emmaus tells us, the resurrected Christ appears to the believers in what is at the same time a withdrawal (Lk. 24.51; see also Mk 16.19; Jn 16.7ff.; Acts 1.8f.), an opening up of a new space for living with God.119 The particularity of God’s self-revelation in the Son becomes universal in the Christian fellowship of life. The resurrection of Jesus culminates in the Christ-community (Rom. 8.11) and its living hope that God will keep transforming the world into a fellowship eternally and perfectly unified in difference until it will be transfigured into a mode of being where ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’ (Rev. 21.4). To sum up, with respect to God the divine incarnate did not gain anything through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection does not add properties to the ontological constitution of his divinity – it affirms it in the flesh. This does not mean that we should agree with Schleiermacher that the resurrection is not constitutive to our understanding of his person.120 On the contrary, the resurrection reveals that the incarnation of the Son was the self-giving of the Son to the Father and the Spirit. Neither the divinity of the Son is given up, nor the humanity of Jesus; Jesus dies as a true human being in a relational dynamic where life is in abundance. In this relational life, God and humanity are united in difference without opposition: ‘Whoever does not love abides in death’ (1 Jn 3.14). The resurrection is an expression of the mutuality of love insofar as Jesus gives himself to the Father and the Spirit, and the Father and the Spirit give themselves to Jesus. The resurrection reveals that the Triune persons never abandon one another.

118. Hans Kessler, Die theologische Bedeutung des Todes Jesu: Eine traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1970), 281. 119. von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 214. 120. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 417ff., 741.

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Having said this, I cannot but agree with Rebecca Parker that ‘Jesus’ resurrection and the continuation of his movement are not triumphs, but a glimpse of the power of survival, of the embers that survive the deluge. To know that the presence of God endures through violence is to know life holds more than its destruction. The power of life is strong’.121 By remembering his unjust suffering, human beings increase their awareness of the countless others who share(ed) his fate. To keep his memory alive is itself resistance – a constant reminder that religious and political oppression does not have the final say.122 In the light of the resurrection, human life remains a tree that is bended but not broken.123 The Christian church is the concrete narrative embodiment of this continuing ‘tragic optimism’.124

6.3 A Trinitarian Theology of Self-giving Love My focus so far has been the meaning of death from a Christological and soteriological perspective, that is, regarding the relationship of God and humanity in the person of Christ. While these perspectives have been thoroughly Trinitarian in orientation, I have not yet directly and more emphatically considered if the Triune relationships within God reflect relational power-dynamics of domination and submission. These two perspectives are of course intimately connected by the fact that God’s love for humanity manifests itself in the mutual love of the three divine persons. Self-giving and self-limiting love as determination of God are also a determination of God’s relationship to creation – a relationship that takes place within Godself: ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ (Acts 17.28).125 As emphasized above, the problems explicated in the above Section 4.2 arise from what is conceived to be a tension between descriptions of the saving act of God in Jesus as (self-)sacrificial, and as an expression of love (and/or justice). While most theologians will argue that their conception of God construes the God revealed in Jesus as a God of love, as has become abundantly clear from what has been written so far in this book, these conceptions of God are widely different.

121. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 250. 122. See Louise Schottroff, ‘Die Kreuzigung Jesu: Feministich-theologische Rekonstruktion der Kreuzigung Jesu und ihrer Bedeutung im frühen Christentum’ in Das Kreuz mit dem Kreuz: Feministisch-theologische Anfragen an die Kreuzetheologie, ed. Eveline Valtink (Hofgeismar: Hofgeismarer Protokolle, 1990), 20, and Moser, Opfer, 457f. 123. I am alluding here to Wittgenstein according to ‘you get tragedy when a tree, instead of bending, breaks’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1e. 124. The expression is borrowed from Paul Ricoeur (who again borrowed it from Emmanuel Mounier). Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 149. 125. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 325ff., and Moltmann, The Crucified God, 247f.

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When surveying theologies of sacrifice, a formulation by Giordano Bruno comes to mind: ‘Love is all and does all, and about him one can say all, and all can be ascribed to him.’126 Thus, when wanting to coherently reconstruct a notion of God as self-giving love, it is vital to clarify the relation between God and love. 1 Jn 4, 8 tells us that ‘God is love’. How are we to understand this confession? In a truly Trinitarian conception of God, God is not love because God possesses a certain kind of attitude or disposition, that is, divine love is not an inner state (or intention) located, so to speak, in ‘the heart’ prior to the establishment of the loving relationships that God is.127 Neither is it an affective state of the Triune persons that strives for the actualization of loving relationships. Furthermore, divine love is not the action of a single divine subject, as in the Unitarian conceptions of Brock, Parker and Brown. Nor can we coherently claim God to be love if love is construed as the (perfect) way God relates to Godself.128 In both cases, God might be a lover, but God would not be love itself. If God was a single person, God could not be love because love refers to specific qualities of an actual personal interaction between lover and beloved.129 Where the one who relates becomes identical to the relation, love becomes a conceptual contradiction.130 God can only be thought of as identical to love if God is the name of a relational space in which extensionally different persons interact 126. Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies, trans. Ingrid K. Rowland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 259. See further Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 269ff. 127. As in, for instance, Aquinas who describes the root of divine love as a power of apparition located in the divine will. Aquinas, ST 1, 113f. See further Christoph Schwöbel, ‘God is Love: The Model of Love and the Trinity,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 3, no. 40 (1998): 313ff., and Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 305. 128. A recent attempt in this direction can be found in Ward, Christ and the Cosmos, 199ff., 206, passim. 129. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 261. This confession would also be incoherent if God is construed as a singular part of an apersonal causal-relation in the immediacy of self-consciousness, as in Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 264. 130. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 111. This notion of God (or the Spirit that God is) as relation (and not as relater) is found both in Christian orthodoxy and in many feminist writings (for recent examples, see Heyward, The Redemption of God, 6f. passim. and Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 157). Drawing on Aquinas’s understanding of the Triune persons as subsisting relations, both Paul Fiddes and Michael Shultz are surely right that God should be understood as distinct movements, and that these moving relationships imply persons, and vice versa (Fiddes, Participating in God, 34ff., 48, passim; Michael Schulz, ‘The Trinitarian Concept of Essence and Substance,’ in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Robert J. Wozniak and Giulio Maspero (London: T. & T. Clark, 2012), 175). However, it does not follow from this that a person is identical to a relation, as they insist. For a critique of the latter claim, see Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2003), 200.

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in specific ways.131 This relational construal of love is of profound importance for a coherent Trinitarian theology of sacrifice.132 But how can we further determine the kind of interaction that love constitutes in the life of the Trinity? Whereas the doctrine of the Trinity was originally developed in response to Arian subordinationism, whether it succeeded or not is still a matter of debate. As shown above, critics like Parker, Sölle, Brown, and Hampson (etc.) continue to argue that such a notion of God implies a relational structure of domination and submission where Christ is either victimized by the Father, or actively engages in a self-destructive relationship to ‘Him’.133 Admittedly, the relationships between the Triune persons are fundamentally ambiguous. They can be understood as opposition, competition, (economic) reciprocity and hierarchy. Says Bruce A. Ware: ‘There is a relationship of authority and submission within the Godhead on the basis of which the other authority-submission relationship of Christ and man, and man and women, depend.’134 Yet they can also be explicated in terms of symmetrical and dynamic mutuality, cooperation, agreement and equality. In the words of Jeff Pool: ‘God seeks mutuality with the human, a mutuality that eschews human spiritual infantilism. This also implies that God’s inner life operates no differently than the relationship that God seeks to re-establish with the beloved creation: no hierarchy, either monarchical or patriarchal, structures the divine life.’135 Such contrary voices underline the importance of an in-depth discussion

131. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 305ff. 132. But why cannot God be love as the interaction of two divine persons? In contradistinction to those like Jean-Paul Sartre who argue that the look of a third party is a threat to the love between two (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 393ff.), in the Christian notion of the Trinity, the third party is necessary for the actualization of an aspect constitutive of true love, namely cooperation. Elaborating on a point made by Richard St. Victor and Richard Swinburne, Markus Mühling notes that true love includes a shared project of doing good towards a third party. This third party cannot be the world, because the world is individuated in relation to God. Thus, it must be a person internal to the divine life. Bringing forth the world (a fourth part in the relationship) is not an essential act of love, because love is already complete (as open, sharing) in the interrelation of the three divine persons (ibid., 308, 331, see also Richard of Saint Victor, On the Trinity, trans. Ruben Angelici (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2011), 132f., Richard Swinburne, ‘Could there be More than One God?’ Faith and Philosophy 5, no. 3 (1988): 233f., and The Christian God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 177ff. For a contrary view, see Brian Leftow, ‘Anti Social Trinitarianism,’ in The Trinity, ed. Stephen Davis, David Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 241, and Ward, Christ and the Cosmos, 196f., 223. 133. Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?,’ 2, 8f., 18f., 27, Hampson, After Christianity, 16ff., 119ff. 134. Ware, ‘Christ’s Atonement,’ 164. For a similar hierarchical view on the Triune relationships, see Swain and Allen ‘Obedience.’ 135. Pool, God’s Wounds 2, 248.

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of what kind of Triune relationality is implied in the notion of God as sacrificial love, and whether or not this conceptual determination is coherent. I do so with the words of Augustine constantly in mind: ‘nowhere else is a mistake more dangerous or the search more laborious, or discovery more advantageous.’136 My reconstruction takes leave in a certain tension between the profound Trinitarian conceptions of Eberhard Jüngel and Wolfhart Pannenberg, before moving on to reconstruct my own position in conversation with more recent works on Trinitarian theology. Eberhard Jüngel sees in the notion of a God sacrificing himself ‘… a concept which is necessary for Trinitarian speech about God’ because God identifies himself as Father, Son and Spirit exclusively in the death of Jesus.137 In this event, God becomes Godself by losing Godself in and through the other. The more different God becomes from Godself the more God actualizes himself as God.138 Insofar as it is in the structure of this self-actualization-through-self-differentiation that we come to see that God is love, Jüngel’s God can be reconstructed as a God of sacrificial love in a way similar to the first line of critique presented above: the power of the love of God is revealed as God empties Godself of ‘imperial’ power.139 Jüngel’s basic thesis is that the identity of God is not constituted in and through itself but comes to expression through self-differentiation.140 This act is an expression of love insofar as God identifies Godself only in and through loving God’s absolute other which is God’s creature. This does not mean that God does not love Godself. Yet it means that God does not love God’s other for the purpose of self-identification, but in order to receive identity from the other. Insofar as this is true also for the beloved, neither the Father, the Son nor the Spirit can identify the other without themselves being identified by the other: ‘For that reason the loving I does not have to promise itself anything for its love. Love itself promises a new being, which relates the I to the Thou out of this being and the Thou to the I from that being, and that indicates that “relates” means “receive”.’141 This means that each Triune person is in love in virtue of being loved by their others. God is love as the fulfilling mutuality that constitutes God as Father, Son and Spirit, and it is sacrificial because it was revealed in the death of the Son. What made it selfsacrificial and not self-destructive is the fact that God’s love in Christ is the ‘… event of the unity of life and death for the sake of life’.142

136. Augustine, The Trinity, 68. 137. Jüngel, Das Evangelium, 140. Author’s translation. See also Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 351, and ibidem note 21. 138. Ibid., 297f. 139. Jüngel, ‘Thesen,’ 292, thesis 4.7. 140. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 352ff. 141. Ibid., 321. Italics in the original. He also states that ‘the essence of all domination is its termination through complete mutual recognition.’ Jüngel, ‘Thesen,’ 293, thesis 4.91. Author’s translation. 142. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 317.

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While this construal in itself seems to cohere with the structure of mutuality inherent in self-sacrificial love as explicated in Section 5.1, there are some aspects of Jüngel’s conception that makes it somewhat ambiguous. Jüngel states that God in the death of Jesus unconditionally determines himself as love by differentiating himself from himself as lover and beloved: God is the one who loves out of himself. In that he relates himself to himself in such a way that he derives his being from himself. This mode of his being is called by the theological tradition God the Father, following the biblical pattern. But the one who loves out of himself must always be related to a beloved one, since it is not possible to love without reference to that beloved one who always receives this love: God the Son.143

The question is now whether this act of differentiation is a result of a co-original mutual self-sacrifice or whether God the Father is the primary (unconditional) lover who differentiates himself from the Son as beloved by sending him into the world. If the latter is the case, the otherness of the Son is constituted by Father for the sake of loving himself, and it presupposes a loving subject that is logically independent from God’s self-differentiation in Jesus.144 After all, Jüngel does not, to my knowledge, speak of the Father’s love as resulting from that of the Son (or the Spirit). The Son loves the Father because the Father primordially loves the Son, not also vice versa.145 If the love of the Father is not dependent on the love of the Son, then a structure of domination and submission (or absolute asymmetry) is admitted, and Jüngel falls prey to the second line of critique presented above.146 This structure is affirmed by Jüngel when he claims that God is the one identifying himself with the dead human being Jesus of Nazareth.147 If this was the case, then Jesus is reduced to a passive instrument of God’s self-love – a kind of love that does not deserve its name. In the complete mutuality characteristic of divine love, there is no primary or secondary lover. Divine love is co-original with the Triune relationships.148 Despite Jüngel’s obvious intention to affirm the identity between God and the Triune relationships, several readers of Jüngel have noted these ambiguities in his conception, above all Wolfhart Pannenberg, to which I will now turn to further explicate the first line of reasoning suggested by Jüngel.149 Pannenberg writes: 143. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 371, and further ibid., 219f., 227, 363f., 379. 144. See Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 135, and Pannenberg, Grundfragen 2, 107f. 145. See also the similar relational logic developed in Hart, Beauty, 168f., 367. 146. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 140f., and further Wenz, Geschichte 2, 339f. 147. Jüngel, ‘Thesen,’ 293, theses 5.2ff. 148. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 312f., 315, 317, and Christoph Schwöbel, Gott in Beziehung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 171. 149. See Schulz, ‘Essence and Substance,’ 157f., and also the fine study by Markus Mühling who traces this modalist tendency in Jüngel through Karl Barth back to the

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Jesus did not make himself equal to God, not even in the sense of declaring himself to be the Son of God (Mark 14:61). He differentiated himself from God by subordinating himself to the Father so that he might serve the Father’s lordship by all that he did. In this way he gave the Father the honor that all creatures owe him as the one God. Only in this self-distinction from the Father by subordination to his royal rule, and in service to it, is he the Son.150

Here Pannenberg seemingly reverses Jüngel position stating that it is the Son who is the primary subject differentiating himself from the Father in the incarnation.151 Still, by describing the act of self-distinction as one of subordination, Pannenberg also risks conceptually committing himself to a domination–submission structure. He could be taken to construe the relationship between the Father and the Son as a hierarchical one in which the Son fulfils his personhood by submitting to the will (or the ‘kingship’) of the Father. Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane supports such a view: ‘“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will”’ (Mk 14.36).152 The early Christian hymn referred to in Phil. 2.6–11 likewise speaks of the self-emptying and selfhumbling of Jesus (see also 2 Cor. 8.9), in Romans articulated as a contrast image to the hubris of Adam (5.12ff.). Pannenberg views these acts of submission as constitutive of the self-distinction of Jesus from his Father, and eo ipso constitutive of his unity with the divine as Son.153 Indeed, when he writes that ‘the self-offering [Selbsthingabe] of Jesus is a sacrifice [Opfer] to the Father only inasmuch as it

Neoplatonic elements in Augustine (Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 105ff., 135, 141). Similar lines of thought are also found in Tertullian (Tertullian, ‘Against Praxeas,’ 598, 601f., and ‘Against Hermogenes,’ in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1968). 478f.). As Mühling notes, Jüngel later rejected these scattered implications of his early position (Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 135f., 328). See also Moltmann’s critique of Barth and Rahner on this issue in Moltmann, The Trinity, 140ff. 150. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 363. See also ibid., 373. 151. The terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are not used to denote gender or sex, but culturally conditioned metaphors of a specific relational ordering of initiatives in the divine economy. Quoting Antoine Vergote, Daphne Hampson claims that even a figurative use of the notion of a divine Father ‘remains captive to the psychological images which preside over the patient’s alienation’ (Hampson, After Christianity, 164). The validity of this claim depends entirely on the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct a relationship of true mutuality between the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’. Only thus will it provide us with an image capable of fulfilling human personhood. 152. See Deborah Krause’s exegesis of Jesus’s experience in Gethsemane as that of the ‘overwhelming will of the Phallic Father’. Deborah Krause, ‘School’s in Session: The Making and Unmaking of Docile Disciple Bodies in Mark,’ in Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible: A Reader, ed. A. K. M. Adams (St. Louis: Chalice, 2001), 185. 153. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 377, 433.

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expresses his obedience to the mission that he received from the Father …’, he risks leaving us with the impression that Jesus ‘gave up’ his own will for the sake of the will of the Father, and in so doing became the perfect Son.154 A critic of Pannenberg’s construal should, however, note that for him the words ‘obedience’ and ‘submission’ does not refer to forced or hesitant consent. The sacrificial love of Jesus becomes an expression of Jesus’s free agreement to the Father’s original will.155 Yet, in expressing his agreement with the original will of his Father, did not Jesus give up his own capacity to forge his own distinct path in life? Did Jesus actualize himself in a masochistic subjection to the will of his Father?156 For Pannenberg these questions are mistaken because the Son knew that the path willed by the Father was the only path through which his own freedom would be fulfilled.157 He knew that a life in opposition to the Father (and the Spirit) would mean a life in complete unfreedom. By entrusting himself in the only ones capable of preserving his freedom, namely Father and Spirit, the Son preserves himself. Yet, this relational dynamic does not conform to the structure of mutuality unless the opposite is also the case, namely that the freedom of the Father is dependent upon that of the Son (and the Spirit). On this point, we should pay attention to the crucial distinction between Jüngel’s and Pannenberg’s understandings of how the Triune relationships are constituted. While in Jüngel the Father is (often) the constituting subject, Pannenberg emphasizes that the Triune persons are mutually constitutive.158 There cannot be an independent

154. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 318. See also Jesus, 334ff., 370, 375. 155. Systematic Theology 2, 316. Such an understanding of love is also found in Moltmann, The Crucified God, 274. John Dunnill has more recently made free obedient love into a moral and socio-historical ideal. Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body, 176f. 156. For a sustained critique of Pannenberg on this feature of his conception, see Linn Tonstad, ‘“The Ultimate Consequence of His Self-Distinction from the Father…”: Difference and Hierarchy in Pannenberg’s Trinity’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 51 (2009). 157. Pannenberg, Jesus, 349ff., 96. See also Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 55f., and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory III. Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, trans. Graham Harrrison, vol. 3 (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 225f. 158. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 304f., 426ff., and Grundfragen 2, 110f. This is also partly the case in Moltmann because of his emphasis on the mutual interpenetration (perichoresis) of the divine persons (Moltmann, The Trinity, 150, 157, 171ff., and ‘Perichoresis: An Old Magic Word for a New Trinitarian Theology,’ in Trinity, Community, Power: Mapping Trajectories in Wesleyan Theology, ed. M. Douglas Meeks (Nashville, TN: Kingwood Books, 2000). See also Johnson, She Who Is, 220f.; Fiddes, Participating in God, 71ff.; and Emmanuel Durand, ‘Perichoresis: A Key to Balancing Trinitarian Theology,’ in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Robert J. Wozniak and Giulio Maspero (London: T. & T. Clark, 2012)). Yet,

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divine subject or personality behind the Triune persons, because the personhood of each Triune person presupposes the Triune relationships. Personal existence is co-extensive with an open and active participatory belonging to a social world.159 If the incarnation was a mere means for the actualization of a mission that originated in the will of the Father (as the primary lover) and has the love of the Father as its goal, the freedom of the Father is only dependent on the freedom of the Son because the Father constitutes the Son in the Father’s self-differentiation on the

the problem with this notion is that it originally rested on an incoherent Platonist ontology in which the divine persons are distinct concretions of the eternal divine ousia, the unity of which comes to expression in the unity of operations. First of all, the divine ousia remains inexplicable beyond the intra-Trinitarian relationships. Secondly, because of the unity of operations, the notion of each person as a distinct centre of initiative is lost. Thirdly, it most often remains, as far as I can see, a theoretically underdetermined metaphor (Dale Tuggy, ‘The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing,’ Religious Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 170f., and Brümmer, Atonement, 104f.). Vincent Brümmer thinks that he avoids these problems by speaking of three distinct modes of agency of a single divine person (ibid., 108ff.). This comes at a high price, however, because God can only remain faithful despite rejection because God is eternal love (for further problems, see Tuggy, ‘Unfinished Business,’ 173). For other notable adherents to the principle of the mutual constitution in the Trinity, see especially Gisbert Greshake, ‘Trinity as “Communio,”’ in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Robert J. Wozniak and Giulio Maspero (London: T. & T. Clark, 2012), and Cornelius Plantinga Jr, ‘Social Trinity and Tritheism,’ in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays, ed. Cornelius Plantinga Jr and Ronald J. Feenstra (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). 159. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. Philip Clayton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), 64, and Grundfragen 2, 108ff. This is not tritheism because each of the Trinitarian persons is not God, but divine. God is not three in the sense that 3 Gods equals 1 God, but as three divine persons, they are the one God (the Athanasian Creed explicitly rejects that there are three Gods). Like a family is not identical to one of its members but consists of the members together in their familial relationships, God is the sum of the relationships between the divine persons. God can thus only exist as the unity of the three persons. The Trinity is a case of one-many identity (Einar Duenger B øhn, ‘The Logic of the Trinity,’ Sophia 50, no. 3 (2011)). Dale Tuggy claims that this contradicts the biblical vocabulary that speaks of God as a person because a community of persons is not a person (Tuggy, ‘Unfinished Business,’ 168). This is not necessarily the case if we understand each distinct saving initiative of God as corresponding to the initiative of one of the three divine persons. They do not act as one collective initiative (i.e. as one person), but each person ‘embraces’ the initiatives of each other. When we speak of God as acting, this is just an abbreviation of what one divine person is doing supported by, or in agreement with, the others. When the OT speaks as if God is one person acting, it is because it is as of yet theologically underdetermined (not necessarily ‘badly mistaken’ as Tuggy claims).

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cross.160 As argued above in connection with Jüngel’s position, this makes the Son an instrument of the Father’s self-love. In contradistinction to this, Pannenberg emphasizes a general rule of personal existence, namely that the very striving for self-preservation presupposes that it cannot be secured in and through one’s own self, that is, the recognition that there are relationships upon which every personal existence depends.161 In the Triune relationships, there cannot be any negation of the personhood of others because no person can be constituted through itself.162 Each of the Triune persons must be strictly co-original and co-constitutive. If this is the case then the dynamic structure of the Triune life cannot involve selfannihilation, self-sacrifice or absolute victimization. With this line of argument, Pannenberg indeed brings us closer to an understanding of the Trinity in terms of mutuality. However, the problem is that within his conception the structure of the power-relations by which intraTrinitarian mutuality is constituted is profoundly hierarchical.163 Even if it is true that Jesus, as a created human being, depends upon the Father (and the Spirit) for attaining his true identity, this does not necessarily imply that his divinity is eternally constituted as Son through free obedience to the Father’s original will. From the claim that their respective status revealed in the course of Jesus’s historical fate depended on it being affirmed by the other, it does not follow that the Father remains the eternal monarch, and Christ the monarch’s eternal loyal subject. Pannenberg’s construal of the constitution of the Triune persons through mutual self-distinction was developed to counteract a reduction of the Triune relationships to relations of origin. The difference between Father, on the one hand, and the Son and the Spirit, on the other hand, has traditionally been located only in the fact that the latter two are constituted (i.e. are eternally begotten/birthed/ breathed/proceeding) by the former, while the opposite is not the case. The

160. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 64f. 161. Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 63f. 162. While Moltmann at times seems to agree on this point (Moltmann, The Trinity, 173), at other times he states that the Father constitutes himself as person (Ibid., 165f.). Moltmann thinks that he protects himself from modalism (or ‘sabellianism’) by stating that the Father constitutes himself by eternally begetting/birthing the Son and breathing the Spirit, and these originating relations are radically different from what originating means within the cosmos. It means proceeding from the substance of the Father. But this statement contradicts the principle that each person is constitutive of the other. While Moltmann claims that the constituting acts of the Father are logically prior to the mutual interpenetration of the Triune persons, the latter is precisely that which achieves the eternal constitution of the persons. An additional problem is that the ontological concept of substance is an incoherent concept (Puntel, Structure and Being, 193f.). The tensions between a relational (or structural) ontology and a substance-ontology remain underdetermined in Moltmann. This last problem is also found in the anti-social Trinitarianism of Brian Leftow and Keith Ward. Leftow, ‘Anti Social Trinitarianism,’ 244, 248, and Ward, Christ and the Cosmos. 163. Tonstad, ‘Difference and Hierarchy,’ 392ff.

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problem with this account is that it admits an absolute asymmetric dependence relation that implies ontological inequality.164 Pannenberg saw this, and sought a different principle of individuation. Although his attempt brought us closer to a principle based on symmetrical mutuality, my argument so far has shown that we are required to develop a different principle of individuation. What must be sought is a principle that affirms mutual relation of dependence between the Triune persons without assuming a hierarchical shape. Markus Mühling has recently proposed a simple, yet evocative, alternative in which the Triune differentiations are construed as an open syntactic differentiation between first-, second- and third-relata all of which may be equally applied to each of the Triune persons.165 Although these are three distinct centres of initiative, the particular initiatives taken do not imply a difference in power or ontological status.166 To initiate a course of actions is not to dominate because there are no higher or lower initiatives, the centre of initiative is interchangeable, and the determinate content of the initiatives are not exclusively bound to only one of the persons. By introducing this principle of individuation, Mühling avoids making the Father’s eternal birth/breathing of the Son and the Spirit the individuating principle – a principle that contradicts the claim that the persons are mutually constitutive, and avoids the admission of a hierarchical powerstructure as in Pannenberg.167 Because there are no initiatives that are eternally given as constitutive of only one person, we cannot eternalize the Father as the source of everything that responds to ‘him’, as traditional theologies of the Trinity has done, and contemporary theologians continue to do.168 The configuration of initiatives that constitutes the distinctness of each person is not static. It might be

164. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 743, and more recently Tuggy, ‘Unfinished Business,’ 170. Already Gregory of Nazianzus struggled with this problem. Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations,’ 375f. 165. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 317, 320, 328, 331f. For a sophisticated contrary view, see Schulz, ‘Essence and Substance,’ 175. 166. For a more extensive argument for ‘centre of initiative’ as constitutive of personhood, see Smith, What is a Person?, 62f., 79. 167. Among those who reject the traditional language for similar reasons, see J. Oliver Buswell, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1962), 107ff., Millard J. Erickson, God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 309f., and John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2001), 488ff. 168. See for example Thomas F. Torrance, ‘The Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ’ ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 176f.; J. Scott Horrell, ‘The Eternal Son of God in the Social Trinity,’ in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, ed. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007), 70ff.; Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 320; Luis F. Ladaria, ‘Tam Pater Nemo: Reflection on the Paternity of God,’ in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Robert J. Wozniak and Giulio Maspero (London: T. & T. Clark, 2012), 469; Coakley, God,

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stable, but it is always dynamic – living. This implies that the historically manifest divine relational modalities witnessed by the biblical writers are not metaphysical absolutes, but relative in character.169 The Triune persons are not differentiated by recourse to trans-historically or transculturally given characteristics, attributes, roles, functions, or modes of agency (e.g. birthing/breathing vs. being born/being breathed, creating vs. revealing vs. inspiring, being Father vs. being Son etc.), but because of the mutual recognition that each person has the capacity of freely taking distinct initiatives from a shared reservoir of possibilities.170 What characterizes the Triune persons is that the personhood of the others is a project that is shared. If this is true, all three are equal in power. The equality of power established requires that the historical operations of the divine persons are undivided only in the sense that all operations are part of a shared project.171 Consequently the Father may take the initiative, and the Son may willingly cooperate in the project thus initiated without the relationship becoming one of domination and submission, and vice versa.172 A suggestive initiative is not domination as long as it is not an essentialized asymmetry, but belonging to the ontological constitution of each of the persons. While I am sceptical about the tendency in Pannenberg of eternalizing the kingship of the Father and the loyal sonship of the Son, with Pannenberg we should reject the claim that the incarnation of the Son was the result of the Father forcing his sovereign will upon his hesitant Son (victimization), or that the Son negated his own freedom in consenting to the will of the Father (selfsacrifice/self-destruction). We should rather say that ‘the whole Trinity worked the incarnation of the Son, as two girls dress a third, while she at the same time dresses herself.’173 Or as Leanne van Dyk states, ‘mutual cooperation and purpose’

Sexuality and the Self, 114, 308ff., 332f.; and most recently Webster, God Without Measure, 29ff., 153f. 169. A point recently made with considerable emphasis by Keith Ward. Ward, Christ and the Cosmos, xiii, 70, 126, 137ff, 248ff. 170. While J. Scott Horrell is right that the Christian scriptures univocally reflect a specific ordering of relationships in the Trinity (Horrell, ‘Social Trinity’), there is almost no biblical support for making the economic Trinitarian relationships metaphysically absolute determinations of the immanent Trinity (the notable exception perhaps being 1 Cor. 15.25– 28). Moreover, theological validity cannot simply be decided by appeal to scripture, but by recourse to the criterion of coherence. 171. This means that we might as well speak of the divine actions as inseparable, but not as indistinguishable. See Augustine, ‘Homilies on the Gospel of John,’ in NPNF, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 132f., and The Trinity, 70, 175. See further Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 264ff. 172. It should also be noted here that ‘the Son’ has never been a designation that implied that Jesus was a divine ‘minor’ as the divine-child-abuse accusation presupposes. 173. Luther renders this common saying in thesis 40 of the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi, the English translation of which is found in Paul R. Hinlicky, ‘Luther’s Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de Divinitate et Humanitate Christi,’ in Creator est

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characterize the Triune relationships.174 Thus insofar as surrogacy presupposes an unequal distribution of power between the surrogate and the one commending the surrogacy, Jesus cannot be understood as a surrogate, as in Williams argument presented above.175 The divine love coming to expression in the incarnation of the Son was a project shared by the Father, Son and Spirit.176 While the Father may take loving or creative initiatives, he cannot do so without the Son and the Spirit, and vice versa. The rhetoric of obedience drawn from the cultural imaginary of the Bible (Mk 14.36; Jn 5.30; 6.38; 8.42; Phil. 2.8; Rom. 5.19; Heb. 5.8) clouds these important truths about the relational dynamic of divine life. Having made these important points, I am not suggesting that the Father took the initiative to execute the Son with the consent of the latter. The NT speaks of the Sanhedrin (Mk 15.1; 10.33c, Lk. 24.20), Judas (Mk 14.41f. par.; 3.19 par.) and Pilate (Mk 15.15; Lk. 24.20) as the ones handing Jesus over to the executioners, while others leave us with an open passive construction where the subject is not specified (Mk 9.31; 10.33a; 1 Cor. 11.23; Rom. 4.25).177 But what about Rom. 8.32a? Does not Paul here portray the Father as far more than a passive spectator to the crucifixion? It reads: ‘He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all’. Does this give us sufficient reason to understand Jesus as being handed over to be murdered by his divine Father? The widespread use of the passive voice ‘being handed over’ (Mk 9.31; 10.33; 14.41 par.; cf. Rom. 4.25) clearly indicates that the Gospel writers understood the Father to allow the murder of his Son.178 They did not, however, assign to the Father the active role of executioner.

Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, ed. Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 184. 174. Leanne van Dyk, ‘Do Theories of Atonement Foster Abuse?’ Dialog 35, no. 1 (1996): 24. 175. For more on this, see Section 6.4. 176. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 286, 306ff. See further Irving Singer, Meaning in Life: The Pursuit of Love, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 27. In light of Mühling’s principle of individuation, it would be wise to look for alternatives (or at least supplements) to the metaphors of Father and Son because it connotes a power-dynamic in which the former is always the primary (initiating) subject, while the latter is always the secondary (responding) subject. 177. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 439. 178. Aside from Rom. 4.25 and 8.32, the textual basis for Paul’s use of παραδιδόναι is the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah 53, 6 and v.12b. One could argue that God is here portrayed as the source of the sufferings and death of the servant (see also v. 10). This claim is disputable as Isaiah seems to abstain from assigning to God the role of actively punishing the innocent sufferer (53.4f.). While the people thought him punished by God, the author corrects this view by locating the cause of his suffering in our transgressions and iniquities. V. 6 can thus only mean that God allowed the unjust suffering to take place, not that Godself administered these upon God’s servant. Moreover, the use of paradidonai does not by itself imply that God gave Christ over to suffering and murder. Acts 15.26 refers to an act of

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Should we then ascribe to Jesus’s opponents a divinely appointed role in the grand plan of salvation? No, this undercuts the core insight around which the NT corpus is based, namely that the will of God is actualized only in and through Jesus (Jn 14.9f.; 10.30). This does not mean, however, that the will of the Father and the Son were indexically identical. The Father wills the incarnation of the Son as that of an Other, the Son wills it as himself. To speak of the unity of will and not of wills, as many theologians do today,179 risks merging their centres of initiative, that is, of the distinct indexicality that constitutes their respective personhoods. Still, while Jesus was undoubtedly an active subject in his incarnation and death (Mk 8.31; 9.31; 10.33 par.; Jn 10.18), his words in Mk 14.36 were not an instance of self-victimization, as the hymnal traditions in Phil. 2.8 and Heb. 5.8 might give reason to think.180 As I argued above, self-victimization is a contradiction in terms. Rather his words express a self-made endorsement of the Father’s initiative. The Pauline literature can both speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus as revealing the love of God (Rom. 5.8; 8.31f. See also Jn 3. 16; 1 Jn 4.10), and the love of Christ (Gal. 2.20; 2 Cor. 5.14; Eph. 5.2, 25; Jn 13.1; Rev. 1. 5b), as well as speaking of God as giving Godself up (Rom. 4.25; 8.32), and Christ as the one giving himself up (Gal. 1.3f.; 2.20). From these voices, we should conclude that Jesus did not submit unwillingly to the will of the Father, but embraced the Father’s initiative to actualize a love that overcomes the destructive forces of human life by ‘placing’ them within the life of God.181 Feminist theologian Daphne Hampson employs the term ‘inter-dependent autonomy’ as an alternative to the Christian understanding of divine love.182 Although this sounds like a conceptual contradiction,183 it is the bearer of a true intuition, namely that Triune life unfolds in the mutual affirmation of the freedom of the divine persons. When Jesus recognized himself as sent by the Father, he affirmed the freedom of the Father, and by recognizing his dependency on Jesus fulfilling his mission, the Father affirmed the freedom of Jesus. The Triune persons are only free in the specific mode of their relationships. They are fulfilled in the mutuality of freedom which is the condition of genuine self-transcendence. Furthermore, Hampson argues that the idea of self-differentiation is an idea that expresses a distinctly male way of delineating the self-in-relation.184 Yet, her idea of

dedication involving living human beings for which death was a contingent possibility, not a necessary requirement (see also Tit. 2.14). 179. See, for instance, Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 41, 52; Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 198; Brümmer, Atonement, 77, 102; and Ward, Christ and the Cosmos, 224, 230. 180. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 378. 181. Pannenberg, Jesus, 349ff. 182. Hampson, After Christianity, 104. 183. Interdependency and autonomy mutually exclude one another, because the former includes heteronomy (i.e. ‘if you kill me you will kill yourself ’). 184. Hampson, After Christianity, 94. See also Valerie Saiving, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View,’ Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (1960): 103ff.

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differentiation is synonymous with separation (or detachment), which is not what, for instance, Pannenberg refers to when speaking of Jesus’s self-distinction from the Father. Pannenberg’s description of this process of mutual self-identification is an expression of a kind of interdependency like that which Hampson identifies as so peculiar to the feminine way of being a self-in-relation. Furthermore, like Hampson claims that most women do, Jesus did not become himself by going through a conflict with a dominant and demanding Father.185 He is recognized as united with the Father (and the Spirit) in difference without opposition. Succinctly put: non-oppositional non-identity was integral to the identity of Jesus.186 He was himself within the ‘Trinitarian logic’ of self-limitation and self-giving.187 The dynamic of mutual self-limitation and self-giving is the deep-structure of the unity of the Triune God.188 In order to highlight the systematic connection between the Trinitarian conception developed so far and the claims made in the previous sections, I want to direct attention to another problem with Pannenberg’s exposition of the mutual self-distinction constitutive of Triune life, namely that it is made dependent on the murder of Jesus. For Pannenberg these events were ‘integral’ to Jesus’s earthly mission because they constituted ‘the climax’ of the mutual self-distinction of the Triune persons.189 In fact his murder was not only the consequence of human evil, but also a necessary consequence of his selfdistinction from the Father (and thus also of his unity with ‘Him’). Against this, I must again insist on the immense importance of distinguishing between the murder and the death of Jesus. While Pannenberg was right that his death and resurrection affirmed his finitude (and thus also his self-distinction from, and unity with, the Father/Spirit), his murder did not. The revelation of his divinity did not require him to suffer and die the way he did. Still, while contingent to his self-determination, the crucifixion of Jesus in fact became an element of the fate that determined his identity. In it we encounter a human victim in its refusal to give up its love for neither the Father and the Spirit, nor humanity. Correspondingly, his resurrection was an expression of the Father’s/Spirit’s refusal to abandon their love for the Son. As the Son lives for and from the

185. Hampson, After Christianity, 96. See also Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 335f. 186. Allision Weir argues very well for the re-appropriation of this aspect of Hegel (as elaborated by Julia Kristeva) within a feminist perspective. Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 12, 31, 150, 159f., 184ff. 187. Kristeva, Black Sun, 135. 188. Or to put it more succinctly: the unity of God is the mode of the Triune relationships. Pannenberg, Jesus, 181ff., 336, and Systematic Theology 1, 425f. See also Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 331. 189. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 375, 450, and Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, 314.

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Father/Spirit, the Father/Spirit lives for and from the Son.190 Important though my critical remarks are, they do not detract from the importance of Pannenberg’s claim that it is precisely because the Father, the Spirit and the Son are complete in their dependence upon the love of each other that they are who and what they are and were able to overcome victimization and human fear of death. These limitations of Pannenberg’s contribution can be further elaborated upon by noting his failure to distinguish between victimization, self-sacrifice and selfgiving. He did not adequately grasp the distinction between the murder of Jesus and his self-giving in death, and the crucial epistemic transition taking place in the Triune transformation of the meaning of death achieved in Christ. While I have already elaborated on the problems that result from the lack of the former distinction, I will proceed by adding some comments about the latter. Paul’s argument in Rom. 8.32ff. is illustrative. In v. 32, Paul speaks of God as ‘giving up’ his beloved Son for us all in order to ‘graciously give us all things’. In the verses that follow, a revealing tension is constructed. On the one hand, God (the Father) gave up his Son to death. On the other, this ‘giving up’ turned out to be the self-giving of the Son to the Father who responded by giving himself to the Son by together with the Spirit raising Jesus from the dead (v. 34; see also Rom. 1.4; 8.11; 1 Tim. 3.16b). The giving of the Father and the Spirit coincides with the self-giving of the Son to the Father and the Spirit and subsequently the self-giving of the Father and the Spirit to the Son whereby the meaning of death is transformed by life-giving divine love. What within the epistemic perspective of pure immanence appears as a divine self-annihilation is revealed to be the self-giving love of the Son to the Father and the Spirit (see also Heb. 9.4), and what appears as the selfannihilation of the Father in giving up himself in the Son is revealed to be the self-giving love of the Father and the Spirit to the Son. This transformation is not ontic but epistemic: what from a purely immanent perspective appears as selfannihilation is revealed to be the mutual self-giving love of Father, Son and Spirit.191 Furthermore, this epistemic tension has two poles, the first being Jesus’s experience of the Father and the Spirit as hidden on the cross, the second being that of the resurrection. Giving himself up meant for Jesus giving his life to the living God. In Eph. 5.2 Jesus’s ‘fragrant offering and sacrifice to God’ is not carried out to propitiate or satisfy God. It was a symbolic expression of his transfiguration and ascension, that is, his ultimate self-giving to the Father in death, a gift which at the same time is presented to humanity.192 His self-distinction was thus not an

190. See also Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 439. 191. If the problem was merely ontic it could have been dealt with completely independent from human existence. On this, see also Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 343. 192. Ruben Zimmermann, ‘“Deuten” heisst erzählen und übertragen: Narrativitet und Metaphorik als zentrale Sprachformen historischer Sinnbildung zum Tod Jesu’, in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg and Schröter Frey, Jens (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 366.

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act of self-annihilation, but a refusal to give up on a love that is able to sustain and nourish the Triune relationships infinitely.193 It was an expression of how the preservation of one’s self is always actualized through the preservation of the other, and vice versa. Triune love includes both self and other in the sense that divine self-love is only possible through the love of the other(s), and the true love of the other(s) is only possible through letting oneself be empowered by the love of the other. Triune love is the life-fulfilling mutuality of a communal ‘we’. Love is not actualized when each person loves oneself in the other. In accordance with the structure first reconstructed above in relation to Jüngel, Pannenberg rightly claims ‘Love falls short of the full self-giving [Hingabe] which is the condition that the one who loves be given self afresh in the responsive love of the one who is loved.’194 The reason why divine self-giving does not imply self-sacrifice, self-destruction or self-annihilation is precisely the fact that divine love fulfils itself in a relationship of complete symmetrical mutuality. As the Father and the Spirit respond to the self-giving of Jesus by giving themselves to the Son, death is transformed into an experience of life. The relation of power is here not that of domination and submission, but that of mutual empowerment. The Father loves the Son (Jn 3.35; 17.1), the Son loves the Father (14.31; 17.1), and the Spirit loves the Son with the Father and the Father with the Son (16.14). When the Father confirms Jesus as Son by resurrecting him from the dead, this is carried out in cooperation with the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8.11; see also Jn 15.26), and it is the Spirit who glorifies the Father through the Son, in the sense that it is only through glorifying the Son that the Father is glorified as Father (Jn 14.6, 16, 20).195 What must be underlined at this point, however, is that the personhood of the Spirit is not adequately grasped by the biblical and traditional emphasis on the Spirit as mediator of the love of Father and Son. Such a move confuses the Spirit as a relationship with that of the Spirit as itself a relater. The biblical basis for affirming the personhood of the Spirit is found in the role played by the Spirit in the resurrection of Jesus (and its invitation to Christian believers to participate in divine life).196 The divinity of the Spirit consists in letting God be God in Christ.197 Moreover, in its passion for letting the other be what he/she/it is, divine love is revealed as the presupposition of existence in general, and personal existence in

193. A look at the context of Eph. 5.2 affirms that self-giving does not refer to an act of absolute self-denial, but to a way of living for others with an unconditional will to love (Eph. 5.25–33). 194. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 426. 195. Ibid., 315f., 429f. 196. On the understanding of the Spirit and the Father as cooperative subjects in the resurrection-event, see Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 334f., and on the Spirit as inviting the believer into the divine life, see Coakley God, Sexuality and the Self, 114, 341, 343f. As I show in section below 10.3, Coakley is, however, not entirely clear about how the activity of the Spirit relates to the believer’s own subjectivity. 197. Wenz, Geschichte 2, 354.

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particular.198 Divine love is the mutual giving of space to the other in which the other can actualize its freedom in love.199 In relation to the critiques presented in Section 4.2, we should then conclude in the following way. If the relationship between the Father and Jesus were to be described as one of power where the Father forces Jesus to carry out his will, the Trinitarian structure of God’s self-revelation would dissolve. If Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane is to be interpreted as self-denial and self-annihilation as Moltmann (with Popkes) argues, it would be impossible to continue confessing the one God as three persons.200 Here I cannot but agree with Helga Sorge that this ‘… is the radical madness of a sado-masochistic and violent interaction between father and son: the son is cursed by the father’.201 In a Trinitarian structure, Jesus cannot be a mere instrument of the Father’s (violent) self-assertion because it would imply a will to self-destruction which is totally at odds with what God eternally is: life-giver. Making the reverse claim that Jesus is the ‘kenosis of the patriarchy’ is inadequate for a similar reason. Because of its inherent modalist tendency it lacks the structure of mutuality that is constitutive of Triune life (the Father gives himself up entirely in the Son). The same problem occurs if the divinity of the Son is rejected. Where God is reduced to a single spiritual power that shapes the social bonds of a just human society (as in Parker, Brown, Brock, Hampson, Ruether, Heyward),202 God cannot be an eternal source of love which remains open despite rejection and opposition. God’s love becomes as transitory as the projects of particular social reformers or reform-movements. Only where God is thought of as an eternal relationship between persons, can God’s love be trusted as a source of fellowship between the different that is truly eternal.203 Without buying into all his (neo-)thomistic presuppositions, David B. Hart is surely right when writing that the Trinity … eternally ‘invites’ and offers regard and recognition; it precedes and exceeds, then, every economy of power, because all ‘credit’ is already given and exhausted, because the love it declares and invokes is prior to, and the

198. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 427. 199. This is an understanding of love very like that of Hampson. Hampson, After Christianity, 164. 200. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 249f., and Wiard Popkes, Christus Traditus: Eine Untersuchung zum Begriff der Dahingabe im Neuen Testament (Zürich: Zwingli, 1967), 286. 201. Sorge, ‘Wer leiden will muss lieben,’ 63. Author’s translation. Italics in the original. 202. See also Mark L. Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 7, and Smith, Risking the Terror, 11. 203. Schwöbel, ‘God is Love,’ 323ff. Vincent Brümmer thinks speculations concerning love as constitutive of God’s eternity is irrelevant to faith, because it is only God’s faithfulness to creation that is important (Brümmer, Atonement, 112). What he fails to see is how the latter is sustained by the former. If God’s love is eternal, then it can always be trusted, despite rejection.

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premise of, all that is given … God simply continues to give, freely inexhaustibly, regardless of rejection.204

The story of Jesus is the self-explication of a God that is love, and in so doing casts out every fear that God is not eternally the fulfiller of promises.205 Together the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were no means to an end, but the expression of superabundant love. From his birth through his prophetic and healing ministry, the event on the cross and the emptied grave brings to expression this love as constitutive of the nature of the Trinity. Triune love is both the beginning and the end of salvation.

6.4 Self-giving Love as Vicarious Atonement There is an aspect of the reformation understanding of the sacrifice of Christ taken up into the Tübinger Antithese that remains to be discussed, namely the so-called ‘vicarious’ character of the life and death of Jesus. Theologies of sacrifice that insist on the systematic validity of this notion are still proposed today.206 Yet, as we have seen, they have also been heavily criticized. The question that will be discussed in this section is how the self-giving of Christ can be said to actualize a good living fellowship between human beings and God on behalf of humanity. We are in a sense returning to Anselm’s thesis that Jesus did something for the benefit of humanity that (other) human beings were unable to do. Again, I will not address the critiques of vicarious atonement formulated above head on, but systematically unfold an argument that will challenge them at the various points where they become relevant. I will begin my traversal by first attempting to clarify the second term of the notion of vicarious atonement. When concerned with evaluating the theological significance of the term atonement, it is extremely important to consider the complex relation between the analytical vocabulary of a systematic reconstruction and the vocabulary of the biblical texts themselves. Atonement is an analytical expression that cannot, by virtue of tradition-criticism, be derived from the ἱλάσκεσθαι-terminology.207 Not only does the concept not appear in the biblical

204. Hart, Beauty, 350f. See also ibid., 375. 205. Schwöbel, ‘God is Love,’ 326. 206. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 427; Sherman, King, Priest and Prophet, 179; Thomas Schreiner ‘Penal Substitution,’ in The Nature of Atonement: Four Views, ed. by James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006); Tück ‘Am ort der Verlorenheit’; and Simon Gathercole, ‘The Cross and Substitutionary Atonement,’ Scottish Journal of Evangelical Theology 21 (2003). 207. Jens Schröter, ‘Sühne, Stellvertretung und Opfer: Zur Verwendung analytischer Kategorien zur Deutung des Todes Jesu,’ in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 65.

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literature, no equivalent to the term can be found in antique literature whatsoever.208 It has primarily served to systematically explicate the general structure of the highly differentiated semantic field employed by the NT witnesses to articulate the significance of the life and death of Jesus. The obvious danger of applying a conceptual strategy such as this is its inherent tendency to harmonize semantic differences into a wide pre-established understanding of what atonement means. Not only is this hermeneutically insufficient, it is also theoretically unsatisfactory. In order to enhance the explanatory power of my reconstruction, I will aim to articulate as precisely as possible which dimension of the meaning of the life and death of Jesus the notion of atonement serves to clarify. Christof Gestrich distinguishes between three closely interwoven meanings of the term.209 Within the interpretative frameworks of high-Scholasticism, the reformers and counter-reformers, as well as in contemporary society in Europe, atonement primarily refers to a juridical act of ‘evening out’ where a perpetrator offers some form of compensation to the offended party in order to resolve a situation of conflict. Alternatively, cultic acts carried out to cleanse a person, or collective, from the blemishes of sin are termed atoning. Lastly, atonement can also refer to extraordinary acts that seek to soften the consequences of a wrongdoing that cannot be easily repaired. In my opinion, however, Wolfhart Pannenberg succeeds in identifying the general trait running through these different uses. He deems an act atoning for someone insofar as it can rid their actions of consequences that constitute existential threats, that is, threats against participation in a fellowship of life.210 Following this understanding of the term, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus can be said to be atoning insofar as it is construed as the ‘place’ at which God freely and mercifully rids the curse of sin of its existentially threatening consequences (Rom. 3.25f.; 8.2–4; Gal. 3.13). In continuation with the Christological and soteriological rule formulated in Section 4.3, atonement is actualized not only in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also in his sending as such (cf. Gal. 4.4). His life as a whole actualizes a love that removes existential threats: sickness, demon-possession, social exclusion, moral sin and ultimately the mistrust in God that makes many human beings approach death in fear.211 What then does it mean that the atoning function of the life and death of Jesus was vicarious in character? In accordance with Pannenberg’s understanding of atonement, the Tübinger Antithese understood the death of

208. Michael Wolter, ‘Der Heilstod Jesu als theologisches Argument,’ in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 303. 209. Christof Gestrich, ‘Sühne V: Kirchengeschichtlich und dogmatisch,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 348. 210. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 411. See also Hofius, ‘Sühne IV,’ 342, 344, and Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 35. 211. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 345.

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Jesus as ‘Existenzstellvertretung’, that is, an action carried out for human beings entangled in a life-threatening situation from which they themselves are unable to escape.212 Their position seems supported by NT-passages speaking of Jesus as dying ‘for us’.213 Yet, when spelling out their soteriological implications, these passages must be treated with great caution. The relation between the ‘for us’sayings and the formula stating that Jesus died ‘for our sins’ is according to Martin Hengel such that ‘The shorter form only becomes fully comprehensible in the light of the longer form: ὑπέρ ἡμών means: “for the forgiveness of our sins”’.214 As far as I can see, this construal is not entirely accurate. Not all ‘for-us’-sayings articulate an understanding of the death and resurrection of Jesus as vicarious atonement.215 For instance, when Jesus is portrayed by Paul as using the expression at the Last Supper (1 Cor. 11.24), it simply expresses the fact that the disciples were the recipients of his will to fellowship.216 The ‘for us’-formula is not drawn from the conceptual framework of the cult, but from the Graeco-Roman ethics of friendship.217 And when interpreted in relation to this context a person can be said to die ‘for someone’ without implying that this person did so vicariously, in the strictest sense of the word.218 For instance, one can simply refuse, to the point of death, to renounce one’s convictions to protect other persons or institutions without implying that one did so in place of others.219 To die for certain convictions

212. See Section 4.3. 213. See Friedrich, ‘Verkündigung,’ 72ff. Interestingly none occur where one would most expect them – namely in the passion narrative (but see Mk 14.24b). 214. Hengel, The Atonement, 36. For a similar view, see also Wilckens, Der Brief and die Römer, 240, and Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1, 191. 215. Cilliers Breytenbach, ‘Versöhnung, Stellvertretung und Sühne,’ New Testament Studies 39 (1993): 66ff.; “Christus sterb für uns.” Zur Tradition und paulinischen Rezeption der sogenannten “Sterbeformel,”’ New Testament Studies 49 (2003); Ferdinand Hahn, Theologie des Neuen Testaments, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 383ff.; Martin Gaukesbrink, Die Sühnetradition bei Paulus: Rezeption und theologischer Stellenwert (Würzburg: Echter, 1999), 43f.; and Henk S. Versnel, ‘Making Sense of Jesus’ Death: The Pagan Contribution’, in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 230ff. See also Kessler (‘Die theologische Bedeutung,’ 315) on the use of the expression in 1 Cor. 5.21. 216. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 418. 217. This claim goes against the insistence of for instance Terrell (Power in the Blood?, 18f). The only place where the ‘for-us’ formula is explicitly connected to cultic sacrifice is Ephesians 5.2. Yet there is no mention made of the atoning death of Jesus. The theme of the passage is the moral lives of the believer: as Christ actualized the will of God by giving himself as a gift to others, so should the Christian believer. 218. Versnel, ‘The Pagan Contribution,’ 227ff. 219. Jens Schröter argues that the parable of the good shepherd in Jn 10.1–21 offers an illustrative example. Yet I am not entirely convinced that this text does not include the notion of vicarious death. It is true that Jesus can be said to give his life for his sheep because

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or in solidarity with others can simply be of exemplary value for someone, as in Schleiermacher where the vicarious function of Jesus consists in him being the archetype of a true human relationship with God.220 Furthermore, while such a death has the potential of benefiting others, a vicarious death guarantees such a benefit for the one(s) for whom one dies.221 It is only when seen in connection with the life and death of Jesus as something suffered ‘for our sins’ that we are potentially facing a notion of vicarious atonement (Rom. 4.25; 1 Cor. 15.3; Gal. 1.4; 1 Pet. 2.24).222 However, both expressions underline a common point, namely that it is not human beings who atone for their sins by paying a tribute owed to God (in the most extreme cases through martyrdom). The initiative lies exclusively in and with God (2 Cor. 5.18–21; Rom. 5.10).223 An atoning act is vicarious insofar as it removes the destructive consequences of the actions of others. The occasion for God to become a human being was that humanity was unable, on its own, to overcome the separation resulting from mistrust in God (see for instance Jn 13.38), and the misguided love flowing from such an attitude.224 As previously noted, the incarnation is necessary for salvation in the sense that finitude can only be transformed by God unfolding Godself within finitude, if salvation is to constitute a historical hope: ‘For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants.’ (Heb. 2.16; see also 1 Pet. 1.3) Human life is constitutive of sin in the sense that sin cannot be dealt with as a trans-historical reality, but must involve either the destruction of the human world or an inner

he refuses to renounce his calling to protect it from danger. But insofar as his death and resurrection mean the overcoming of the ultimate threat to unlimited fellowship within the herd, his death is vicarious. Jesus fulfils this aim vicariously because it is only achievable by a love that is infinite. ‘Sühne,’ ibid., 69. 220. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 385ff., 463f. See also Kessler, ‘Die theologische Bedeutung,’ 274; Friedrich, ‘Verkündigung,’ 73; Sölle, ‘Der Erstgeborene aus dem Tod,’ 67; Versnel, ‘The Pagan Contribution,’ 259. 221. Versnel, ‘The Pagan Contribution,’ 233. 222. Klaus Wengst argues that this expression combines the non-cultic and nontheological Greek notion of effective death, and the cultic notion of expiation before God (Klaus Wengst, Christologische Formeln und Lieder des Urchristentums (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1972), 63, and also Versnel, ‘The Pagan Contribution,’ 216ff.). Sigrid Brandt goes further, rejecting that a (cultic) theology of sacrifice lay behind the expression (Brandt, Opfer Als Gedächtnis, 221). Furthermore, it is remarkable that Paul never quotes from the fourth song of the suffering servant when he interprets the significance of the death of Jesus, the only passage in the Hebrew Scriptures where suffering and death is said to be of atoning significance for others. 223. While Levitical religiosity exclusively portrays the priests as the subjects of expiation, other Hebrew text-cycles speak of God as the subject, both in an active and passive sense. See Adrian Schenker, ‘Sühne II: Altes Testament,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 335f., and also Tück, ‘Am ort der Verslorenheit,’ 39. 224. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 115.

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recreation of its relational nexus.225 Yet, as noted in Section 6.1, the incarnation did not transform the Son into sin (2 Cor. 5.21). Rather God did what no human being can do, namely transform human existence from within. Jesus fulfils this aim vicariously because it is only achievable by a Triune love that is truly indestructible. Furthermore, the vicarious character of the death and resurrection of Jesus does not imply that he died in place of others so that the latter may not themselves die: ‘One died for all, and therefore all died.’ (2 Cor. 5.14; see also Jn 11.25; Gal. 2.19; Phil. 3.10f.)226 Thus, the death of someone like Maximilian Kolbe, who took the place of someone sentenced to death, does not offer us an adequate analogy. His was an act of situational substitution: because he died in that situation, others did not. The death of Jesus was exclusive in the sense that it alone represented the death of all.227 The vicarious character of his murder/death and resurrection means different things, however, depending on whether it is viewed from the perspective of his opponents, or from that of his friends. For the former, the murder of Jesus did not imply survival. The enemy-love displayed by Jesus meant that his opponents died with him. By confronting the deadly power of sin actualizing itself in his opponents, Jesus revealed the result of a life not lived by the rule of love, but by the rules of egoism and retribution. In this way, both Jesus and his opponents suffered the deadly power of sin, but in different ways. While his opponents revealed what it means to live and die independently of God by killing the fountain of life, for his followers Jesus transformed the meaning of their deaths by giving himself to the Father and the Spirit. By doing so, those who seek fellowship with God in death will be able to approach death as the possibility of fellowship with God in God’s life (Rom. 6.3f., 8f.). The death and resurrection of Jesus was vicarious insofar as Christian believers can link themselves to this new reality which they were unable to actualize on their own (1 Pet. 1.21;0 Jn 11.25f.). In doing so, they themselves are invited into the holy (1 Cor. 6.19f.), actualizing God’s good life in creation (Rom. 6.12–14; 2 Cor. 5.21). It is this moral point Paul is articulating in 2 Cor. 5.14. The guiding thought of Rom. 3 is not that Jesus brought the old covenant to its culmination, but that God, in and through Jesus, initiated something completely new. The allusion to cultic vocabulary present in the pre-Pauline

225. Karl-Heinz Menke, ‘Gott sühnt in seiner Menschwerdung die Sünde des Menschen,’ in Erlösung auf Golgota?: Der Opfertod Jesu im Streit der Interpretationen, ed. Magnus Streit and Jan-Heiner Tück (Freiburg: Herder, 2012), 115ff. 226. See Eberhard Jüngel, Wertlose Wahrheit: Zur Identität und Relevanz des christlichen Glaubens (München: Kaiser, 1990), 250f., and Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, 427. 227. While according to the traditional Latin meaning of vicariatio, one could stand in for only one person at a time, according to the relational logic of repraesentatio, the representative could stand in for the many. Stephan Schaede, ‘Jes 53, 2 Kor 5 und die Aufgabe systematischer Theologie von Stellvertretung zu Reden,’ in Stellvertretung: Theologische, philosophische und kulturelle Aspekte, ed. Christine J. Janowski, Bernd Janowski, and Hans P. Lichtenberger (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2006), 131, 133.

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tradition of Rom. 3, 25f. can easily overshadow the fact that Paul does not develop his soteriology around cultic notions of accumulated guilt that needs an atoning act in order to be annulled, but rather around the experience of God’s faithfulness despite human faithlessness and unwillingness to live in a fellowship of loving mutuality with God and God’s creation. What motivates God’s initiative is a will to establish a new (covenant) fellowship, a will brought to its definitive realization at Easter.228 It is the hope rooted in the Easter-event which transforms the old human being, separated from God by sin and death, into the new who trustfully comes to God (1 Cor. 15.42–49). The resurrection of Jesus reveals the indestructible love that God is, and which the created order itself could not actualize within the bounds of its self-enclosed finitude (or self-enclosed divinity for that matter). Easter opens humanity up to the reality of a life beyond the death of its natural bodies. The exclusive character of this inclusive event is fully revealed through the Spirit at work among Christian believers. The transformation of the meaning of death was vicarious insofar as it is only possible to actualize in and through the self-unfolding of Triune love. In the mutual trusting self-giving of Father, Son and Spirit in and through which God mediates between God and God’s lost creation, God is revealing the reason for a trust that can bring humanity into true fellowship with God. The atoning nature of Jesus’s death and resurrection secures the re-establishment of a living fellowship with the holy, a function earlier filled by the sacrificial cult, only insofar as the transformation of death occurring in and through Jesus incorporates humanity into the eternal life of the divine (see also Rom. 12.1; 15.16). Yet, as Ingolf Dalferth argues in his seminal article on the Tübinger antithesis, while the atoning sacrifices of the Levitical cults followed the structure of consecration – immolation – incorporation, the death and resurrection of Jesus manifests the opposite chronology: first incorporation, then immolation, and lastly consecration.229 While in the Levitical cult a transferal of identity to the sacrificial animal had to take place in order for someone to participate in the giving of its life to God, in the NT Christ’s incorporation into the holy takes place in order for others to gain a new identity through faith (1 Cor. 1.30). In the new covenant, consecration takes place as ‘the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children’ (Rom. 8.16; see also 3.22). A new (religious) identity is established in and through faith. While in cultic religiosity human beings had to establish their purity through sacrifice before approaching the divine, Jesus establishes fellowship with the sinner as such, thus transforming a love that is conditional in character

228. The expression ‘righteousness’ (δικαιοσύνη) is connected here to the content of the covenant relationship. The righteousness of God is what characterizes this relationship. Kessler, ‘Die theologische Bedeutung,’ 270. 229. Dalferth, ‘Dogmatische Erwägungen,’ 189ff. See also Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte, 275f. Dalferth is here in accordance with Luther’s insistence that holiness follows from blessedness. First, we are blessed/saved (selig), then holy (heilig) – first incorporation, then consecration. Luther, ‘Confession,’ 365.

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into a love that is unconditional. Yet again, it is only from the point of view of Easter that the love of God can be said to unfold in the crucifixion of Jesus. The transferal of identity (consecration) from a non-believer to a Christian believer takes place when a human being recognizes his own death and resurrection as proleptically taking place in the fate of Jesus. Now, Dalferth further argues that the metaphorical reversal of the sacrificial sequence in the death of Jesus means that his death did not have a vicarious character.230 When speaking of the death of Jesus as incorporation into the holy, we are no longer speaking of something which happened in our place or in our stead. The problem with such notions is, according to Dalferth, that it introduces a split between the work and the person of Christ. The actions and sufferings of Jesus are understood as external events divested from the person who performs/undergoes them, so that their effects may benefit others. Yet, Christ did not provide an atoning sacrifice that human beings cannot provide, yet reap the (juridical) rewards off. What is problematic with such a quasi-causal and juridical understanding of the death of Jesus is that it misconstrues the personal character of the saving action of God.231 What is crucial in understanding the saving action of God is the fact that Jesus himself is the content of this action. His actions cannot be divested from who he is: the love of God pouring itself into the world and so re-creating it. Salvation consists in inviting humanity to partake in divine life. Thus, Jesus does not produce salvation. He is salvation: ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’ (2 Cor. 5.17) While Dalferth is making a valid point here against those insisting, with the theologians of Protestant orthodoxy, that Jesus vicariously suffered the penalty of sin, I would like to argue that the notion of vicarious atonement can be reconstructed in a way that both avoids his critique, and even integrates his main concern. How may this be done? To begin with, the vicarious character of the death of Jesus should be distinguished from its representative dimension.232 Robert Sherman echoes a classical claim when writing that ‘Christ is mediator, the representative, and the advocate through whom, in the power of the Spirit, we approach God the Father and God the Father comes to us.’233 To evaluate such a claim we must clarify what ‘represent’ means in this context. An action is representative if it makes an absent X (the one represented) present to Y, and the latter accepts it as such. In the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer, to represent means ‘letting something become present’

230. Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘Christ died for us: Reflections on the Sacrificial Language of Salvation,’ in Sacrifice and Redemption, ed. Stephen Sykes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 320, and Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte, 320. 231. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 374ff.; Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte, 306; and further Ferdinand Hahn, ‘Das Verständnis des Opfers im Neuen Testament,’ in Exegetische Beiträge zum ökumenischen Gespräch, ed. Ferdinand Hahn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 287f. 232. Gestrich, Stellvertretung, 179f., and Schaede, ‘Stellvertretung,’ 132f. 233. Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 180. See also ibid., 170.

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at a specific time and place.234 Can Jesus then be said to represent humanity insofar as he chose to make humanity present to the Father and the Spirit? This fits well with a cultic frame of mind. It would imply, however, that the one represented (humanity) is the source of Jesus’s authority.235 This was exactly what his opponents tried to prove. By killing him they sought to prove that the authority he claimed was an expression of human hubris. Yet by doing so they revealed their own hubris, acting as substitutes of God. Easter morning showed that Jesus can be said to simultaneously represent the sinful dimension of humanity, and the love that actualizes itself through his Father and the Spirit.236 He both represented the failure of sin to create and sustain good fellowship, and the love of the Father and the Spirit insofar as they are revealed as the sources of his endeavour to include human beings into the fellowship of divine life.237 The killing of Jesus revealed that humanity was unable to fill this function. It revealed that its life-support is cut off, and so the need for a vicar announces itself. Christ was no vicar of God, but of humanity.238 The life and death of Jesus are vicarious insofar as we through his story come to see that humanity is in dire need of support in order to sustain itself. While a representative relationship is characterized by the ontological overflow of the one represented, a vicarious relation is characterized by the lack of the ones for whom someone stands in. Jesus was the representative of God insofar as he widened the realm of the Kingdom of God, that is, brought near what was (epistemically and morally) absent. It was vicarious in the sense that it sustained a life unable to sustain itself. Humanity needed someone to fill the function it could not itself fill. While Christ is the representative of God because God is the centre of his saving powers, the sinfulness

234. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1960), 134, footnote 2. 235. Christoph Gestrich argues that representation means that there exists an asymmetrical relation of power between the two parts – the one representing being subordinated to the one whom he or she represents (Gestrich, Stellvertretung, 218f.). Even if the choice to represent is made by the former, this does not exclude that the source of his/her authority lies with the one represented. A choice to represent implies the rejection to rely on any other competing source of being (see Mk 14.36). This is the case for both the Father and the Son. To accept the role of representation coincides with a transfer of power to the representative, that is, the Father reveals his power as being dependent upon that of the Son. Thus, the title ‘Son of God’ does not designate subordination. It is a title of honour (Michael Wolter, ‘“Dumm und Skandalös”: Die paulinische Kreuzestheologie und das Wirklichkeitsverständnis des christlichen Glaubens’, in Das Kreuz Jesu: Gewalt, Opfer, Sühne, ed. Rudolf Weth (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), 51). 236. Thus, Jesus did not represent the Son. He was the Son in flesh. 237. He did not represent God in the sense that he took God’s place. He embodied God precisely because he did not. Schaede, ‘Stellvertretung,’ 141. 238. In contradistinction to the original employment of the term in the Roman theology of offices developed in the ninth century where the vicar represented Christ/God. Ibid., 130.

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of humanity is revealed when human beings act as the vicars of God attempting to secure salvation exclusively in and through their own powers. On this background, the meaning of the incarnation can be formulated in this way: ‘In place of the sinner, who acts like a God, a God acting like a human being appears.’239 This does not mean that Jesus was a substitute for humanity, if substitute is understood as in the original sense of the Latin term substitutio. In Roman hereditary law, substitutio originally referred to a permanent replacement (as in the case of Kolbe mentioned above).240 That Jesus filled a function that humanity itself could not fill does not mean that Jesus sought to replace humanity. Vincent Brümmer argues that if the significance of Jesus lies in his capacity to do what I cannot do, then I would be replaceable.241 God has no interest in me, but only that someone gives to God what God requires. Yet, this is not a necessary implication of an interpretation of the death of Jesus as vicarious. The life of Jesus was vicarious precisely because no human being can be replaced.242 He led each particular human being to the place where living sustenance eternally is (Jn 3.16; 4.14; 6.51).243 To act vicariously is to invite each particular human being to inhabit its intended place in the life of God. This conceptual clarification is also relevant to the Kantian critique referred to in Chapter 3. As noted, Kant criticized the notion that guilt can be compensated for by the acts of another person because guilt is internally related to what is personal.244 How does this critique fare when faced with my reconstruction of the notion of vicarious atonement? Kant was certainly right that guilt, unlike punishment, cannot be transferred from one person to another because of its internal relation to what it means to be a person. Guilt is not an attribute of a particular substance, but a determination of the way in which someone relates to someone else. Jesus provides a solution to the problem of guilt, not because guilt was transferred to his person and eliminated in his death, but because Jesus situates himself between a person’s guilt and its negative consequences, namely separation.245 God’s capacity for forgiveness is a capacity for relating positively to others despite everything that blocks the relationship.

239. Gestrich, Stellvertretung, 227. Author’s translation. Italics in the original. 240. Schaede, ‘Stellvertretung,’ 129. 241. Brümmer, Atonement, 76. 242. Dorothee Sölle says, ‘Because I am irreplaceable, I must be represented [vertreten]’. Dorothee Sölle, Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the ‘Death of God’, trans. David Lewis (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1967), 55. 243. See Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 206. 244. For a contemporary version of this critique, see Oliver D. Crisp, ‘The Logic of Penal Substitution Revisited’ in The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement, ed. Derek Tidball, David Hilborn and Justin Thacker (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008). 245. Gestrich, Stellvertretung, 365f., 370f.; Bernd Janowski, Stellvertretung: Alttestamentliche Studien zu einem theologischen Grundbegriff, (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1997), 19. To mention only one example, Gerhard Ebeling is mistaken when

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When Jesus in Lk. 4.18 speaks of the liberation of captives and oppressed, the author employs the Greek term for forgiveness (ἀφίημι), emphasizing that Jesus is capable of releasing them from their captivity to the distorted relationships of their past. While captivity to guilt is not the primary focus in this text (pointing to the wider horizon of forgiveness), it indicates that guilt is not primarily a way in which a person relates to himself. Kant misrepresents the complex character of guilt because he does not take into account the relationship between individual and community, individual and institutional structures, past and present.246 The reception of Kant’s critique of the vicarious and atoning character of the death of Jesus does not consider the necessary dark side of this shining coin, namely that we leave human beings alone with their merciless moral principles. Here it is worth recalling Hegel who stated that even if Kant was right when interpreted in a purely juridical framework where the finite subject is a singular person, he is wrong when interpreted in the framework of morality and religion where the ‘spirit’ unfolds.247 Because spirit is inherently communicative, it can be released of guilt in and through the other. Yet when offering forgiveness Jesus does not replace us, but seeks out the place in which human beings are alone with their shortcomings, revealing himself as the ‘place’ where we connect anew.248 Offering others to enter into a process of forgiveness of sins is thus neither an immoral rechannelling of individual guilt as we saw Christine Gudorf argue above, nor is it simply forgetting.249 It involves subversive memory insofar as it identifies the wrongs of the past.250 Forgiveness includes the expression of moral indignation

stating that ‘God, in a free act of grace, annuls the guilt’ (Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 197). Author’s translation and italics are mine. 246. Manfred Oeming, ‘“Fürwahr, er trug unsere Schuld”: Die Bedeutung der alttestamentlichen Vorstellungen von Sünde und Sündenvergebung für das Verständnis der neutestamentlichen Abendmahlstraditionen’, in Sühne, Opfer, Abendmahl: Vier Zugänge zum Verständnis des Abendmahls, ed. Andreas Wagner (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1999), 18. Kant’s construal is also problematic in the sense that he makes human beings guilty of radical evil while at the same time arguing that such evil inheres in their given nature. 247. Hegel, LPR 3, 370f. 248. Gestrich, Stellvertretung, 370f. See also Bernd Janowski, ‘“Hingabe” oder “Opfer”?: Zur gegenwärtigen Kontroverse um die Deutung des Todes Jesu’, in Das Kreuz Jesu: Gewalt, Opfer, Sühne, ed. Rudolf Weth (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2001), 30f., and above Section 5.4. 249. According to Nietzsche, the human being who forgets will be unable to forgive (Genealogy of Morals, 24. See also Griswold, Forgiveness, 40, 50). In private and societal relationship where forgiveness is enacted as forgetting the evils of the past, the trauma of the victim(s) is perpetuated. Haim Dasberg, ‘Trauma der israelitischen Gesellschaft: Holocaust – Ûberlebende, Opfer der isrealisch-arabischen Kriege und die Golfkrise,’ Dachauer Hefte 8 (1996): 18. 250. Grey, Feminism, 65ff., 93ff.

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at having been treated unjustly, and calls victimizers to compassion and to take responsibility for their actions. As such it presupposes the recognition of individual and collective guilt. In his invitation to forgiveness, Jesus made the recognition of guilt possible in the first place. Yet insofar as guilt consists in recognizing that ‘I am not currently living the life of love that I am capable of ’, forgiveness also involves identifying and remembering the evils of the past without letting these hinder the possibility of future good living in a just society.251 Through Jesus, God creates a new relationship out of a past filled with relational destruction. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s refusal to let humanity be alone with their past of relational decreation. Salvation is actualized in Christ because in him we come to see that God sustains human persons despite their moral shortcomings. Kant’s critique fails in the sense that it neglects the fact that God in Jesus reveals himself as the source of fellowship, and thus personhood, as such. The need for vicarious atonement arises out the fact that every single human being cannot sustain itself entirely in and through itself, but live with, for and from others. Robert Sherman is thus right in stating that the vicarious character of Jesus’s death ‘means that the collective momentum of historical and social evil is not allowed the last word in judging the individual’s merit or demerit amid the accidents of time and place’.252 A last point should be made regarding Delores William’s interpretation of Jesus as surrogate. Surrogacy and substitution are not the same. While the former presupposes the lesser value of the one who is sacrificed or sacrifices him- or herself, the latter is only the case where the one requiring someone to fulfil his or her function is of equal status to the one for which he or she stands in.253 Jesus is no surrogate because he is the embodiment of a shared love in which there is superabundant life. To conclude, as has been established above, the life and death of Jesus cannot adequately be described as sacrificing himself to God because when dying in God living fellowship is preserved. When dying Jesus gives himself to the Father and the Spirit as they give themselves to him. From what has been said in this section, we should further describe this as vicarious atonement insofar as it removed the existentially threatening consequences of human action by revealing the place where we can connect anew. Atonement is thus not carried out through an act of self-destruction or self-annihilation. The act of investing one’s resources of living is primarily to be viewed as a transformative, not a destructive act. The blood of Christ is not atoning because God needs death in order to create life, but because

251. Suchocki, The Fall to Violence, 149. Although remembrance of past horrors is necessary for repentance and healing to come about, as Miroslav Volf argues, it might be that the forgetting of horrors is necessary for the ultimate establishment of the peace of the eschaton because the pain of memory makes us prisoners of perpetual mourning. But this will only be possible if, and when, the threat of repeated violence is longer present. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 135ff., 224, 234ff. 252. Sherman, King, Priest, and Prophet, 205. 253. van Nistelrooij, Self-Sacrifice, 78, and Schaede, ‘Stellvertretung,’ 129f.

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the finality of death constitutes a threat to the good fellowship between creation and Creator that is willed by God. The blood of Christ is sanctifying only because it refers to a death that is transformed into an eternal fellowship of life (1 Pet. 1.2, 19–21; Jn 10.28; Rev. 5.9f.). When reading of interpretation of Jesus as ‘a lamb without blemish or defect’ (1 Pet. 1.19) and the reference in the Apocalypse to ‘the blood of the lamb’ (Rev. 7.14; 12.11), it is the blood of the living and powerful slaughtered unblemished lamb that protects his followers from succumbing to the sufferings caused by their slavery to destructive forces (cf. Heb. 8.14).254 If a life is self-giving only insofar as it is a life lived for the good of both oneself and others, then we should describe the death of Jesus as a vicarious atoning self-giving. Finally, it is important to emphasize with Moltmann that atoning actions cannot be restricted to the removal of destructive elements from human life, but includes the creation of new spaces for human self-unfolding (Jn 14.3).255 The Son did not become flesh only because of the problem of sin, but because of the internal dynamic of the creative love that constitutes the Triune life that always wants to live well with, for and from, others in an infinity of new spaces. In Christ, humanity is given ‘new and real time for living’ as Dorothee Sölle once beautifully put it.256

254. The authors here are drawing on the symbolic framework of the apotropaic rites of the Judaean cult, primarily the original rite of the Pesach-feast. Wolter, ‘Der Heilstod Jesu,’ 303. 255. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 272; The Trinity, 115ff.; and The Way of Jesus Christ, 155, 188. 256. Dorothee Sölle, Christ the Representative, 1967, 91. See also Novello, Death as Transformation, 64f. It should be mentioned that Sölle, and Novello with her, connects this to the representative dimension of the work of Christ. As my vocabulary is distinct from theirs, I do not follow them in this respect.

Chapter 7 GOD AND SACRED EXCLUSION/INCLUSION

Sacred bloodshed is not the only way in which semantics of sacrifice are connected to violence. As noted in Section 4.1, there is more to violence than acts that cause physical injury. Actions that lead to psychological and social mal-development are also within this semantic spectrum. What must be asked then is whether, and how, the God revealed in the life and death of Jesus endorses this kind of violence, and if so, if it can be coherently thought as an expression of love. In the sections to follow, I will focus on implications of the notion of God as sacrificial love for socio-religious demarcation, that is, of creating and sustaining in- and out-groups, and will move on to consider how the notion of God’s wrath is utilized in order to stabilize such orders.1 I start out by reconstructing the socio-religious significance of the so-called scapegoat-ritual, the second ritual sequence of the Hebrew Day of Atonement (Lev. 16).

7.1 Scapegoating as Sacred Exclusion Although the authors of the biblical literature themselves did not conceptualize the scapegoat-ritual as sacrificial in character,2 it has been reconstructed as such in a way that is relevant to consider in the context of my inquiry. As announced above, my primary interest in this ritual is not empirical, but systematic and reconstructive. In the scapegoat-ritual of the ancient Judaean cult, the high priest placed his hands on a male goat confessing the sins of the people thereby symbolically

1. Of course, this does not mean that there is no connection between the motif of sacred bloodshed and sacrificial exclusion/inclusion. Delores Williams has, for instance, interpreted the resurrection as a metaphor for the re-inclusion of an excluded. Williams, Sisters, 167. 2. Stephen Finlan lists several empirical differences between what the biblical literature itself conceptualizes as sacrifices and the scapegoat-ritual of the OT cult. Finlan, Problems, 7, 36f. See also Ina Willi-Plein, Opfer und Kult im alttestamentlichen Israel: Textbefragungen und Zwischenergebnisse (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1993), 26, 104ff.

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transferring the iniquities of the people of Israel onto the goat. The goat was subsequently driven out into the wilderness carrying away the guilt of the people. Even if this ritual sequence meant putting the animal in danger of losing its life by the teeth and claws of wild beasts, the meaning of the ritual was not dependent on that to happen.3 What took place was not a symbolic re-enactment of non-ritual killings (cf. Burkert). It was rather a symbolic re-enactment of excommunication, that is, of expelling destructive individuals from society. According to Girard’s line of thought, this fact did not render the ritual non-violent or non-sacrificial. It was not the killing itself that made the scapegoat-ritual sacrificial and violent in character, but the transfer of guilt upon one individual who was subsequently excluded from society. As such it was a symbolic transformation of psycho-social violence exercised on human beings (i.e. social exclusion),4 and indirectly of physical injury (as a highly probable side-effect). Even if sacrifice and violence were treated as synonyms in this context (both referring to an act of social exclusion), it is important to note that the scapegoat-ritual constituted a symbolic strategy aimed at preventing destructive forces already unleashed from making societal life impossible. By symbolically channelling their violence to a vicarious victim, society was purified (through a symbolic catharsis), and as a result minimized physical and psychological violence. On this background, what must be asked is whether violent exclusion is intrinsic to any act of social inclusion, and thus intrinsic to what it means to enact a good and living fellowship.

7.2 Sacrificial Love and the (Im-)possibility of Unrestricted Hospitality From my analyses of the semantics of violence in Section 4.1, we learnt that the widest sense ascribed to the term was that of any act of exclusion. Thus, for an act of love to be radically non-violent it should be radically inclusive.5 Theologically, the question that arises from this radical semantic expansion of the concept of violence is the following: if divine love is radically non-sacrificial does this mean that God does not exclude anyone, or anything, from entering into God’s fellowship of love? In other words, does a radically non-sacrificial love imply unrestricted hospitality, and is this notion coherent? Emmanuel Levinas’s

3. Admittedly, extra-biblical Hebrew traditions speak of the practice of pushing the goat off a cliff for it not to be able to return to the camp with its impurity. Alan J. Torrance, ‘Reclaiming the Continuing Priesthood of Christ’, in Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 189. 4. Stephen Finlan correctly notes Girard’s analysis of the mechanisms of human group formation is reductive in character. Aside from the scapegoat-mechanism, the need for food, shelter and defence makes human beings coordinate their efforts. Finlan, Option on Atonement in Christian Thought (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 106. 5. See, for instance, the proposal of Anderson, ‘Sacrifice as Self-destructive Love’, 43ff.

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discussions of the possibility of absolute hospitality offer an interesting point of departure for considering these questions.6 Levinas’s critique of traditional metaphysical thinking was built on the dichotomy between totality and infinity.7 According to Levinas, infinite hospitality towards the Other means that we do not peep through the hole to see who is knocking at our door.8 Infinite hospitality is radically non-sacrificial in that it does not exclude anyone or anything. It is universal unconditional responsibility, the (wel-)coming of every Other.9 Totality, on the other hand, is conditional and thus sacrificial, because it excludes the Other – the one(s) we do not know. It forces everything into the ontological order of the Same.10 How does this conceptual scheme relate to the Christian notions of hospitality and sacrifice? To answer this question, we could begin with a clarification of the kind of hospitality the vocabulary of sacrifice found in the Christian Scriptures ascribes to God. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the love of God originally came to expression in the election of Israel as God’s people (Deut. 4.37; 7.6–9; 10.15; Hos. 11.1), and in God’s faithfulness to the covenant (Exod. 20.6; Deut. 5.10; Neh. 1.5). In other words, God’s love was manifest in the consecration of Israel as the sacrificial collective of Yahweh (Ps. 78.68f.). According to Walter Burkert’s general ethnographic account, primordial sacrificial rituals served to establish and sustain socio-religious in- and out-groups in two ways.11 First, by assigning specific roles to those participating, the sacrificial ritual established the internal organization of a social group. Secondly, by establishing table-fellowships they made the participants in the ritual distinct as a social unit. Both functions were performed by means of consecration. Even though not always occurring within the framework of a centralized cult, sacrificial rituals all took place at a consecrated time and place, by consecrated people presenting consecrated objects. Consecration meant the transferral of something or someone from one sphere to another so that it attained a new (religious) identity. Through

6. See Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). 7. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, and Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 89f., 95. 8. Lévinas did not himself employ the word ‘hospitality’ extensively to characterize his understanding of the self-other-relation in Totality and Infinity. It can nevertheless, as Jacques Derrida has convincingly demonstrated, be reconstructed as its central topic. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), and also Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 25. 9. Lévinas’s point here is that I cannot welcome the other unless the Other first comes to me: ‘I welcome the Other who presents himself in my home by opening my home to him’. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 171. 10. Ibid., 221, passim. 11. Burkert, Homo Necans, 35ff., and further Bader, ‘Jesu Tod als Opfer’, 420ff.

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consecration, ordinary times and places, persons, objects, and ultimately the social group as such were ‘made holy’.12 These consecratory acts concerned the regulation of access to a communicative space in which humanity encountered the divine (e.g. Exod. 29.42–45). This regulated space of sacrifice was its cultic dimension. By ordering a space of interaction between persons and groups of different status, the sacrificial cults defined the boundaries of social and religious exclusion/inclusion.13 The symbolic framework of the sacrificial cult was complex. It consisted of a dualistic conception of space and time where two relata appeared in a mutually determinative relation to one another: the consecrated space/time/ people/groups defined the non-consecrated, and vice versa, the holy was only what it was in relation to the profane, and vice versa. The holy functioned as the clean and ordered counter-space balancing out the stained and disordered profane realm. Sacrificial rituals were the primary means for the establishment and sustenance of the relation between these spaces/times/people/groups, and so secured the stability necessary for the society to exist. Insofar as the sacrificial cult established and sustained the socio-religious delineations constitutive of the nation both internally and externally, the nation would cease to exist if it stopped acting as a sacrificial collective (Mal. 2.12; Hos. 11.1f., 5). In accordance with Burkert’s account, the sacrificial collective was established through a sacrificial meal. This is also the case in Hebrew Scriptures. While there are indeed traces of the ancient anthropomorphic notion of the divine actually being nourished by the consecrated food presented at these meals (e.g. Exod. 25.30; Lev. 21. 6, 8, 17; 22.25; 1 Sam. 21. 6f.; Judg. 6.19ff.), other voices in these scriptures openly criticized the idea (Ps. 50.7–13; Judg. 13.16).14 The sacrificial food was not thought to nourish God making the offeror ‘the dominant quasiparental sustainer of the divinity’s existence, and therefore entitled to make demands on him’.15 To expect that God would be nourished by the sacrificial food would be to treat God as a finite creature, and not as the creator of the cosmos, including of course every nutritious ingredient in the sacrificial meal. In fact, the food that was burnt consisted of the inedible parts of the animal. It was consumed by fire because it was unsuitable for eating. The focal point of the sacrificial meal was not a symbolic provision of divine nourishment, but to keep Israel united.

12. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 9. See also Sigrid Brandt, ‘War Jesu Tod ein “Opfer”: Perspektivenwechsel im Blick auf eine klassische theologische Frage’, in Das Kreuz Jesu – Gewalt, Opfer, Sühne, ed. Rudolf Weth (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), 67ff. 13. Bruce J. Malina, ‘Rituale der Lebensexklusivität: Zu einer Definition des Opfers’, in Opfer: Theologische und kulturelle Kontexte, ed. Bernd Janowski and Michael Welker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 32. 14. Alfred Marx, ‘Opferlogik im alten Israel’, ibid., 135ff. 15. Meyer Fortes, ‘Anthropologists and Theologians: Common Interests and Divergent Approaches’, in Sacrifice, ed. M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes (London: Academic Press, 1980), xvi.

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It was a continuous affirmation that the nation was constituted as the sacrificing collective of Yahweh.16 Part of what made the sacrificial practices of the Hebrew Society cultic was that participation in the sacrificial collective was heavily regulated. While there may be some tensions within the different strata of the Hebrew Scriptures as to who could enter the cultic perimeter and present sacrifices,17 access to the most holy was restricted to consecrated adult Judaean males (eventually only those of the tribe of Levi). Although the love of God was mostly described in particularistic terms, there were voices who spoke of the love of God as universal, including the strangers and the outcasts (Deut. 10.17–19). The life of Jesus can be interpreted as an elaboration of this latter perspective. Through Jesus, the socio-religious delineations of the Hebrew sacrificial cult were profoundly transformed. The interpretation of Jesus as saviour did not have its origin in the motif of the incarnation, but in the episodes conveying the manner in which he actualized his meal-fellowships, culminating in the for-us/for manysayings of the Last Supper.18 In these meals, salvation meant universal hospitality of both visitation and invitation. Jesus did not require the fulfilment of any antecedent condition when inviting people to recline with him at the table (e.g. Lk. 19.1–9; 15.11–32), or when paying a visit to someone. In the carpenter from Nazareth, God’s will to fellowship began to actualize itself among those considered as the despised outsiders of society: lepers, prostitutes, people possessed by demons, tollcollectors, etc. (Mk. 2.15–17 par.; Mt. 11.19; Lk. 7. 34–50; 14.12–14; 15.2). In the Gospel stories, Jesus reveals a God different from the ones who are too pure to be in the presence of the unclean.19 His saving presence was not conditioned by prior ritual cleansing (i.e. consecration). Jesus was not afraid of becoming impure, and thus did not react with hostility towards those considered impure by the religious norms of his time. Rather than hostility, he invited the social and religious anomalies into his fellowship.20 In Hag. 2.11–13, we are presented with the view that whereas consecrated (i.e. holy) meat does not transmit its holiness unto the unclean when touching the latter, an unclean person de-consecrates whatever he touches. Contrasting this view, Jesus sought out the impure because he knew

16. This is especially the case in the deutoronomistic layers of the Hebrew Scriptures where Yahweh is the God of one nation with one cult. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 402. 17. Ibid., 403, footnote 154. 18. Jürgen Roloff, ‘Anfänge der soteriologischen Deutung des Todes Jesu (Mk. X. 45 Nd Lk. Xxii. 27), New Testament Studies 19 (1972–73)’, and Christfried Böttrich, ‘Proexistenz im Leben und Sterben: Jesu Tod bei Lukas’, in Deutungen des Todes Jesu im Neuen Testament, ed. Jörg Frey and Jens Schröter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 416ff., the latter exposition with special emphasis on the Gospel of Luke. 19. Jay B. McDaniel, ‘The Passion of Christ: Grace both Red and Green’, in Cross Examinations: Reading on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 202. 20. Willi-Plein, Opfer und Kult, 39ff.

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that rather than being infected by the impurity of others, he would transmit his purity onto them: ‘You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you’ (Jn 15.3; see also Mt. 5. 25–34, 48; 1 Cor. 7.12–16). In John, consecration is not the precondition for reaching a state of participation in divine reality as it was in cultic religiosity. Rather consecration (i.e. the establishment of a new (religious) identity) was the consequence of Jesus’s message (Jn 1.12; 12.36; 17.17, 19; see also Acts 15.9). While, according to Lev. 7.20, the unclean person eating consecrated food was to be annihilated, the coming of Jesus meant that unclean persons were consecrated by eating his food (i.e. his words), and so became incorporated into the life-giving reality of the holy. As noted, one of the constitutive functions of cultic sacrifices was to cleanse people making them respectable as participants in meal-fellowship. People who had not made a sacrifice were unclean and thus could not sit at the dining-table. When the Pharisees reacted to a hospitality that did not recognize sacrificial purification as a necessary condition for fellowship, Jesus replied: ‘Go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”’ (Mt. 9.13; see also 12.33; Lk. 11.37– 44). Luke elaborates on the meaning of this saying by first having Jesus tell the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10.25–37).21 According to Luke, Jesus presents this parable as an answer to a question posed by a Jewish Scribe: who is my neighbour? Jesus answered this question by telling of a human being (ἂνθροπός τις), with no determinate gender, religious or ethnic belonging, social status (etc.), who needs help. A neighbour is simply any human being in need. But Jesus catches the opportunity to teach the Scribe the true meaning of the love of God and neighbour. In Jesus’s time, the relationship between Jews and Samaritans was not only tense, but also marked by hate. Around 200 B.C., the Samaritans had supported the Syrians in their attack on the Jews, and the latter retaliated by burning down the sacred temple of the Samaritans on mount Gerizim. Thus, in the Judaean lifeworld in which Jesus lived there was an ongoing debate among the Jewish Scribes on whether the commandment of Lev. 19.18 also included Samaritans (and Gentiles). It is a representative of the heretic archenemy of the Jews Jesus here presents as the true bearer of the love of God. Luke describes the injured person as appearing dead (‘half dead’), and so any contact with him would make the priest and the Levite unclean, making them unable, for instance, to offer their daily sacrifice. They are caught in a dilemma: to break the law concerning ritual requirements, or to fail fulfilling the law’s commandment to love a fellow human being in need. They choose the former, and so they make the wrong choice. The Samaritan, who according to the Judaean religious leaders interpreted the Law wrongly, here reveals its true meaning: to live out God’s compassion for every human being. The oil and wine used in the sacrifice presented each day in the temple (Lev. 23.13; Rev. 6.6) is here poured into

21. On this and the following, see John R. Donahue, The Gospel in Parable: Metaphor, Narrative, and Theology in the Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1990), 129ff.

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the wounds of the injured person. Here, the true sacrifice is an act of boundless compassion carried out by an unclean religious heretic. When the Scribe responds by acknowledging the ‘mercy’ of the Samaritan as fulfilling the intention of the Law (v. 37), the echo of Hos. 6.6 is resounding (see also Isa. 58.5–9). Ironically, the prophetic critique of a merely external cultic religiosity is concretized by a person not recognizing the sacred character of the prophetic writings. The lines of religious and social demarcation prevalent in the Hebrew cultic religiosity are construed as an absolute hindrance to the actualization of the kind of hospitality Jesus embodied.22 However, these norms of social demarcation were not radically transcended; they were profoundly transformed. While atonement in times of the old Hebrew cults consisted in separating oneself from the sinful dimension of human living (the unclean, etc.), Jesus achieved atonement by seeking out precisely this dimension. By transforming the boundaries set between the sinners and the ‘saints’, Jesus provided a counterforce to the inability of people to live well with, for, and from every other human being in just institutions (see below). Whereas the sacrificial economy of the Hebrew Scriptures was based on an inner-ethnic and inner-religious logic where God remained present in the fellowship on the condition of sacrifices provided, the Gospel narratives portray a divine initiative to forgive sins that ‘precedes the repentance, both temporally and logically’.23 In Jesus, God’s love did not know any ethnic, social, biological, religious (etc.) boundaries. It was radically universal (Jn 3.16; 11.52). His mission was to erect a temple that was to be ‘a house of prayer for all nations’ (Mk. 11.17). Whereas the Ark of the old Hebrew cult symbolized the Lord of armies who scattered the enemies of Israel (Num. 10.36), Jesus was the one who sought to gather ‘all creation’ (Mk. 16.15. See also 13.26f.; 15. 27f.). For Jesus, our love of other human beings is directly linked to the love of God because loving God means loving everything that God loves (Mk. 12.30f.; 5. 43–48; see also 1 Jn 4. 16b, 20f). The key text for understanding how Jesus appropriated semantics of sacrifice is Mk. 12.28–34 (see also Mt. 22. 35–40; Lk. 10.25–28). It reads: One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments,

22. This point is emphasized by the fact that the Gospels are consistent in identifying the outsiders of society as the ones who recognize Jesus’s true identity: lepers, a Roman centurion, the Gadarene demoniac, a paralytic, a haemorrhaging woman, two blind men, a Canaanite woman and the centurion at the cross. Ronald F. Thiemann, ‘Beyond Exclusivism and Absolutism: A Trinitarian Theology of the Cross’, in God’s Life in Trinity, ed. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 127. 23. Helmut Merklein, Die Gottesherrschaft als Handlungsprinzip: Untersuchung zur Ethik Jesu (Würzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1978), 204. See also Hans Kessler, ‘Das Kreuz und die Auferstehung,’ in Jesus von Nazareth, ed. Heinrich Schmidinger (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1996), 154. Author’s translation.

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which is the most important?’ ‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.’ ‘Well said, teacher,’ the man replied. ‘You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions. (Italics are mine).

In this passage, Jesus establishes the norm by which to judge sacrificial religion: love of God and fellow human beings. It is the employment of this norm that results in his prophetic critique of the social function of cultic sacrifices. That Jesus held meals with everyone established the kind of fellowship which is the life-giving nutrition for everyone (Lk. 9.10–17), a fellowship that overcomes all evil, even (eternal) death (Jn 3.16). It was Mary Magdalene, the outsider par excellence, who remained faithful to Jesus on the cross (Mk. 15.40) as well as in death (Mk. 16.1), and who first witnessed the ultimate meaning of God’s will to fellowship embodied in Jesus. And there was no coincidence in the fact that the travellers in Emmaus understood this at the very moment when Jesus shared the bread with them (Lk. 24.30–36). Insofar as the Jesus of the Gospels embodies a love that does not require any antecedent condition in order to be actualized, it could not be seamlessly integrated with the sacrificial religiosity of the Levitical cult. The love manifest in his person was radically hospitable both regarding visitation and invitation. God knocks on everyone’s door (Rev. 3.20; Lk. 14.15–23), and never rejects those who want to have fellowship with God. This particular characteristic of God’s love does not allow the cultic lines of socio-religious demarcation to structure the relational space between God and humanity as it did in the religiosity of the old Hebrew Society.24 However, a significant shift occurs when Luke traces the formation of the Christian meal-fellowships in Acts. As God’s presence broke through the boundaries set by the national cult of the Jews (Lk. 23.45; Acts 2.1–13), new attempts were made to regulate the table-fellowships (Acts 6.1; 10.1–11.18). Luke concludes on a somewhat pragmatic, yet ambiguous, note: although the Christian fellowship is to be open for anyone, some (rather pragmatic and context dependent)

24. There is, however, an aspect of the cultic function of sacrifice retained in the Gospels’ account of how the death and resurrection of Jesus configure this relational space. As noted, cultic sacrifice served to re-include a sacrificing person into an exclusive communicational space. While Jesus ontologically never lost access to this space, epistemologically the story of Jesus’s resurrection is a story of the (re-) affirmation of absolute exclusivity: for Jesus, the status of being Son of God, and for the Father that of being truly Father.

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conditions are to be met by those participating at the common Christian meals (15.1–29).25 This ambiguity regarding the rules of social demarcation is important to systematically pursue. In contrast to the hospitality of God embodied in Jesus, the hospitality of human beings is finite. Human beings do not let everyone into their houses, but remain preferential. Their times and their spaces are limited. If fellowship between humanity and God means true mutuality, God’s hospitality cannot be actualized within the current finite order because God does not force anyone to open their door when knocking at it. The door is locked from the inside, so that human beings can choose not to accept God’s eternal wish to establish table-fellowship with each and anyone. When looking back upon his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, Jesus lamented that his will to include everyone into this fellowship had not given rise to a corresponding will among the Judaeans of his time: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing’ (Mt. 23.37). Faced with such rejection, Jesus admonished his disciples not to force anything upon anyone but to recognize the freedom of choice given to their fellow human beings: ‘If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet’ (Mt. 10.14). On this point, it will be worthwhile to consider a line of argument developed by Jacques Derrida. Derrida famously argued that absolute hospitality is a historical impossibility because exclusion is constitutive of any instance of determinate human acting.26 If a non-sacrificial world means a world without preferential acts of exclusion, then a non-sacrificial world would be a world without determinate human beings or societies. Put differently, an unrestrictedly hospitable human being or society must be without borders that mark its identity, that is, it must be absolutely undetermined. Thus, if sacrifice and violence means exclusion, and exclusion is intrinsic to historical hospitality, then the latter cannot but remain sacrificial and violent. From this point of view human individuals and collectives are always already entangled in violence.27 Yet even if unrestricted, hospitality is impossible to actualize historically, it is a notion we cannot live without, according to Derrida.28 It is an ethical and/ or political desire that announces itself in each singular historical instant. Unrestricted hospitality is connected to his notion of messianicity as a desire

25. On this see also Section 7.3. 26. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68ff.; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 55; and Derrida, Acts of Religion, 256. 27. Likewise, Chantal Mouffe has argued that the we/them distinction is an ontological dimension of the human condition. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 3, passim, and The Democratic Paradox (London Verso, 2005), 134f. 28. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 16ff., and Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 149. Of relevance is also the related argument concerning deconstruction as justice in Derrida, Acts of Religion, 243ff.

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for an impossible absolute openness: enter whatever/whoever may come.29 It involves an absolute risk insofar as ‘the newcomer may be a good person, or may be the devil’.30 Insofar as it is beyond rational calculation based on our horizons of expectation, our desire for unrestricted hospitality risks the worst. Historically then, the possibility of absolute inclusion requires the possibility of exclusion, that is, the condition of its possibility is also condition of its impossibility. The ethical and political meaning of unrestricted hospitality is to desire the impossible, and to act as if the impossible were possible.31 It is an ethical good only insofar as it cannot be actualized. Much can be said about Levinas’s notion of infinite hospitality and Derrida’s concept of (im-)possible messianicity. I will restrict myself to addressing what I find to be the fundamental issue at stake in both positions. It concerns the question of whether or not it is possible to positively determine what divine hospitality may come to mean historically if such hospitality must be unrestricted, that is, not exclude anything. Derrida’s aporia is irrefutable insofar as historical hospitality is a term that presupposes a relationship between inclusion and exclusion, and this is also the case with messianic hospitality: unconditional openness to whatever may come excludes conditional openness. For this reason, historical hospitalities cannot be absolute, that is, only possible to define in relation to themselves. The search for a kind of hospitality that does not exclude anything is futile – it is an incoherent search.32 It is a search that is no search because there cannot be anything to search. Derrida is not simply saying that the full meaning of unrestricted hospitality has not yet been grasped. Historical beings are unable to even search for it, and so it will forever remain

29. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 16; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 65f., 90; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 25, 77ff.; Derrida, Acts of Religion, 257, 361ff.; and Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 29, 173f. See further, Pyyhtinen, The Gift, 91ff. 30. Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,’ in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1999), 70. See also Politics of Friendship, 219, and Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 35. 31. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 235f. 32. That is not to say that there is no value in the experience of something as incoherent (or as Derrida would say ‘impossible’). Yet its value is not that it as such is the condition of desire (see Derrida’s comment in Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, 72). Rather it constitutes the limit of our desire, that is, it is the experience of a self-dissolving desire, that is, that we cannot desire beyond that which there cannot be anything to desire, no ‘dream’ of desiring/doing/experiencing (not even a void). When we formulate questions to which there cannot be an answer, we determine the limits of coherent questioning. Derrida recognizes the logical structure of this argument but does not draw out its implications in a coherent manner. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 80f., 222.

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‘absolutely undetermined’, beyond every prophetic prefiguration.33 Derrida does not even leave us with the desire of an empty dream.34 In fact, to speak of a ‘chora [void] of tomorrow’, as Derrida himself does, is already to say too much.35 Although the principles of exclusion/inclusion upon which future historical hospitalities are based must be determinable in order to appear as phenomena, they may well transcend what we at each singular historical instance conceive of as possible. It may be an ‘absolute surprise’.36 As shown above, this was the focal point of the story of the Good Samaritan. Discarding this insight would be tantamount to promoting a notion of divine and human hospitality that prevents the possibilities of love from unfolding historically. What must be sought then is a notion of divine and human hospitality the exclusionary principle of which does not commit this mistake, that is, capable of always keeping the future open to whoever comes. Now, what happens when human beings not only reject divine hospitality, but even attempt to undo it? Their apparent success is revealed as defeat when they realize that divine love can sustain itself – endlessly. In determining itself as infinite in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the love of God determines human love as finite. In Christianity, the finite love of human beings and the infinite love of God stand in a mutually determining relationship to one another – the one cannot be thought without the other. The notion of the infinite is a term by which we may understand ourselves as finite, that is, as not divine. In the Christian tradition, it has been used to articulate the qualitative difference that exists between the creator and the created world. We can think in similar terms when it comes to the notion of sacrifice and non-violent enemy-love. By interpreting the story of Jesus as a story of the actualization of non-violent enemy-love in a sacrificial existence, human beings may understand that they are not themselves God, but loved by God ‘while we were still sinners’ (Rom. 5,8). Does this mean that unrestricted hospitality is only real in God, never possible to actualize historically for finite beings? When stating that divine hospitality is different in character compared to human hospitality, I am not saying that the former is unrelated to the latter. It is precisely because God is determined as infinitely hospitable that God is related to the history of finite beings as a whole. The love of God does not become less divine when conceived in relation to the finite order. On the contrary, it is only by doing so that we can determine the love of God as infinite: it is related to every dimension of being at all times and at all places. As such God is the

33. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65. See also Politics of Friendship, 38, and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 115. Derrida is not entirely consistent on the matter, however, speaking of the hope of a politics of absolute hospitality as a ‘subtle’ and ‘silent’ voice that enables us to affirm that democracy is better than tyranny (see ibid., 114). 34. Contrary to John Caputo’s claim in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, 3f. 35. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 66. Italics in the original. 36. Derrida ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 17.

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horizon through which all historical beings are fulfilled, brought together in living mutuality that spans the entire cosmos. Still does not the historical character of human beings mean that everyone necessarily relates to this divine hospitality in and through hope for the fulfilment of promises, and as such relate to it as contingently real? This is undoubtfully so, but the eschatological dimension presupposes that God’s promises are not empty. What is hoped for is, indeed must be, something more or less semantically and ontologically determined at present.37 But precisely what status does the content of God’s promises have? In Christian theology, reality is articulated in what Ingolf Dalferth terms an ‘eschatological indicative’.38 The content of the promise of the realization of divine hospitality is the full semantic and ontological determination of the relationship between God and the finite dimension of reality as it presently is. The contention that divine hospitality will in fact actualize itself in the eschaton is true if this notion is coherent with everything else that is truly the case at the present time (i.e. the real world). If so, the promise of the hospitable future of God is indeed a promise worthy of trust.39 While the promise of divine hospitality love is exactly that – a promise – this does not mean that it is not real – a logical impossibility. It is of course true that its full actualization is not possible given the present state of the world. It may only be so in its transfiguration. Hans Boersma says: ‘All acts of hospitality in history share in the limited and conditional character of these acts. … It is only in the eschatological resurrection of Christ, completed on the last day, that this violence comes to an end and God ushers in his unconditional or absolute hospitality.’40 It is only through the historical resurrection of Christ that we can get a glimpse of the content of this promise, that is, the hospitable character of our future with God. While it is indeed, and will remain, an impossibility for human beings to actualize infinite hospitality within the given historical order, it is a fundamental presupposition of its eschatological actualization that this is possible for God. That God is in fact fulfilling God’s promise is necessarily true (within a theologically determined universe) at all times! The possibility of the future actualization of infinite hospitality presupposes that God at present (indeed at all times) is in fact the fulfiller of this promise. As such the possibility of divine hospitality presupposes a real love, and thus also a love that (who) in fact will be.41

37. Lorenz Puntel, ‘Der Wahrheitsbegriff in Philosophie und Theologie,’ Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 9 (1995), 43. 38. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen: Hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 122. 39. Strictly speaking, whether a true promise is a good promise remains an open question. Could we not apply ethical criteria as the means to discern good possibilities from bad possibilities? But how do we know, in advance, if the deity yet to come is good or bad? Can we just presuppose that the deity to come is good? 40. Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, 257. 41. Moreover, the fact that the full explication of the nature of divine love escapes human capacities does not result in a theological possibilism, but in a recognition of humanity as

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Now, if we should concretize the socio-historical implications of this reasoning, we should first affirm that divine hospitality is radically nondiscriminative both when it comes to visitation and invitation. God remains forever open to everyone. Yet, for this to be possible God must exclude the exclusionary. In order to stay open, God must exclude that which contradicts the constitutive principle of such openness. The socio-historical implications of denying it would be grotesque: ‘Hospitality is an art that is impossible to practice when we refuse to challenge evil. … Divine violence may at times be necessary to ensure a hospitable future. … The violence resulting from the implementation of creational boundaries is necessary for God to embody hospitality in our world.’42 If traces of divine hospitality are to be recognizable in a human world of exclusionary violence it must be found where there is resistance towards those who continue to bring evil upon their fellow human beings. Human beings who desire to keep the future hospitable for everyone are required to exclude those who do not (sometimes even by means of just policing).43 If violence refers to any act of exclusion, then who among those who desire a peaceable unity among the different could denounce any use of violence? Insofar as divine hospitality means attempting to secure the well-being of all human beings, it must exercise inclusionary violence, that is, it must exclude any action that counteracts its full actualization. Inviting each and every human being to join in a fellowship of love means extending a universal invitation to turn away from practices which inhibit the human ability to live well with, for and from others in just institutions.44 In other words, God’s hospitality to join a fellowship of love is absolute. God does not invite each and every human being into a grotesque fellowship where love and violence are indistinguishable. It would be incoherent to claim that God acts violently because God invites every human being to join a fellowship of unlimited love. Yet, as Jesus readily experienced, this invitation did not only occasion love. Rejection of the invitation to exercise enemy-love had divisions among human beings as its inevitable consequence (Lk. 12.51–53).

finitely related to God. If Derrida and Lévinas are only saying that finite beings have not been able to exhaust everything that is expressible of God, it is a quite trivial anthropological claim. Even so theological possibilism primarily concerns theological anthropology and not God as such. See for instance Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), and my critique of his position in Asle Eikrem, ‘Kearney on the Possibility and Actuality of God: Critical Remarks,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 54, no. 2 (2012). 42. Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross, 35, 53f. 43. Gerald Schlabach, ‘Warfare vs. Policing: In Search of Moral Clarity,’ in Just Policing, Not War: An Alternative Response to World Violence, ed. Gerald Schlabach (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007). 44. This inscription of the good within the just is a development of a suggestion by Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 352.

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Commenting on the meaning of the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, Eta Linnemann writes: ‘In these similitudes Jesus tells his listeners that here and now in these objectionable table companions this deed of God has happened, and that his joy of finding expects their joy to share it, a joy that shares God’s joy. He expects their assent to his table with the lost, with whom he celebrates God’s joy.’45 In the Gospel of Luke, this message is elaborated through the parable of the Good Samaritan (10.30–35), and that of the loving father (Lk. 15.11–32). Upon the return of the lost son, a somewhat heated exchange occurs between the father and his older son. Through the latter character, Jesus articulates the theology of his opponents, the pious Judaeans. The anger with which the older son reacts towards the hospitality shown by the father upon the arrival of his lost son, reflects the anger exercised by the pious Judaeans towards the sinners and tax-collectors with whom Jesus constantly mingled, and with which he celebrated the coming of the Kingdom of God. It is their anger towards a God welcoming the impure into his fold which kept them from entering into the celebration in the first place, and nothing is said regarding their further reactions towards the father’s reason for celebrating the homecoming of his lost son. It is obvious, however, that remaining angry they would close themselves off from the gift of love. The criterion of exclusion is not the wrath of God, but the anger of human beings towards a God ‘provoking’ them with open arms. Insofar as the boundary (not the barrier!) around the fellowship of God is non-exclusionary, it must exclude the exclusionary.46 In order to maximize difference, Christian hospitality must be based on an exercise of ethical and political judgement based on respect for otherness (which of course also includes the believer him- or herself): ‘Vilify all boundaries, pronounce every discrete identity oppressive, put the tag ‘exclusion’ on every stable difference – and you will have aimless drifting instead of clear-sighted agency, haphazard activity instead of moral engagement and accountability and, in the long run, a torpor of death instead of a dance of freedom.’47 If Jesus actualized undifferentiated hospitality, his hospitality would be indifferent. He would be like the man or woman who Nietzsche described as ‘offering resistance no more, to no one anymore, neither to evil nor the evil-doer’.48 No real inner change would be required of human beings (as both victims and victimizers) identifying themselves with Jesus. Recall that this was one of the main points of the modern moral critique of sacrificial religion. Jesus embodied a different socio-historical vision. While, in his preaching, repentance is not construed as the antecedent condition for forgiveness to be actualized, it is put forward as its consequent one. The parable of the unmerciful servant makes

45. Eta Linnemann, Parables of Jesus: Introduction and Exposition, trans. John Sturdy (London: SPCK, 1966), 72f.. 46. I am alluding here to Miroslav Volf whose political theology is guided by the moral ideal of ‘nonexclusionary boundaries’. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 64. 47. Ibid., 64f. See also ibid., 204, 289. Derrida readily acknowledges this. See Derrida in Caputo and Scanlon, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, 72. 48. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo and the Antichrist, 130.

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this clear (Mt. 18.23–35).49 The story is constructed around a contrast between two ways of treating debtors. While the king releases his servant from debt without having to meet any preconditions, the servant fails to do likewise, and treats his debtor with a complete lack of mercy. His inability to incorporate the love shown to him by his master has a serious consequence: the cancellation of his own debt is itself cancelled. The same point is articulated in the Lord’s prayer (Mt. 6.12, 14f.; see also Lk. 5.35f.). While the forgiveness of God does not have any antecedent conditions, it has a consequent condition that has a retroactive effect: If we do not make forgiveness our way of life, neither will God’s will to forgive be actualized in human beings, nor in the human world.50 If we do not live forgivingly, societal life will, in the long run, become impossible. While God faces the future with an attitude of hospitality to the extent that God invites whoever may come into God’s fellowship, the place thus actualized cannot integrate its contradiction, namely the principle that excludes the exercise of enemy-love. As such it cannot be absolutely undetermined. In 1 Cor. 5.7 Paul makes a similar point, arguing that the continuing existence of ‘the leaven of malice and evil’ (v. 8) contradicts the reality inaugurated by this event. When Paul describes the death of Jesus as the sacrifice of a Passoverlamb, the context is that of the building and re-building of fellowship. If atonement here means the removal of the destructive social consequences of sin, then Paul, in contrast to traditional usage, brings to expression the atoning dimension in the sacrifice of the Passover-lamb. As such it is the event who initiates the joyful meals repeatedly to be celebrated among Christian believers.51 The invitation to these meals is not only universal, but it is also never outdated. God would disown Godself if God did not eternally welcome those who want to share table-fellowship with God (2 Tim. 2.13). Insofar as God eternally loves righteousness and justice ‘the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord’ (Ps. 33.4). Thus, it is not the case that ‘my turning from God is followed by God’s annihilating turning from me’, as Barth once claimed.52 God never turns away from the godless, but constantly seeks out what is lost (Lk. 15.1–32). Similarly, the Gospel of Matthew connects

49. See Raymund Schwager, ‘Christ’s Death and the Prophetic Critique of Sacrifice,’ Semeia 33 (1985): 112. 50. This does not mean that the fruit produces the tree. The tree still produces the fruit, but the fruit testifies that there is in fact a living tree, and not only something that appears as such. For more on this see Section 7.3. 51. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 223f. It is probably a similar symbolic background that enables Paul, later in his letter, to present the blood of the Last Supper as a symbol of the life-giving love of Jesus revealed in his death (1 Cor. 11.25). Paul uses the expression metaphorically to spell out how the killing (and resurrection, 1 Cor. 15.17) of Jesus protects the Christian Church from evil (and death) becoming its final reality. Furthermore, even if the Last Supper is interpreted as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, it does not imply that it has an atoning function, because the Levitical code required that the ones participating in the sacrifice of thanksgiving were already ritually clean. McLean, ‘Atoning Sacrifice,’ 547. 52. Barth, CD 4-1, 253.

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God’s perfection to God’s unceasing love of enemies (Mt. 5. 43–48, cf. Lk. 6.36). The perfection of God’s loving kindness is also connected to its infinite character (cf. Hos. 2.19f., Jer. 31.3b, 34). While the period in which God lets human beings realize their sinful desires is temporary, the love of God lasts forever as Godself is eternal.53 God’s gift of freedom does not imply the withdrawal of God in ‘cold divine respect’.54 God is no neglectful parent. While God is epistemically hidden where human beings have withdrawn themselves from God, the love of God is ontologically omnipresent. In the words of Ps. 139.7–12, Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you’.

Because God’s steadfast love fills the earth (Ps. 33.4f.; see also Mt. 12.7; Hos. 6.6), the rejection of the gift of the Kingdom did not result in God ceasing to take loving initiatives towards creation. Yet the new situation of widespread rejection required a new initiative. This new initiative was the resurrection, and the greeting Jesus brought with him upon his return from the deadly blow of sin: ‘Peace be with you’, words echoing into the heart of the Apostle Paul who attributed to God the name ‘peace’ (Rom. 15.33; 16.20; 1 Cor. 14.33; 2 Cor. 13.11; Phil. 4.9; 1 Thess. 5.23). God never ceases to call the beloved (who are also from time to time his enemies) into God’s peaceful presence. And when the beloved appears, God runs towards them with open arms, embracing them and kissing them (Lk. 15.20). Hell only exists for those who do not want to live in the presence of God’s love, yet finding escape from God’s love impossible.55 While absolute self-annihilation is not possible insofar as all life is in God, temporary estrangement from God may be.56 Except from the exclusion of its contradictory principle, the concrete determination of the content of the fellowship to which one is invited cannot be trans-historically determined. What divine hospitality concretely means will always be a matter of contention for finite beings. Insofar as temporality is

53. Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 348ff. 54. Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 200. 55. Pool, God’s Wounds 2, 180, in contradistinction to Lane, ‘The Wrath of God,’ 158. 56. While this possibility is often thought to be required to preserve human freedom (or alterity), I write ‘may be’ because definite statements on this issue quickly become highly speculative. If all human beings are confronted with God’s reality face to face at some point, then it is hard to understand how someone would reject the embrace of God’s love. In such a situation, it is indeed a question whether human beings would be genuinely free.

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constitutive of finite beings, ‘hospitality … always leaves something to be desired’.57 It may always transcend what we at any moment are capable of conceiving of as possible. It may include something completely unhoped-for. The borders of the Christian church are not fixed as in the Levitical cult, but moving continuously beyond itself towards a place still to come.

7.3 The Christian Meal – An Expression of Sacrificial Love? An obvious implication of what I have been writing so far is that I have strong reservations against describing the Christian meal as a sacrifice. It is not a commemoration of the sacrifice of Christ, but of the Triune self-giving love revealed in his life. Having said this, I have not exhaustively treated the relation between the Christian meal and the configuration of sacrificial violence outlined above. Throughout the ages, celebrations of the Christian meal have been constitutive of the social demarcation of the Christian church. Considering what I have been writing in the previous sections in this chapter, it will be important to discuss whether or not theologies of sacrifice can be used to understand the dynamics of social exclusion/inclusion unfolding within these celebrations. I will end the section by showing how we can coherently relate this aspect of sacred violence to that of sacred bloodshed. The focus on semantics of sacrifice in Hebrews is unique, and represents a late development in the kerygma of the early church. An explicit sacrificial interpretation of the Christian meal is here notably absent (as it is also in the rest of the NT). It first appears in Did. 14,1–3 where the Greek terms εὐχαριστεîν and θυσία are combined metaphorically to characterize the event as a sacrifice of thanksgiving.58 Although the Catholic doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass from early on included the dimension of thanksgiving, it also understood the Eucharistic meal as an atoning sacrifice.59 The reformers acknowledged the interpretation of the Eucharist as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, but distinguished sharply between the unique atoning sacrifice of Christ, and the Eucharistic making-present of this event.60 The Eucharist was not understood as atoning in nature, but as making

57. Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 127. I readily follow Derrida’s radical formulation of this point in which he says that what we at present consider hospitable (or friendly) may perhaps turn out to be the very opposite. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 29f. 58. See Section 2.1. 59. Gillian R. Evans, ‘Opfer V: Mittelalter bis Neuzeit,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 281. 60. See especially Luther, ‘Admonition,’ 105f.; ‘The Misuse of the Mass,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Abdel Ross Wentz, Luther’s Works, vol. 36 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1963), 145ff.; ‘Babylonian Captivity,’ 50ff.; ‘A Treatise,’ 97ff.; Melanchton, ‘Apology for the Augsburg Confession,’ 220, 260ff.; Calvin, Institutes 2, 1438ff.; and further, George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

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visible God’s grace in a way that evoked a spiritual and moral response in the believer. A vocabulary of sacrifice was only recognized as an appropriate means to determine the character of this moral response. Luther says: Therefore these two things – mass and prayer, sacrament and work, testament and sacrifice – must not be confused; for the one comes from God to us through the ministration of the priest and demands our faith, the other proceeds from our faith to God through the priest and demands his hearing. The former descends, the latter ascends. The former, therefore, does not necessarily require a worthy and godly minister, but the latter does indeed require such a one, for ‘God does not listen to sinners’ [John 9:31]. He knows how to do good through evil men, but he does not accept the work of any evil man; as he showed in the case of Cain [Gen. 4:5], and as is said in Prov. 15[:8]: ‘The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord,’ and in Rom. 14[:23]: ‘Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.’61

While Luther here pays attention to the fact that the ‘ministration’ of the priest is a social event, he underdetermines the way in which the specific character of the response of faith is constitutive of the meal as Eucharistic, that is, a good gift. What does it mean that the sacrament comes from God through the ministration of the priest? Is it true that the ministration of the sacrament is a witness to the presence of God completely independent of the moral character of the faith it expresses? The obvious danger of making the morality of the Christian faith-community constitutive of the goodness of the gift is that we risk making God’s gift a merit of faith. In what follows, I will suggest a socially oriented understanding of the Eucharist in which this is not a necessary implication. The consecration of the bread and wine is not a constitutive factor of the meal ex opere operato, but the consequence of the way in which the meal is celebrated. It is not the consecration per se that makes Christ (epistemically) present,62 but the specific character of Christian faith expressing itself as love. If a human being participates in the mutual Triune self-giving through his or her faith, and if love is the basic expression of such faith, then without the latter, the meal cannot become a commemoration of the Christian God, and holds no promise of God’s presence.63 It is love of everything that God loves (self, finite others, and God)

Press, 2008), 95ff. While we have lately seen some moments of ecumenical convergence on this issue, several matters remain theoretically unresolved. See ibid., and Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, 20ff. 61. Luther, ‘Babylonian Captivity,’ 56f. 62. Ibid., 54. Insofar as God is ontologically omnipresent, no ontological presence is actualized in the act of consecration. 63. The term ‘commemoration’ is not a simple reminder of an event that happened long ago, but a celebration that makes the past a living contemporary reality (i.e. ‫זכּרון‬, ἀνάμνησις, memoria). Koch, ‘Überwundenes Opfer,’ 343.

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which brings to expression that the believers actually enter into that which God invites them into, not the simple act of ‘ministration’ or the consumption of consecrated bread and wine. The confession of Christ as the good gift of the Christian meal comes to expression in the universal love of the Christian community (including its minister). This does not mean that the moral fruits of faith produce the Christian meal and that human beings are saved because of the merits of love. Rather faith expressing itself as love testifies to the fact that it is indeed a Christian meal and not something merely appearing as such. Faith is not greater than love (1 Cor. 13.13). Without faith expressing itself as love (Gal. 5.6ff.), the meal becomes an abstract (interior) gesture, and as such a testimony that brings judgement on the celebrants. Luther rightly says that ‘where no fruits are in evidence, or where the opposite is the case, Christ will certainly not be present; there will only be a false name’.64 It is only a faith expressing itself as love that is evoked by God, participates in God, and thus allows God to appear to human beings.65 If Luther was right that sin cannot be an expression of faith, as I think he was, then the actions of the priest in the celebration of the supper can only be said to proceed from faith’s response to the Christian God insofar as it can be characterized as love. This does not mean that the meal cannot be Christian unless the minister is perfect in love of God and fellow human beings. The minister remains a jar of clay (2 Cor. 4.7). It is of central importance to an adequate understanding of the Eucharist that God is capable of self-giving even though faith (and love) is obviously not the only relational modality that characterizes a Christian human being (as little as misguided love is the only relational modality of atheists or people of other religious faiths).66 It simply means that the gift of God only comes to expression through a faith

64. Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John: Chapters 14–16, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, trans. Martin H. Bertram, Luther’s Works, vol. 24 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1961), 264. 65. Love that precedes faith is not necessarily a work that seeks to achieve merit with God, but a way in which God generates, sustains and strengthens faith. Love can be a means through which God reveals God’s grace not only to the receiver of love, but also to the one who loves. This means that God may unfold grace through the love of someone whose motives are ‘impure’. Jn 4.34 reads: ‘“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work”’. What nourishes Jesus is to share the loving initiative of the Father with the world. Similarly, human love is not the condition of God’s response to us, but inherent to our response to God. Arvid Runestam, Jagiskhet Och Saklighet: Till Läran om Rättferdiggörelsen genom Tron (Stockholm: Svenska kyrkans diakonistyrelsens bokförlag, 1944), 152ff.; ‘Opus Instrumentale: Die Tat als Gnadenmittel,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 18 (1941): 81ff., and more recently Weaver, Self Love, 137. 66. The relational modality described here is at work wherever human beings love one another, that is, whenever they (implicitly or explicitly) open themselves to the Triune lovelife of their creator (Lk. 10. 25–37).

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expressing itself as love. Again: it is only a faith expressing itself this way that can be said to be made possible by God.67 In the Eucharistic celebration, God’s love shared by us is the flesh and blood of Jesus. With these suggestions, I take a definite stand against all understandings of faith that reduces it to an invisible (interior) hyper-phenomenon of some sort. If we do not pay attention to the dimensions of faith that makes it a concrete social modality we end up with an extremely impoverished notion of faith. The introvert spirituality at display in so many present-day Eucharistic celebrations is at best an extremely indirect and one-dimensional way of responding to the love of God. Furthermore, the love that makes the good gift visible cannot be reduced to one kind of visibility, for example, the spoken word (of consecration). In what follows, I will argue that a specific kind of hospitality is one of its most basic kinds. While Paul’s corrections of the abuse of the Lord’s supper (1 Cor. 10.18–21; 11.17–34) can be interpreted as establishing a criterion of participation in the Eucharistic meal closely resembling that of the communal meal of the society oriented around the cult, such an interpretation fails because it misrepresents how Paul spells out the inner meaning of the meal. Those who eat and drink judgement upon themselves do so because they enact a meal, the structure of which relies on conditions of exclusion/inclusion that reproduce the religious-political power-structures of the surrounding society.68 They are unable to actualize the unity of the one bread that is gifted them (v. 17). The words spoken at the Eucharistic celebration expressing that Christ was given for us in order to establish a new kind of (covenant-) fellowship become a testimony against them. Paradoxically then, to be radically inclusive Christians must exclude those who exclude others from celebrating the meal as equal participants in the body of Christ. Insofar as this involves socioreligious delineation, the Eucharistic celebration remains a cult-act relying on an act of exclusion. But this does not mean that it actively eliminates those excluded. Paul’s argument is simply that one cannot celebrate a meal that is both Christian (inclusive) and non-Christian (exclusive) at the same time (1 Cor. 11.20). There is no antecedent condition of inclusion (e.g. faith, ritual purity)69, but there is

67. Luther says that faith cannot be ‘a sluggish, useless, deaf or dead thing; it must be a living, productive tree which yields fruits’ and while ‘Love does not make us godly, … when one has become godly love is the result’. Luther, John: 14–16, 24, 264f., and his sermon on 1 Cor. 13.13 found in Epistle Sermons: Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost, trans. John N. Lenker et al., vol. 2 (2009), Ebook. 68. This argument goes in the opposite direction of Rom. 13 where loyalty to the traditional power-structures is required of the Christian believers. This conservatism also dominates the Pastoral letters: women are to be submissive to their husbands and slaves to their masters (Tit. 2.5, 9; 1 Tim. 2.12; 3.4; 5.14). 69. The traditional cultic focus on ritual purity as a condition of inclusion is still upheld within some Christian contexts. See for example Suzanne Campbell-Jones, ‘Ritual in Performance and Interpretation: The Mass in a Convent Setting,’ in Sacrifice, ed. M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes (London: Academic Press, 1980), 96, and Hampson, After

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a consequent condition: love your neighbour (incl. your enemy) as yourself (see also Gal. 5.6).70 If you do not, you do not participate in a Christian meal. The Christian meal only excludes the principle that contradicts its constitutive condition: universal love. Only a fellowship constituted by the universal challenge of a Christian hospitality of love prevents the closure of the cultic space. In her reading of 1 Cor. 11.23–26, Sigrid Brandt argues that Paul does not here formulate a theology of sacrificial atonement, but rather a covenant theology.71 Yet, if atonement means removing the destructive consequences of sin by re-establishing a fellowship of true love between human beings, and between humanity and God, then the Eucharistic commemoration can indeed be (literally) atoning in character – a true ‘ministry of reconciliation’ (2 Cor. 5.18). Such participatory commemoration is radically social in character. In interpreting the social character of the Eucharistic celebration as reflecting the structure of the sacrificial meal of the hunting community, Walter Burkert connected the physical and social aspects of the configuration of sacred violence explicated above.72 The breaking of the bread is prefigured in the slaughter and the cutting up of the captured prey subsequently to be distributed and consumed in a communal meal. Insofar as there is a ‘natural’ symbolic connection between the communal consumption of food and the sustenance of living fellowship, there is an equally ‘natural’ semantic connection between the configuration of the Christian meal and semantics of sacrifice. Both involve a destruction of matter that gives life to the community (φάρμακον ἀθανασίας). In doing so it becomes an expressive example of sacred violence. Klaus-Peter Jörns has even argued that the story of Jesus as a whole is structured around this logic: capture – slaughter – sharing of the ‘salvific prey’ (Heilsbeute).73 Such a construal fits seemingly well with the function of the sacrifices presented at the institution and celebration of the covenant in old Israel (see also Exod. 34.15; Deut. 12. 6f., 18; 1 Sam. 20.5f., 29; 2 Sam. 6.17–19). Paul undoubtedly sees a similar function in the death of Jesus instituting the new covenant fellowship celebrated in the Christian meal (1 Cor. 11.25; see also Mk. 14.24). Do Burkert and Jörns capture the essence of what is taking place in the Christian meal? Is the fellowship of Christian believers nourished by life that is

Christianity, 187. On a similar note, John Dunnill refers to confession/reconciliation as a condition of Eucharistic inclusion. Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body, 207. 70. The translation of this saying has been a matter of debate. I am inclined to follow those who argue that ‘as yourself ’ should be taken in as an adjectival phrase, not an adverbial one: ‘Love your neighbor as another person who resembles yourself ’. See Pool, God’s Wounds 1, 231f. 71. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 247f. 72. Walter Burkert, Anthropologie des religiösen Opfers: Die Sakralisierung der Gewalt (München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 1984), 27. See Section 4.1. 73. Klaus-Peter Jörns, ‘Liturgie: Wiege der heiligen Schrift?’ Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 34 (1992): 326ff.

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destroyed? Here, the soteriological rule of interpretation presented above becomes highly relevant.74 Jörns is certainly right that an explication of the meaning of the Eucharist cannot be exclusively derived from the meaning of the death of Jesus. It is true that his death was a necessary condition for God’s boundless will to fellowship to be fully revealed, and that the body shared in the meal is a makingpresent of the body which died on the cross (1 Cor. 11.25f., Lk. 22.19). Yet, the reason why those seeking fellowship with God in death will also have fellowship with God in God’s life (Rom. 6.3f., 8f.) cannot be extracted from the exclusive commemoration of his death. First, unlike the covenant meals of old Israel where the presenting of the sacrifice preceded the celebratory meal, Jesus instituted the Christian meal before his death. This fact indicates that an explication of its meaning must consider the numerous meals Jesus had with his followers during his earthly ministry. It brings to expression the significance of Jesus’s life as a whole, namely his will to live well with, for and from others in just institutions. Secondly, his death becomes the food of eternal life only when interpreted from the point of view of his resurrection. What nourishes the Christian fellowship is a life that cannot be destroyed. Christian faith does not feed off the destructed body of Christ, but off a transformed body where life is in abundance.75 It is the death of the living Lord that is proclaimed (1 Cor. 11.26; Heb. 7.16).76 Only through commemorating the exalted crucified can Christ be experienced as an ever-present bodily reality in these meals. In other words: the Eucharist is a commemoration of the earthly history of Jesus as transformed by his participation in the eternity of God. Thus, it is not the case that ‘meal and sacrifice go together at the Lord’s supper just as the covenant sacrifice and the covenant meal did in Israel’.77 Unlike the sacrifice that sealed the old covenant, in the Christian meal Jesus seals his covenant with human beings by presenting himself as a living gift. Insofar as he does not sacrifice his will in obedience to the Father, but is united with the latter in his will to overcome victimization and death, the Eucharist is an expression of Jesus’s refusal to give up on the life-giving love of Father and Spirit. In this way Jesus manifests the imago Dei of recreated humanity. As Christian Eberhart correctly notes, 1 Jn 1.7 uses the metaphor of the blood of Christ to claim that the life of Jesus sanctifies human beings. It is this consecration which symbolically unfolds in the celebration of the Eucharist. This

74. See Section 4.3. 75. The glory-body of Christ is not identical with the body put to death on the cross, as Bultmann claimed (Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1952), 147), if by that he means that they are structurally identical. While being numerically identical, and the one being the cause of the other, they are not structurally identical. On a structural level, the relationship between them must be understood as one of family resemblance (similarity and difference). 76. Oswald Bayer, Leibliches Wort: Reformation und Neuzeit im Konflikt (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992), 296. 77. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, 319.

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does not mean that a human being is symbolically incorporated into the divine life as in the ritual of baptism. When consuming the blood of Christ, human beings are accepting God’s invitation to attain a new identity to live his or her life with, for and from others both coram deo and coram mundo/hominibus. They become holy, that is, re-connected to God, and as a result are purified from sin.78 Thus, when participating in the Eucharistic meal, the Christian participates in the living gift of Christ (Rom. 12.1; Eph. 5.2), and becomes ‘living stones’ in the temple of God (1 Pet. 2.5). As the believer invites Christ to become a living presence in his or her life by continuously receiving bread and wine, his or her earthly life is transformed in the same way that Jesus’s earthly life was transformed by his continuous self-giving to the Father through the Spirit – the life and death of the believer get an entirely new meaning. It is this incorporation and consecration that allows us to speak of the Eucharist as establishing, and sustaining, a new covenant fellowship between God and the participants in the meal. The meal is ‘nourishment for the suffering, comfort for the grieving, and hope that someday all will gather at one table in peace’.79 The only criterion of exclusion/inclusion in the community sitting at this table is its constitutive principle: to move in the pattern of hospitable Triune love.

78. On the OT background for this understanding of the concept of holiness, see Willi-Plein, Opfer und Kult, 46. 79. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 215.

Chapter 8 THEODICY – THE RADICAL NATURE OF THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE

So far, I have endeavoured to show how a belief in God as love is coherent given that the relatively indeterminately evolving cosmos has produced self-conscious mortal lifeforms with the capacity to exercise freedom as violence. Sacred bloodshed and unjust exclusion are made possible by this given state of affairs. I have offered repeated reminders, however, that my notion of God as love needs a theodicy in order to optimize its coherency. The radical problem is this: is it coherent to believe that a perfectly good God would create a world with its inherent possibilities of violence (of which the murder of Jesus is but a single actualization)? Rosemary Ruether for one, does not think so, stating that ‘divine goodness and divine omnipotence cannot be reconciled, as Christianity has sought to do in the theology of atonement’.1 Recall also Dorothee Sölle’s claim that any attempt to locate the cause of suffering in God inevitably forces us to ascribe a sadistic element to God.2 Even if God is acknowledged only as the indirect cause suffering, God is still thought to instrumentalize suffering for the actualization of some kind of genuine spiritual glory. To avoid such theological moves, many theologians deem it immoral to develop theodicies. Cynthia Crysdale writes, ‘To grant intelligibility to evil when there is none is a grave error, not only in the intellectual realm but in lived reality. For such “sense” when there is none, so far from solving the problem of evil, only perpetuates its craziness. It is far better to name the non-sense, to acknowledge the surd, to embrace the pain of evil’s unintelligibility.’3 Insofar as evil is, in its very principle, unintelligible, it is also ultimately unresolvable, both theoretically and practically. Although God’s will to justice may momentarily

1. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Introducing Redemption, 106. See also Heyward, The Redemption of God, 182f. 2. See Section 4.2. See also Sölle, ‘Der Erstgeborene aus dem Tod’, 64. 3. Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 148. See also Jüngel, ‘Suffering’, 9; Terrence W. Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991); Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990), 12, 22, 53, 125; and Samuel Shearn, ‘Moral Critique and Defence of Theodicy’, Religious Studies 49, no. 4 (2013).

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manifest itself in human societies, the fight against evil will go on forever. Faced with so much horrendous suffering, is this the only viable moral attitude to the problem of evil? How we should answer this question depends entirely on what kind of theodicy we develop. Immoral are those theodicies according to which God allows evil in order to actualize a higher good, as when Marilyn McCord Adams argues that the horrendous sufferings of crucified people allow them to experience intimacy with God and thus would ‘not wish them away from their life histories’, that evil is ‘a pedagogic instrument for human reorientation to the Good’ as Douglas Hedley claims,4 or when violence or terminal illness is judged to be good because it makes one stronger or improves the gene pool.5 Morally problematic are only those theodicies that portray concrete evils as better than they are, or call good what is evil. However, such moral judgements ought not to be generalized and formed a priori. They are only valid as a concluding verdict of an in-depth critique of a particular theodicy, because there are also the kinds of theodicy that do not attempt to explain why concrete evils happened to befall someone, but endeavour to understand what makes evil possible at all, for example, dualistic theodicies or process theodicies.6 A person who applies a theodicy to a particular person’s suffering says more than what such theodicies say. If the expression ‘grant intelligibility’ in the quotation of Crysdale above is understood as ‘providing a positive goal or purpose’, then I would agree with her. If, however, it would mean ‘coherence’, then I surely disagree.7 An attempt to enquire into the coherence of the claim that God is perfectly good, and the creator of all things (i.e. omnipotent) is not immoral.8 Whereas the former trivializes, and so augments, suffering of evil,

4. Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined, 137. 5. Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 162, 167. Rape-victim Susan Brison testifies to the destructive impact such messages have on a victim (Brison, Aftermath, 11). On this and the following, see Asle Eikrem and Atle Ottesen Søvik, ‘A Critique of Samuel Shearn’s Moral Critique of Theodicy’, Religious Studies 51, no. 2 (2015). 6. See Johan Hygen, Guds Allmakt og det ondes Problem (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1973), and David Ray Griffin, Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), respectively. The former work is only available in Norwegian, but its main argument is presented in Atle Ottesen Søvik, The Problem of Evil and the Power of God (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 61ff. 7. On this crucial distinction, see Puntel, Structure and Being, 342f. 8. Having said this, I am fully aware that the problem of evil cannot be reduced to the problem of theodicy. It is only one among the complex interrelated problems that together constitute the overarching problem of evil: What is evil? Why do people do evil? How can we most effectively fight evil in our own life, as well as that of others? How can we comfort those who suffer evil? While some of these are more important to answer than others, they are intimately related. Being human undoubtedly includes being engaged in a kind of cognitive activity that derives moral conviction from theological understanding.

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the latter does not necessarily do so. To say to parents of a terminally ill child that it serves some higher purpose and that they therefore should not wish it away from their life story is of course morally utterly problematic. To say that their experience is not incompatible with belief in a good creator God is not. While indeed confirming the purposeless character of the child’s suffering, these parents may with time be comforted by reasons to believe that the child has fallen into the hands of God, and that God will preserve their relationships beyond natural death. Furthermore, these theodicies potentially have a profound moral value for victims. Anti-theodicists who admit our complete intellectual bankruptcy in the face of evil and suffering and abandon the quest for any kind of theodicy would, as Michael Stoeber aptly writes, ‘be demeaning the victim’s experience of extremely destructive suffering because one would be ruling out that which would ground and support that hope for the recovery and redemption of the victim’.9 A theodicy may offer hope where there seems to be none. Finally, excluding reason from consolation reduces suffering to an emotional problem, and in so doing cuts sufferers off from voices that may provide them with reasons to go on despite the emotional damage that may indefinitely prevail. Drawing upon the conceptual scheme developed in Section 5.1, I will in the following provide a sketch to a theodicy that enables us to combine the notion that Jesus is a victim of human sin, while at the same time not making it an instance of immoral ‘self-victimization’. Its basic claim is that God may allow for the victimization to take place without becoming an indirect victimizer. A cogent argument supporting this claim must construe the creation of the cosmos, the incarnation and the murder of Jesus by recourse to the notion of divine self-limitation. This does not mean that God has created a space outside God from which God has withdrawn. As Moltmann says, ‘God creates the world by letting his world become and be in himself: let it be.’10 Creation is to open up a space within Godself (to speak of what is outside is incoherent), from which God limits the possibilities of God’s power, presence and knowledge.11 This notion does not tell us (literally) that ‘God’s no to himself is his yes to us’ as Jüngel claims.12 Self-limitation is not self-negation.13 Rather God’s yes to us is his yes to Godself as the God of creation. God remains the God of creation

Moral practices are legitimized and criticized by theologies. Yet, while cognitive activities are manners in which human beings express themselves religiously, not all are equally constructive for every purpose. 9. Michael Stoeber, Reclaiming Theodicy: Reflections on Suffering, Compassion, and Spiritual Transformation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 66. 10. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 109. 11. There is no principle reason that this cosmos is the only one created by God in selflimitation. There may be many spaces within God (Being), the specific characteristics of which may be different in each case. 12. Jüngel, ‘Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes’, 120. 13. See Section 5.1.

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precisely in this self-limitation. Only when someone limits him- or herself can the other give us ourselves, and vice versa. This self-limitation is already the condition for the existence of the Triune persons vis-à-vis each other, and is the power out of which they cooperatively created the world. Self-limitation was God’s decision to open Godself up to the indeterminacy of contingent beings, and is of the character that cannot be retracted: God has absolved Godself from the possibility of negating it. Why do so when the price is so high for so many people? God’s will to cooperative love is not only ecstatic, that is, it does not only come out of itself towards others. It is also eternally open to others, that is, to relate in different ways to beings capable of actualizing values different from those already characteristic of the intra-Triune life. This is the nature of divine love. Even if God did not know which potentialities would be actualized in the created world, God would know that whatever differences (token-values) would be actualized, God would be able to maintain a living relationship with it. From a soteriological point of view, the question becomes whether the incarnation of a divine person should be understood as God’s own way of dealing with God’s own guilt of having created a world with the potential for both moral and natural evil.14 According to Jan-Heiner Tück, this would make belief in a good God impossible, dissolve our reason for thankfulness of the work of creation and salvation, and contradict the ‘for us’-sayings of the NT.15 If we restrict our perspective to the saving actions of God, then thankfulness (as well as complaint) could indeed be appropriate because of God’s faithfulness to God’s will to fellowship. On the other hand, God would not be praiseworthy if God willed the situation from which creation needed saving. Such a God would be nothing but a sadistic egoist. As far as I can see, this conclusion can only be avoided if God created a world with such a high risk of developing moral and natural evil because God valued the relative indeterministic otherness of the finite cosmos more than the impossibility of suffering (i.e. a so-called type-value), and that all beings are invited into the eternal divine fellowship of love beyond suffering and natural death. Paul Tillich writes, ‘The power of God is that He overcomes estrangement, not that He prevents it.’16 The freedom determined by the will to violence can only be overcome by a freedom determined by a will to love that is able to integrate the difference of the finite within itself. While moral and natural evil is finite, the love of God is infinite. The alternative is to make God a mixture of good and evil, and such a God is no God. If there is to be any hope, any promise in God, God could not have known that the cosmos would be ridden with so much meaningless suffering.

14. This question was the topic of discussion in Tück and Streit, Erlösung auf Golgota?, see especially 8f., 22ff., 47, 155ff. 15. Tück, ‘Am Ort der Verlorenheit’, 48. 16. Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 112f.

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The victimization of Jesus does not simply reveal the ‘impotence’ of God, as Michael Welker describes it.17 It reveals that God has the power of self-limitation. Self-limitation is the reason why God could not prevent humanity from murdering Jesus (as well as the murders of countless others in human history for that matter), and cannot but leave him with the cry of godforsakenness. God allowed Godself the possibility to suffer and die already in the act of creating a world with a genuinely open future. Only in a cosmos in which the details of what happens are indeterminate can a permanently selflimiting God be absolved from responsibility for the victimization of Jesus on the cross.18 But what then about the resurrection; was that not a breach of God’s self-limitation that came too late? No. The resurrection is simply a consequence of who Christ was in his unique relationship with the Father and the Son: God cannot be destroyed.

17. Welker, Christology, 189. 18. Blaming evil on structural evils (Roman Empire, etc.) as Denny Weaver does, does not remove the theological problem: why did God sanction (allow or author) the unravelling of these powers in God’s creation in the first place? Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 92f.

Chapter 9 THE LOVE THROUGH WHICH GOD TRULY LOVES HUMANITY – A PRELIMINARY SUMMARY

So where does all this leave us regarding the first question posed in the introduction? First of all, in my critique of the positions analysed in Section 4.2, I have argued against the claim that we must give up the doctrine of the Trinity and the confession to Jesus as a divine and human person. The gift of God to humanity is the power of love released in the incarnation. However, as has become evident by the conceptual reconstruction carried out above, when endeavouring to coherently interpret the love of God unfolding in Jesus as an atoning sacrifice, the need for a vocabulary more nuanced than the biblical one, and those offered by contemporary theologians, has become acute. The meaning of the life and death of Jesus cannot be adequately grasped by one concept. Relative and absolute victimization, self-limitation and selfgiving all determine different aspects of his life and death. The negative presupposition of the problems discussed in this book is the human capacity to negate the freedom of self (self-denial) and/or others (unlimited self-affirmation). God's response to this situation is the incarnation, the compassionate love for a world that is also broken, the counter-response of which is the victimization of Jesus. Jesus subsequently reacts not by negating the other’s freedom, but affirming it in self-limitation, again rejected and resulting in death, which occurs within the mutual self-giving of the Spirit and the Father to the Son. This activity turns the attempt to negate the freedom of Jesus and the potential misinterpretation of this act as an act of self-destruction into an act that expresses the complete dependence on God for its affirmation of freedom. The self-giving of the Spirit and the Father witnessed in the resurrection of Jesus that his death was a loss of personhood coram mundo but not coram deo. The Father and the Spirit recognize the freedom of Christ as the condition of the freedom of themselves – and vice versa. The Triune persons live with, for and from the freedom of others as others, that is, the Trinity unfolds a mutually empowering of selves through mutual self-limitation and self-giving. Insofar as each divine person opens up a space for the other to actualize its freedom, they do not treat others merely as instruments for their own actualization, but always also as an aim in themselves.1 By being the source of the other’s freedom, persons in love are the 1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 45f. See also Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 391.

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source of each other’s worlds. The freedom of both self and other is unsurpassable in God. Both self-sacrifice and self-giving are expressions of love insofar as such courses of action do not instrumentalize suffering for a purpose outside the loving relationships themselves.2 It is carried out to establish, sustain and nurture them. The healing of the relationships is itself the final aim. The relation between love and freedom (as also goodness and joy) is intrinsically related to one another: the one cannot be thought without the other. By its unifying character, the love of Father, Son and Spirit God prevents the relationship among them from dissolving into separation, and by its differentiating character, prevents their dissolving into oneness. The love of God is not a ‘flight of the alone into the Alone’, as Plotin once described it.3 It involves giving up our desire for both unlimited self-assertion and self-denial.4 The love of God is intrinsically related to the universal preservation of the freedom of each other. Thus, it is neither compatible with self-destructive acts that lead to self-annihilation, nor with the nihilistic isolation of a self occupied with others only for the sake of oneself. God is not a tyrant who rules by enslaving others.5 Rather God is constituted as the fulfilling mutual respect of self and other. The relation between giving and receiving in God can further be characterized as directly proportional: ‘The lover who takes is not thereby made richer than the other; he is enriched indeed, but only so much as the other is. So too the giver does not make himself poorer; by giving to the other he has at the same time and to the same extent enhanced his own treasure: says Juliet in Romeo [and Juliet]: “the more I give to thee, the more I have”’.6 God is love because God is mutual self-giving and self-receiving. Yet again it is important to underline that in God the one part does not give in order to receive (do-ut-des), nor does it receive in order to give (des-ut-do), neither does it receive because it has been given. Rather God is the name of a relationship of true mutuality. Existing as loving relationship means giving and receiving in freedom.7 The Triune persons do not love in order to be loved, but in truly loving each other in freedom they are love. Because the mutual dependency of the freedom of self and other unfolds in time, there is a profound vulnerability in God’s love for humanity.8 Unfolding in a tension between a promise and a world resisting its fulfilment, it suffers in longing. Yet as infinite longing it offers a counter-movement that expresses a faithfulness that can drive out fear and create mutual trust.

2. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 157. 3. Plotin, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong, vol. 7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 345. 4. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 157f., 98f. 5. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 389. 6. Quoted after Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 307. 7. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 321. 8. Ibid., 388. For Sartre, this vulnerability is a threat that can only be neutralized by the subject taking possession of the freedom found in and through the other, and so to free oneself from one’s initial dependence on the freedom of the other (ibid., 393ff.).

Chapter 10 THE LOVE THROUGH WHICH HUMANITY TRULY LOVES GOD

We now move on to reflect upon the second question posed in the introduction: can we coherently claim that the love through which humanity truly loves God is self-sacrificial in character? Today it is not uncommon to answer this question positively because Jesus is thought to reveal what it means to be a true human being in his relationship with the Father and the Spirit. Instead of asserting himself in an unlimited way vis-à-vis them by claiming his independence (i.e. sin), Jesus recognized his complete dependency upon them, and accepted his calling to follow the mission to which he was assigned by the Father, no matter the cost. Thus, for Colin Gunton ‘the notion of sacrifice takes us not only to the heart of the being of God, but also to the heart of creaturely being’.1 To properly evaluate such a construal, I will discuss two relational modalities that have traditionally been thought to characterize the love through which humanity truly loves God: faith and praise. Are these adequately determined as expressions of self-sacrificial love? To answer this question, we must first consider if the traditional construal of the relational problem(s) that faith and praise were supposed to solve is adequate.

10.1 Sin as Self-assertion or Self-sacrifice – A Critical Rethinking In her seminal article ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’ published in 1960, Valerie Saiving claimed that the traditional understandings of sin were exclusively based on male experiences of patriarchalist cultures.2 The prevalent problem of male relational life has historically been unlimited self-assertion and hubris. On

1. Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Sacrifice and the Sacrifices: From Metaphor to Transcendental?,’ in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays, ed. Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga Jr (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 226. 2. Saiving, Valerie, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View,’ Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (1960). This is also characteristic of the Girardian perspective that determines sin as acquisitive or imitative desire, disregarding actions that involve direct or indirect self-violence.

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this background, it is not hard to see why self-sacrifice should be presented as the solution to the problem: ‘Better go to heaven with one hand than to go to hell chock full of self-will.’3 But if the problem is shame and self-denial, as has been the case among many women living in patriarchalist cultures, then self-sacrifice would easily reinforce a relational distortion that is unable to secure good living for everyone in just institutions.4 Rather than self-assertion, the sins of women have more often been: ‘triviality, distractability, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence; inability to respect the boundaries of privacy; sentimentality, gossip sociability, and mistrust of reason – in short, underdevelopment or negation of self.’5 For these women, self-assertion is a healthy natural reaction to not being recognized as a capable self, and the presupposition of being capable of actualizing the mutuality characteristic of a relationship of true love. The insight formulated by Saiving is extremely important because it reveals a fatal blind-spot of many theologies of sacrifice in the history of Christianity. In the following, I will attempt to reconstruct a notion of sin that integrates this insight. The relational modality of sin has traditionally been defined as moral transgressions of divine law. There is a valuable intuition in this definition insofar as it is based on identifying acts that keeps human beings from living well with, for and from each other in just institutions. It was this conviction that motivated the prophetic voices of the biblical literature. According to Isaiah, for instance, rebellion against God’s law is concretized as social injustice (Isa. 1.4, 16f., 21–23; 59.1ff.; see also Amos 1–2; Hos. 7). In order to throw sinful living into sharper relief, Amos unfolds its contrast, namely the meaning of living according to God’s will. Such a life consists of practices which sustain justice (Amos 5.14f.). Moreover, Amos is in line with the voices in the prophetic strands of the Hebrew Scriptures according to which the Promised Land is identical to a place where justice reigns supreme. In a similar manner, Jesus portrayed the re-establishment of justice as a core dimension of the coming Kingdom (Lk. 4.18–21). Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’s meeting with Zacchaeus, the tax collector, makes an explicit connection between Jesus’s arrival at his house, the restoration of a life-enhancing relational life (justice, v. 8), that is, salvation (vv. 9f). Also, Paul depicts the concrete vices which characterize unjust living: They [those who do not seek God] have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. (Rom. 1.29–31)

3. Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, 84. 4. See further Hampson, After Christianity, 145ff.; Weaver, Self Love, 61ff.; and Love, Love, Violence and the Cross, 31ff., 53. 5. Saiving, ‘The Human Situation,’ 109.

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Characteristic of the semantics of sin in these biblical voices is the internal connection it makes between sinful acts and sin as a societal condition, emphasizing how the state of social injustice reigning in a community is the result of the accumulation of individual destructive actions.6 Sin is damage to the connexive structure of the human world. This means that whenever someone suffers from relational damage it affects the whole of the human world. Thus, sin is more than individual moral fallibility – it is damage to human being. 7 In this way, the creation of social injustice comes back to haunt the individuals guilty of committing sinful actions.8 Accordingly, salvation did not merely (or primarily) refer to the act of freeing individuals from accumulated guilt, but also to the re-establishment of a state of social justice. What must be asked then is whether self-sacrifice contributes to the establishment of a social world in which people live with, for and from each other in just institutions. I will propose an answer to this question in Chapter 11 where I discuss self-sacrifice as a moral and socio-historical problem. Of concern in this chapter is the question of how sin should be characterized when describing the way in which humanity relates to God. Although the life and death of Jesus indeed confronts the moral corruption of human nature in its socio-historical dimension, such a perspective articulates only one aspect of human sin. The fundamental weakness of most modernist and liberationist critiques of many traditional atonement theories lies in their persistent and exclusive reduction of sin to this aspect.9 In addition to the socio-historical critique unfolding in and through Jesus, his life and death also had as its topic the corrupted ways in which humanity relates to God, namely the unwillingness of human beings to live their lives, in accordance with the First Commandment, in an open and trustful relationship with their Creator (Gen. 3.3; Jn. 8.24; 16. 9).10 Most theologians agree that the moral corruption of humanity in its socio-historical dimension is an expression of this basic existential–relational attitude.11 Within the NT corpus, it is especially John and Paul who conceptually connect the plurality of sinful actions to sin as a singular attitude. According to John, sin is a refusal to

6. The individual and the institutional dimension of sin are thus interwoven. Institutions manifest cooperative human endeavours, and as such potentially reflect the very same basic relational deficiency which characterizes human beings as such. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s portrayal of the driving forces behind the construction of institutions that regulate the right to acquire possessions that are exclusively my own is an (early) illustrative example of the connection between individual and cooperative sins. See Christine Axt-Piscalar, ‘Sünde VII: Reformation und Neuzeit,’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 412. 7. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gottes Opfer, 316f. 8. Koch, ‘Sühne’ and ‘Vegeltungsdogma.’ See also Janowski, ‘Offene Fragen.’ 9. See for example Smith, Risking the Terror, 42. 10. See Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 360, 370, 374f., and Hahn, Theologie des Neuen Testaments 2, 410. 11. Axt-Piscalar, ‘Sünde VII,’ 400ff.

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acknowledge Jesus as actualizing the saving will of God (Jn. 8.24), and Paul locates the origin of the above listed vices in the refusal to know, and acknowledge, God as creator, even though they are able to do so (Rom. 1.28). He elaborates on this line of thought ending up stating that every action that does not originate in a basic trust in God is sin (Rom. 14.32). Now, what is it that sin cannot trust? Sin is distrusting the will that moved God to become creator of the cosmos, namely the will to enjoy an eternal fellowship of love with finite life. It is the unwillingness or incapacity to recognize that God wants to be with for, and from us, and that we should freely be with, for and from God. The problem is that human beings do not recognize that their freedom can only be fulfilled when they love everything that God loves: self, every finite other and God. The problem is not that human beings (believers and non-believers alike) cannot freely choose to actualize divine love. The problem of sin is thus not freedom as such, but the unwillingness to actualize freedom exclusively as love of God and all creation. Who was the sinner in Jesus’s eyes, the one’s suffering the unjust social exclusion of the religious elite(s) because of actions not conforming to the prevailing socio-religious codes of conduct, or the excluding religious elite upholding and enforcing these codes?12 The alternatives given are false. What Jesus confronted was not a certain social group, but misguided love. He came to convert people who based their relationship with God on their ability to morally and religiously surpass other human beings, that is, those not putting their trust in God’s power to enable them to live freely with, for and from others. It was people of such misguided love and corrupted faith who drove Jesus into death. Considering Easter with the portrayal of the death of Jesus on the cross, the problem of sin receives its full determination as everything that keeps humanity from enjoying the eternal loving fellowship with all living beings which is the will of the creator. The question that now announces itself is whether a self-sacrificial love of God is the solution to the problems of sin thus understood. To this question we now turn.

10.2 Is Christian Faith an Immoral Self-sacrifice? Theologically important though it is to distinguish between divine–human and inter-human relationships, treating these relational spaces in complete separation from one another involves the grave dangers of de-theologizing the latter and de-moralizing the former. The systematic reconstruction of God’s action in Christ developed so far in this book has been an attempt to avoid the latter pitfall. When proceeding to an inquiry into the character of the human response to God’s action in Christ, it is of utmost theological importance that I stay true to this methodological conviction. While I recognize that the character of this response cannot be exhaustively described and evaluated in moral terms, insofar as there is a moral dimension to every human engagement, we cannot refrain from asking

12. On this and the following, see Ebeling, Dogmatik 2, 182f.

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if a description of the human response to God’s action in Christ in terms of selfsacrificial love is morally good. In several of the traditional theologies of sacrifice surveyed above, God stands over against the human world with demands only Godself is capable of redeeming (most obviously Anselm, Luther, Calvin, Barth). The relationship between God and humanity is conceived as absolutely asymmetrical.13 According to feminist theologian Daphne Hampson, such a conception of God makes Christian faith immoral because the Christian God requires the sacrifice of something without which a good relational life would not be possible, namely a centred selfhood.14 We can only avoid this moral judgement if we stop construing God as transcendent in relation to the world, and rather conceive of God as the dimension of this world ‘through which we come to be most fully ourselves’.15 To be fully ourselves does not mean that we become self-centred (i.e. selfish, absolutely autonomous), but to become centred-in-relation: ‘It is through the relationship with others that one comes to have a centredness and integrity in oneself; while the fact that one has some kind of core or centredness allows one in turn to be open towards other people.’16 She contrasts this focus on the openness which characterizes wellintegrated and centred human beings with what she terms the ‘masculinist’ Lutheran notion that human beings before God are originally curved in on themselves because of the profound insecurity that characterizes their relationship to God and the social world. Humanity becomes the weak (female) counterpart to a perfect and powerful (masculine) God.17 By being completely dependent on the loving acceptance of a transcendent God, humanity is completely decentred. On a general level, Hampson’s argument, like that of Saiving above, presupposes that the experience of women has something to teach men concerning the development of a healthy self-relation within a theistic lifeview. If this is true, then the opposite must of course also be the case, namely that males could offer significant contributions as well.18 If representatives of both genders (as well

13. For more recent statements to the same effect, see for instance Pierre Bühler, ‘Warum müssen wir uns Heute noch in Theologie und Verkündigung mit dem Opfer befassen?,’ in Opfer: Verschenktes Leben, ed. Hans-Jürgen Luibl and Sabine Scheuter (Zürich: Pano Verlag, 2001), 6, and Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘Mere Passive: Die Passivität der Gabe bei Luther,’ in Word – Gift – Being: Justification – Economy – Ontology, ed. Bo Kristian Holm and Peter Widmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). 14. Daphne Hampson, ‘On Autonomy and Heteronomy,’ in Swallowing a Fishbone: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996), and After Christianity, 2, 77, 123. 15. Hampson, After Christianity, 10. 16. Hampson, Christian Contradictions, 238. See also After Christianity, 2, 37, 77, 83, 106, 123, 207. 17. Hampson, After Christianity, 125. 18. Groenhout, ‘Kenosis,’ 312. Hampson recognizes this. Her target is male constructs of ‘the feminine’ that undermine human equality. Hampson, After Christianity, xx.

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as transgendered) cannot ask the common question of what is truly human, then male, female and transgendered would cease to be different ways being human. In the words of Mark Hocknull, they would be instances of ‘different human being – different beings altogether’.19 What we need to thematize is the structure that ‘mediates’ between different beings in a way that connects them without opposition in the human (Gal. 3.28). We should not look for what is specifically feminine or masculine in God, but what kind of relationship to God that makes a being truly human.20 Thus the question that should be guiding us in what follows encompasses different forms of human beings asking for a precise determination of the relational structure that brings it to fulfilment: is it possible to reconstruct a notion of faith understood as centred-in-relation without leaving the notion of sacrificial love behind? An answer to this question requires the step-by-step development of a rather complex argumentative structure. Let me start by identifying two issues on which I share common critical ground with Hampson. Hampson and I agree with Kierkegaard that ‘immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself ’.21 On this point, she is also in line with Luther, who is often the paradigmatic object of her critique. As noted in Section 2.2, Luther emphasized that faith is the sacrifice of a self that strives to achieve itself through itself.22 What they disagree on, however, is the question of whether or not a human self can ever become centred-in-relation to a transcendent God.23 What must be discussed then

19. Mark Hocknull, Pannenberg on Evil, Love, and God: The Realisation of Divine Love (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 90. See also Moser, Opfer, 417f. who rehearses a point already noted in the seminal article by Valerie Saiving (Saiving, ‘The Human Situation,’ 101f.; see also Heyward, The Redemption of God, 200). Mary Daly is perhaps the most renown representative of extreme (almost ontological) gender-dualism (Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)). 20. On this see also Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 173f. 21. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 53. Hampson is not always consistent in her use of the word immediacy in this context, stating rather paradoxically that ‘we should conceive of God as immediately connected to ourselves: on to which we open out, or on which we can draw’ (Hampson, After Christianity, xix. See also ibid., 231ff.). If God is not identical to ourselves, then God is other than ourselves, and an element of mediacy is present. 22. Whether this self is illusory or actual is another matter. 23. What Hampson rejects when discarding the personhood of God is not clear (see also Daly, ‘After the Death of God the Father,’ 57f., and Heyward, The Redemption of God, 186). On the one hand, it seems to me that she refuses to construe God as an acting subject, yet on the other, she repeatedly speaks of God as ‘loving’, and ‘a power for good … which gives [sic] us illumination … always seeking to enter our lives’. She even says that ‘my God can do rather a lot of things’ (Hampson, After Christianity, 230f., 247, 251, 253f). She probably echoes the Schleiermacherian insistence that God is a dimension of human personhood in

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is what kind of relationship establishes the self as centred, and whether Christian faith can be viewed as an instance of this kind. I also agree with Hampson that a centred self cannot be achieved unless we take leave of all attempts to construe salvation in terms of absolute predestination, that is, the view affirming that God is in control of all the details of the evolving cosmos. If human beings cannot be construed as selves capable, in some sense, of freely responding to God’s initiative to re-establish good relationships within the present world, then humanity would be mere puppets of an immoral God, and no true community of persons could ever be actualized. God would not have established a fellowship with me, but merely with Godself. It is only a human self that is a deliberating responsive centre that can enter into a truly personal relationship with God and fellow human beings. In fact, this responsiveness is the image of God in human beings. But how can we further determine the creative responsiveness of a self ‘centred-in-relation’? According to Hampson, to be a centred self means to have the capacity to reach out to another.24 Against Luther, she asks how a self-enclosed in itself is at all capable of relating and responding to God as a person, and how it could be held responsible if not doing so. Must we not presuppose a capacity for attesting openness in the first place: ‘Here I am, capable of responding to others’?25 Indeed we should. But how do we come to recognize this inherent capacity if not by responding to another? Our capacity for relating to others is not ‘selfactivating’.26 No self ignites itself by itself. Centred selves become manifest only when self and other call and respond to one another. Two thoughts must be held together here. On the one hand, a capable self is the presupposition of responding to another person. On the other hand, a self only recognizes itself as capable by responding to another. Every word to another presupposes a word from another. Insofar as the call and the response mutually condition each other, there cannot be a first call or a first response.27 Call and response coincide – the one cannot be without the other. Following this logic, Christian faith must be understood as the relational space in which human beings and God become manifest as centred selves in a responsive calling to one another. Divine and human persons come to themselves only by others relating to them as persons who resemble them. Does this mean that God and humanity are the source of each other’s centred selves, that is, that a centring of selfhood is only possible if their relationship is conceived of as absolutely symmetrical? An understanding of faith as responsive openness can be developed along different lines. Dewi Z. Phillips claimed that faith in God is to respond to God

a way that makes human action responsible for the historical actions of the divine. Yet this topic is, to my knowledge, underdetermined in her writings. 24. Hampson, After Christianity, 165. 25. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 338ff. 26. See Anderson, ‘Sacrifice as Self-destructive Love,’ 39f. 27. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 24.

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in praise, and to praise God is to make one’s life a sacrifice to God. To sacrifice to God means to love God without expecting anything in return: ‘Love of God is sacrificial; it involves the denial of the self.’28 If this statement were literally true we would not have successfully moved beyond the God who requires our nothingness in order to become all in all. Sarah Coakley points to a different path available to us. Her Christology of willed self-effacement referred to in Section 4.2 has given rise to an understanding of faith as a humble recognition that human beings are not self-empowering, but become truly themselves when opening themselves up to the power for them that comes from God. In Coakley, faith is not self-denial. The true self of faith is achieved through a self-conscious decentring of self in God. Here God does not work all in all, but asks us to let go of our closed-off selves and to open ourselves up to God’s gift of a relational self. Faith is our positive response to this question. It is our vulnerable ‘defenseless prayer of silent waiting’ that allows God to transform our selves to the kind desired by God.29 Would such an understanding of faith satisfy Hampson? I doubt it would.30 Hampson is so sceptical of what she terms ‘heteronomy’ that she sometimes could be taken to say that we must deny the otherness of God in order to come to ourselves. She explicitly states that she refuses to surrender herself ‘to any person or to any God who lies outside myself ’, and that God is the name of ‘powers which are ours’.31 Such statements easily give rise to a critical question: if there is no real other in Hampson’s conception of God how could she avoid Feuerbach’s critique of God being a projection of the human self-consciousness, that is, the endeavour to come to itself through itself? Hampson’s God, it would seem, is a puppet for our arbitrary ideals of self-actualization. God’s actions are reduced to our own, and transcendence is reduced to pure immanence – a being among beings.32 While she sometimes states her position in a way that makes her susceptible to such a critique, it does not do full justice to it. She is adamant that God is something ‘more’ than a particular self.33 When Hampson speaks of God as that which is more than a self, she presupposes that there is a border, or a distinction, between herself and God. Thus, the otherness of God as such seems not to be the problem. What she finds ethically problematic is a relationship between God and the human self understood in terms of an opposition between the self and a

28. D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge, 1965), 100f. 29. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 34, and ‘In Defense of Sacrifice,’ 25, 28ff. 30. Daphne Hampson, ‘Response,’ in Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminists Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996), 120ff., and ‘Afterword,’ in ibid. 31. Hampson, After Christianity, 38, 251. See also ibid., 77, 125, 154, 213ff., 230ff., 282f. Similarly, Carter Heyward vacillates between speaking of God as the human power to love, and as the source of human love. Heyward, The Redemption of God, 6, 37. 32. Sharon Welch self-consciously endorses such a Feuerbachian ‘theology of immanence’. Welch, Risk, 173, 77ff. 33. Hampson, ‘On Autonomy and Heteronomy,’ 16, and After Christianity, 231, 251f.

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transcendent person (or constellation of persons).34 If Coakley’s understanding of the relational dynamic of faith presupposes that human desires and God’s desires are initially opposed in toto, then Hamspon would surely dismiss it.35 If the willed self-effacement of faith refers to the act of letting oneself be completely decentred in a God who both objectively opposes and saves humanity, then such a faith cannot be but literally self-destructive. God becomes everything, humanity becomes nothing. There are no life-fulfilling desires but God’s. What Hampson is after is a theology of faith in which the relationship between God and human beings are not understood as competitive, but as cooperative. In what follows, I will attempt to critically pursue this desideratum. The main thesis to be defended is that faith is the epistemic mode in which we come to recognize that God affirms and nourishes the created dimension of ourselves that (desires to) live well with, for and from God and in doing so reveals that God’s desire is to be with, for and from human beings.36 Saying this means that I endorse a central anthropological presupposition of Coakley’s understanding of faith, namely that the establishment of a faith-relationship requires the existence of human selves ontologically structured in a way that make them capable of opening up to God’s love, which implies the capacity to love everything that God loves, that is, ourselves, all other finite beings and God (Mt. 22.37–39).37 God’s invitation to a living fellowship of love is a call addressed to human beings to let this capacity actualize itself (and thus also to oppose the desire to negate it): ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me’ (Rev. 3.20). Faith is the joyful response of Zacchaeus that welcomes the God that desires to be with him (Lk. 19. 6; see also Rev. 22.20). It is the voice that moves from saying ‘I believe in the one who says that God loves me’ to confessing that ‘I love God’, and in so doing commits itself to love everything that God loves (1 Jn. 4.7–21). A centred self arises in Christian faith because of the recognition of this specific response-ability. Christian faith is born in an active relation to one’s responsivity, when we come to see that God desires to be an unreserved power for universal well-being, and that God cannot fulfil this desire unless we38 allow Triune love to include us (as centres of genuine

34. Hampson, After Christianity, 101, 232. Hampson here echoes the basic point made in Heyward, The Redemption of God, 7f. 35. This is precisely what Coakley at times seems to imply. See for example Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 316. 36. Insofar as this is a recognition of something ontologically given, salvation is not a creation out of nothing, but God’s invitation into a renewed fellowship of love: creatio ex vetere (contrast Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 325f.). 37. Love is not here the capacity to experience positive feelings towards everyone (as erotic love or filial love), but the capacity to see our neighbour in every living being, including one’s ‘enemies’. Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 172f., 189. 38. It should be noted that I regard faith as a cooperative human endeavour in which each individual draws on the faith-resources of others in order to respond to God’s call.

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creativity) in its dynamic unfolding. In the words of Bonhoeffer, faith is an act by which we ‘accommodate God and the whole world within us’.39 Because of its universal scope, failure to respond to God’s call will either threaten the centredness of myself, my finite others, God, or even all of us. Faith is here not centred on God as such, but on God’s relationship to us and vice versa. If such a construal of faith is true, then faith should be understood as integral to a relational space in which a partially (a-)symmetrical mutuality unfolds. Such a theology of faith has several important conceptual presuppositions to be unfolded in what follows. Trivially, mutuality requires the existence of relators. Relators are what they are by virtue of difference and unity. A first clue to how difference determines divine–human relationships can be found in Hegel. A limit is, as Hegel noted, ‘the immanent determination of the something itself ’.40 We cannot determine the limits of ourselves without thinking otherness.41 Schleiermacher, who Hampson shows great affinity with in many regards, indicates the theological significance of this insight: ‘All that is finite exists only through the determination of its limits, which must, as it were, be ‘cut out’ from the Infinite.’42 If to be centred is to characterize both humanity and the God of humanity in their interrelationship, mutual self-limitation must be integral to it. However, centredness is not only achieved through mutual differentiation of selves. The semantic-ontological unity of God and humanity comes to expression in that fact that what belongs to God is always part of the self-explication of human beings, and vice versa.43 One cannot be different unless one is also united. Succinctly put, in every difference there is unity, and in every unity there is difference. If God and humanity are centred-inrelation to one another, they must be united in difference. There is, however, an asymmetry present within this structure of mutual divine–human differentiation and unification. What makes God distinct in kind from humanity is that God is the ultimate medium that holds every difference together.44 That God is Spirit (Jn. 4,24) means that God is that dimension of reality through which everything can relate in a life-fulfilling way to something else. As

39. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 405. 40. Hegel, Science of Logic, 117. 41. Ibid., 127ff., and LPR 3, 292. See also Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 24f. There is however a different understanding of border which does have this implication, and that is the border for which it is incoherent to ask what lies beyond it, because it cannot be known. Asle Eikrem, Being in Religion: A Journey in Ontology from Pragmatics through Hermeneutics to Ontology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 172f. 42. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 103. See also Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 16, 28, 83f., 130ff.. 161ff. 43. On this, see also Weir, Sacfrificial Logics, 20f., 184ff. 44. Rita N. Brock’s insistence that Jesus is not an exceptional instantiation of this power, but rather one example among many (Brock, Journeys, 60ff.), fails in that it does not provide a principle of individuation capable of distinguishing God and humanity. If there is such a

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this spiritual medium, God is the universal condition of personhood. At the same time, this also means that God is experienced in the relationships of finite persons. It is not the case that God becomes more transcendent the more God is removed from the finite realm, that is, the relation between the finite world and God is not that of an inverse proportionality (i.e. opposition). Rather the relation is one of direct proportionality: the more immanent God is, the more transcendent God is.45 As it becomes manifest in the person of Christ, the transcendence of God consists in being the (inter-personal) horizon in and through which every human person is united with each other. Such a notion of God is akin to what Hampson speaks of as the power of love that connects human beings to one another.46 Insofar as finite beings themselves are neither their own ultimate horizon nor that of every other, being this horizon is what makes God different in kind from finite beings. As the horizon of every being, God is the unifier of the different, the world is the unified in difference.47 Such an understanding of the transcendence of God is similar to what Hampson terms ‘the dimension of the totality … that prompts our knowledge of ourselves’.48 I prefer the term horizon to totality because it emphasizes that the condition of the personhood of both God and human beings is that they are never fully present to one another, a point Hampson would surely endorse.49 But while Hampson rejects the Christian religion because of its insistence on revelations of transcendence, my explication of the relationship between God and humanity shows precisely why revelation always takes place in a relational life that is truly personal. Persons that are never fully present to one another always find themselves in a relationship of revelation. The problem is thus not, as Hampson suggests, the notion of transcendence as such, but to a misconstrual of the term. That the relationship between God and humanity is directly proportional does not mean that God is transcendental, that is, a dimension of self-consciousness, as in Schleiermacher. Rather God is co-extensional with our (self-)consciousness. This claim has two implications. First, that God is the dimension of Being that

principle of individuation, then it is unproblematic to ascribe to Jesus an exceptional status. If there is not, then the concept of God becomes redundant. 45. See especially Lorenz B. Puntel, Being and God, 260ff., 296, but further also Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 36, and Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 3. 46. Moltmann says: ‘For only the concept of unitedness is the concept of a unity that can be communicated and is open’. The Trinity, 150. 47. Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 143. 48. Hampson, After Christianity, 231. See also ‘On Autonomy and Heteronomy,’ 8. Hampson, however, interprets the idea of ‘whole’, or ‘totality’, as a Kantian transcendental ideal of pure reason denoting the whole which makes it possible for ‘reality’ (or the world) to appear (omnitudo realitatis) (After Christianity, 239, 244f.). In contradistinction to this, my use of the term ‘horizon’ denotes the determining dimension of this whole which is neither reducible to any of its parts, nor itself part of a greater whole (or horizon). 49. Hampson, After Christianity, 233.

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connects every self-consciousness to every other. Secondly, that the relationship between God and humanity is logically intrinsic – the one cannot be without the other. Although this means that God requires a capacity for (and a vocabulary of) faith in order to reveal Godself, it does not mean that God becomes believable because human beings actually believe in God, but human beings may believe because God reveals Godself as believable.50 While Hampson is sceptical about any talk of the self as decentred and heteronomous, I will argue that the above determinations of the relationship between God and humanity is consistent with claiming that humanity is both decentred and centred-in-relation to God. This is the case when faith is understood as welcoming a love that is strictly universal, that is, it includes both self and every (finite and divine) other. It is oriented towards a relationship that involves a de-centred centring: Only the human being who opens him- or herself up to God’s universal love (de-centring) is capable of loving both self and every other (centring). This implies that human beings also decentre God by being centred because they so become God’s genuine other. God receives God’s identity as God from humanity. In this restricted sense, God is also from humanity.51 Both God and humanity belong to each other in their centredness as well as their decentredness. Hampson’s ideal of ‘inter-dependent autonomy’52 could in fact be an adequate expression of the recognition constitutive of true faith (that expresses itself as universal love) if it is taken to say that my freedom is dependent on the recognition of the freedom of the other (heteronomy), and vice versa. Obviously, this claim is controversial. What does it mean that the autonomy (or freedom) of God is dependent upon humanity? Here conceptual refinement is extremely important. Autonomy, or what I would preferably term freedom, is a relational determination. Nothing can be free in itself. While God, as Triune, is indeed an infinite relationship of free persons, the freedom of God vis-à-vis humanity is only meaningfully ascribed to God in an actual relationship to humanity, that is, as the God of humanity. It is only coherent to speak of the autonomy (or freedom) of God as expressible in relation to that which is not God. The autonomy of both God and humanity is interdependent when understood in the restricted sense that they are genuinely different relators. If the latter were not the case then the unfolding of the world would be the self-unfolding of God.53 The freedom of God is a determination of God’s relationship to humanity insofar as God is revealed as its creator, and the freedom of humanity is a determination of the world as a

50. For a further explication of this point, see Eikrem, Being in Religion, 111f., 160ff., 207f. 51. It is precisely because she reaches out to God that the haemorraging woman in Mk. 5.21–34 does not reach out to a person in opposition to her, but to her true other. Thus, while it might be true, as Rita N. Brock notes, that this woman participates in the deconstruction of patriarchy, she does not participate in the deconstruction of God. Brock, Journeys, 84. 52. Hampson, After Christianity, 104. 53. If Miroslav Volf is right that our free gifts are really God’s free gifts through us, then human freedom is a mere illusion. Volf, ‘Being as God is,’ 8.

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created source of genuine creativity.54 In other words, in this relationship, mutual self-limitation is constitutive of the true freedom of both creator and created. Even though we are only able to think of the freedom of God in such a relationship, that does not mean that God is free because human beings are able to think so. Rather, human beings are able to coherently think God as free because God, as Triune, is truly and infinitely free. This means that the relationship between God and the world is not primary constitutive as Hampson in accordance with Schleiermacher, Barth and later process theologians insist.55 It is secondary constitutive.56 While the existence of the Triune God does not imply the existence of the world, the existence of the world implies the existence of God. God is infinitely free by virtue of being love, that is, three persons united in difference without opposition. This is the case because whereas the Triune structure of God is constituted by the mutually constitutive individuation of Father, Son and Spirit, creation is individuated in relation to God. It seems then that the crucial point on which I disagree with Hampson concerns the idea of God as creator.57 God not only holds the different together, God is also the source of the different.58 The glory of God among human beings becomes manifest when each person discovers more of its true self so that finite life increases.59 This idea introduces an aspect of asymmetry between God and human beings that Hampson finds ethically unacceptable. The very claim that the world

54. Kathryn Tanner argues against conceiving the relationship between God and humanity as one of cooperation because it means that humanity has a scope of activity that is not provided by God (Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 4). Against her, I will argue that God has provided humanity with the capacity for genuine creativity in a way that makes it adequate to speak of divine–human cooperation in bringing their relational lives to fulfilment. 55. For contemporary samples of process-inspired views, see Parker, Blessing the World, 157ff., and Trelstad, ‘Atonement through Covenant,’ 115f. Barth’s view is formulated in Barth, The Humanity of God, 50f. For Barthian-inspired claims to the same effect, see for instance Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 190f. and Bacon, ‘Thinking the Trinity,’ 456. Paul Fiddes is a good example of someone who finds support in both theological traditions for such a view. See Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 75f., 142. 56. Mühling-Schlapkohl, Gott ist Liebe, 326. See also Christoph Schwöbel’s discussion on whether or not human love is a necessary condition of God’s identity as the God of love: Schwöbel, ‘God is Love,’ 319ff. and David B. Hart’s discussion of the relationship between God and creation as necessary/contingent: Hart, Beauty, 156ff. 57. Hampson, After Christianity, 239. 58. Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 143. 59. Stefan Oster, ‘Becoming a Person and the Trinity,’ in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology ed. Robert J. Wozniak and Giulio Maspero (London: T. & T. Clark, 2012), and Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 170.

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was created60 by God as a space of determinate possibilities implies a heteronomy that is not constituted by a co-original structure of inter-dependence. Even though our being involves ‘potentialities which are ours to exercise’,61 these potentialities were not created by us. Freedom (and with it our capacity for faith) is part of our God-given nature.62 Otherwise we would not be formulating a theology of freedom, but a secular anthropology or social-psychology.63 And if we add to this that the preservation and flourishing of this space of possibilities is dependent upon God, then a further heteronomical determination is added to the very condition of human freedom. In other words, if human life is dependent upon Triune divine life for its existence, then human freedom is as well. It seems then that the notion of a creator God also excludes the strict symmetry required by a truly mutual relationship of centred selves, and thus also of love. What Hampson does not see is that it is precisely this asymmetry that is constitutive of a love that is truly infinite. If the identity of God as a God of love was dependent upon God’s relationship with humanity, then the love of God would not be that of an unconditional acceptance – a love that is infinitely open to creatures despite their resistance. Insofar as God is the (infinite) source and not (only) the consequence of human love, God must be love.64 Thus the crucial disagreement between myself and Hampson is whether or not a relationship that is completely mutual need be completely symmetrical. If there is no asymmetry between God and human beings, then God becomes indistinguishable from humanity, and finite love becomes our ultimate horizon. Only if God is not reduced to human love may we believe in the love that includes all and never ends. However, that God loves humanity means that God not only longs for a loving response, but

60. While Hampson explicitly defends the identification of God (mind), and that which is not God (matter), I find good reasons to doubt this. It is both inconsistent with the standard cosmological model of contemporary physics, and is encumbered with several logical difficulties (Compare Hampson, After Christianity, 239 and William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, ‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument,’ in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William L. Lane and James P. Moreland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)). Furthermore, Hampson thinks that David Hume’s counter-arguments against William Paley’s argument from design still holds (Hampson, After Christianity, 247), as far as I can see both Paley and contemporary versions of this argument (based for instance of the anthropic principle) avoid most of Hume’s critique. See Einar Duenger Bøhn, ‘Why This Universe?’ in Talking Seriously About God: Philosophy of Religion in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, ed. Asle Eikrem and Atle Ottesen Søvik (Zürich: LIT, 2016). 61. Hampson, After Christianity, 236. 62. Although in tension with some of her other lines of reasoning, Hampson sometimes affirms this. See ibid., 238. 63. Grey, ‘Jesus,’ 168. 64. For this reason, Rebecca Parker’s understanding of God as ‘the source from Whom all Blessings Flow’ also requires a Trinitarian understanding of God. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 195.

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that God also desires it.65 God does not want to be God without us.66 As such, there is a partial (a-)symmetry present. However, this partial (a-)symmetry is not primordial, but a consequence of the open character of the love that God is. While God and humanity are mutually constitutive in the sense that the one cannot be without the other, humanity is not the condition for the existence of a God of love, while the opposite is indeed the case. Now, where does my line of argument leave us with respect to the claim that the Christian understanding of faith is self-sacrificial? The recognition of God as creative source of love is not self-sacrificial. Faith does not mean that human beings must temporarily loose themselves in order to receive themselves more fully. Rather, the relationship between God and humanity is actualized in mutual self-limitation, that is, in the recognition that the freedom of the one is dependent on the freedom of the other.67 On the one hand, in creating an evolving cosmos with the potential to bring forth personal beings, God limited Godself. On the other, this recognition does not imply that humanity is entirely decentred. Rather it is a recognition of my difference, that is, of my centredness. Furthermore, establishing and sustaining a fellowship with God does not require that I identify myself with God. Salvation does not mean that finite selves are dissolved into the infinite life. In other words, salvation is not a literal surrender of the self to God. Rather, God affirms our relative freedom.68 God would not be God if God did not do so.69 The decisive point here is that because God is the source of our freedom and the horizon which holds everything together in difference, our relationship to God is the condition of our personhood.70 Ontological dependence is not domination. In this sense, it is indeed true as Hampson insists that ‘God is not one who could limit our freedom in the world.’71 Even if I am ontologically structured in a way that enables me to open myself to God, I must not respond positively to God’s invitation. I can reject it without

65. God would not desire our company if God already has everything in Godself as for instance Kathryn Tanner claims. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 84. God does not have the company of finite beings in Godself. 66. Eberhard Jüngel, ‘What Does It Mean to Say, “God Is Love”?’ in Christ in our Place: The Humanity of God in Christ for the Reconciliation of the World, ed. Trevor A. Hart and Daniel P. Thimell (Exeter: Paternoster, 1989), 309. 67. On this, see also Moltmann who writes: ‘Freedom does not mean lordship; it means friendship. This freedom consists of the mutual and common participation in life, and a communication in which there is no lordship or servitude. In their reciprocal participation in life, people become free beyond the limitations of their own individuality’. The Way of Jesus Christ, 56. 68. Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 62. 69. Jüngel, ‘God is Love,’ 301f. 70. Thus, I agree with Sarah Coakley that openness to the gentle power of God is a source of empowerment. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 32ff. 71. Hampson, After Christianity, 233.

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ceasing to exist as an individual in the present world with a relative freedom of will and action. God breaks down the self-enclosed dimension of our selves only by calling for our free response. A true encounter with God takes place in the mutual openness that characterizes two centred selves. But insofar as God is the creator and sustainer of our space of possibilities, without God there would be no human freedom, not even the freedom to reject God. However, this does not in and by itself imply that God is a ‘power for good’, as is Hampson’s preferred designation for that which is God, and it does not imply that our relationship to God fulfils personhood as good living with, for and from divine and human others in just institutions.72 This claim can only be validated by an enquiry into the history of religious experience in general, and the Christian history of revelation in particular. If the goodness of God can be found in the latter, only then could Christian faith be said to promote the fulfilment of personhood (1 Jn. 2.29). As I have been arguing above, the structure of unity-in-difference-withoutopposition manifest in Christ is the moral-ontological value of God’s creation which fulfils human personhood.73 Carter Heyward once wrote that ‘in Jesus we see that what is moral—right, just—is what is natural in the sense of the organic and deep relation that characterizes creation itself ’.74 If this is the case, then partial (a-) symmetrical mutuality is not an arbitrary human projection, but an expression of the inner structure of a life-giving dimension of creation, and as such a heteronomy which human beings must embrace in order to become truly personal.75 Christian faith is true insofar as it can coherently argue that this is the case.76 If what is lost in faith is an illusory self (the non-relational, or the self-effacing dimension of our self), and personhood is truly fulfilled, then nothing is lost, everything is gained. The text quoted from Heyward above continues: ‘Moreover we see that moral choice and “human nature” are not in opposition, but rather the human refusal to cooperate, or act, with God is that which is immoral and unnatural, an assault upon both humanity and God.’ In our world, God and humanity are entirely centred (free) in their mutual love because only in living with, for and from, all others are they truly themselves.77 What from the outside of faith seems like self-sacrifice is from the inside experienced as that of receiving oneself. If faith is the mode in which God reveals Godself as the inexhaustible source and fulfiller of personal existence – as freedom expressing itself as universal love – faith is in fact the mode in which we actively open ourselves to the selfgiving of God in and for us.

72. Ibid., 247. 73. See also Heyward, The Redemption of God, 16f. 74. Ibid., 39. See also Parker, Blessing the World, 160f. 75. Mercedes, Power for, 143. 76. This does not mean that mutuality is a trans-historical value that is independent of human language and thinking. It simply means that we do not create, but discover these values insofar as we are able to coherently think them. 77. See Moltmann, The Trinity, 55f.

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10.3 Sacrifice of Praise as Self-limitation and Self-giving But what about the ‘sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name’ (Heb. 13.15f.; see also 1 Pet. 2.5; Rom. 12.1)? Is this an expression of the true mutuality which I established above as the criterion of love? Again, we could take our departure from the words of Gunton: ‘Sacrifice is … the end for which the world is made: to echo the mutual giving and receiving of the Father, Son and Spirit within the dynamics of space and time, as sacrifice of praise.’78 Is this so? In what follows, I will add three comments on the particular mode of relationship that Christian praise constitutes, the first is aimed at those who claim that sacrifice and praise are synonyms, the second concerns worship as a means of social demarcation, and the third having to do with the particular character of the worshipping subject in its relationship with God. First of all, sacrifice and praise cannot be synonyms.79 By calling worship a sacrifice we reduce the former into something one-dimensional and empty the notion of sacrifice from its connection to the death of Jesus understood as the overcoming of destructive violence and fear of death. This is the reason why the sacrifices of praise remain highly ambiguous in the Christian tradition: it purports to be a commemoration of a structure it holds to be dissolved. Secondly, we could argue that Christian theologians should avoid describing sacrifice of praise because of its cultic connotations insofar as the defining characteristics that distinguish the Christian faith from cultic religiosity are the dissolving of the difference between sacred and profane, holy and unholy.80 The unfolding of divine love in Jesus meant the tearing in two of the temple-curtain releasing the divine glory into the world (Mk. 15.38f. par.; see also 14.58f.; 1 Cor. 3.16; 6.19; Acts 7.44–50), and thus the whole of Christian life is to testify to the presence of God. In conquering sin, Christian life as a whole is incorporated, through faith, into the divine life. Christian life is creative responses to the love of God in word and deed. Anyone who lives his or her life coram deo, not only the priests of a temple cult, may exercise the ‘true and proper worship’ of a Christian that according to Paul in Romans 12 consists in being devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil.

78. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 205. See also Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice, 270ff. 79. Dalferth, ‘Christ died for us,’ 301. 80. Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte, 309.

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Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. … Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Rom. 12.1, 10ff.)

Although this ideal is neither optimally clarified here, nor ethically unproblematic in all aspects, Paul is correct to insist Christian praise should be holistic and inclusive, not particularistic and exclusive. Still, this does not mean that the cultic dimension has been dissolved. It has been transformed. The Christian notion of the cultic is based on the distinction between good living with, for and from others in just institutions and the ways of life that do not. To dissolve the cultic would be to dissolve this distinction and Christian faith would become an unholy mixture of good and evil. Furthermore, I must again strongly emphasize that this distinction is not a sociological one (i.e. characterizing different groups of people), but an anthropological one, that is, distinguishing different dimension of each and every human being. Thirdly, praise cannot be an expression of love if the ‘I’ is given up entirely, as Edmund Schlink once claimed.81 Pious as this may sound for some, it is not without problems. As noted above, relating to the argument presented by Derrida, giving without return is as impossible as a non-relational relation.82 In loving praise, human beings receive themselves as truly others in relation to God, that is, as subjects capable of responding in opening themselves up to the other, and as receiving the other as a genuine other, that is, as the condition of their freedom. As Karl Rahner once wrote, ‘Nearness to God and genuine human autonomy grow in direct and not inverse proportionality.’83 Praise is not submissive, self-sacrificial or self-destructive. It is more like receiving a guest, like opening up one’s world to God and fellow human beings. It is, in the words of Sarah Coakley, a ‘gentle space-making’.84 Praise is the self-limitation with which one responds to God’s call to good living with, for and from others in just institutions. This does not mean that it has become a matter of des-ut-do in which God gives to me what I shall simply pass on.85 I am not called to simply become a channel of God’s action. God did not create the world ‘so that the created order should be offered back to its

81. Edmund Schlink, ‘Die Struktur der dogmatischen Aussage als öekumenisches Problem,’ Kerygma und Dogma, no. 3 (1957): 255f. Schlink’s view was explicitly endorsed by Pannenberg, Jesus, 184. 82. See footnote 19, Chapter 5. 83. Rahner quoted in Elizabeth A. Johnson, Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 29. See also Rahner, The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, trans. Robert Barr (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 33. 84. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 35. 85. On the relevance of this notion for Christian spirituality, see Alexander Deeg, ‘Opfer als Nahung: Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch zur Spiritualität des Opfers’, in Erlösung Ohne Opfer?, ed. Werner H. Ritter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 142.

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creator’, as Gunton claimed.86 If this was the case, praise would be a case of God loving Godself through me (and the rest of humanity). Sarah Coakley comes close to committing herself to a similar view when writing that ‘strictly speaking, it is not I who autonomously prays, but God (the Holy Spirit) who prays in me, and so answer the eternal call of the “Father”’ and that prayer ‘at its deepest also is God’s, not ours’.87 Why is this not a case of ‘being silenced’ by God (the Holy Spirit), a power-dynamic that Coakley herself finds highly problematic?88 She can only avoid an affirmative answer to this question if the Holy Spirit is understood as our other, that is, as the condition of our free creative response. The Holy Spirit does not replace our distinct human voices, nor does the Spirit efface itself as person in the believer as Vladimir Lossky once claimed.89 Rather the Holy Spirit bears witness ‘with our Spirit that we are children of God’ (Rom. 8. 16, italics are mine).90 It gives us our voice, voices that are sometimes genuinely new to God (and that often can become a subversive power over against a society that suppresses truth through injustice).91 Praise is our positive response to the Spirit’s invitation of our particular voices to creatively share its self-giving love of the Father and the Son. Even if the love of God is the condition of freedom (in that God both creates and sustains the dimension within which it unfolds), Daphne Hampson is wrong when claiming that human beings only become decentred in the kind of praise based on this recognition. They become centred as well.92 Welcoming the will of God (Mt. 6.10) is also welcoming the freedom of all creatures, others as well as our own (Jn. 8.36; 1 Cor. 6.12: Gal. 5.1). If God made freedom possible in the first place, then why would God wish to negate it? Whether we want to do the latter is up to us. Insofar as self-limitation here means to recognize God as our inexhaustible source of free response, we come to see that praise is in reality an instance of self-giving: the more a human being gives him- or herself to God, the more human beings receive themselves as respons-able.

86. Colin E. Gunton, ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation: An Interpretation of Colossians 1: 15–23,’ Dialog 35, no. 1 (1996): 39. 87. Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 55, 115. See also ibid., 113, and the similar views of Alan J. Torrance in Torrance, ‘Priesthood of Christ,’ 186, 190. See also Kathryin Tanner who speaks of the acts of Christians more generally as the actions of God (as Christ). Christ and the Spirit do not live as me, but in me. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 56f. When Paul speaks of Christ living in me, he still speaks of himself as the one who lives. See Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 70f. 88. Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 84. 89. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. Members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Serguis (London: James Clarke, 1957), 172. See also Fiddes, Participating in God, 261f. 90. Some of Coakley’s own formulations tend in this direction, but not consistently so. See for example Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 112, 114. 91. Sölle, Suffering, 78. 92. Hampson, After Christianity, 128.

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Yet even if we cannot think of praise without God, and we cannot think of God without praise; praise does not bring (the love of) God into existence. Rather praise creatively brings to expression what is given as expressible in various ways. Genuine praise is dependent on receiving God as a genuine other. In praise, God remains free.93 Correspondingly, praise is also dependent on God receiving humanity as a genuine other, that is, as free. The love of God becomes an experience in praise as a persistent living with, for and from genuine others. In other words, praise unfolds in the mutuality of friendship: ‘People draw near to God by praying without begging and by talking to him in a way that shows they respect his liberty. The prayer of the friend is neither the servility of the servant nor the importunity of the child; it is a conversation in the freedom of love, that shares and allows the other to share.’94 Human beings receive themselves from the God who speaks to us ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod. 33.11), and God lives from humanity in praise insofar as God is proclaimed as a God of humanity.95 Insofar as God’s love of humanity cannot be experienced outside this mutual embrace, A. N. Whitehead was right that ‘the power of God is the worship he inspires’.96 In this restricted sense, it is indeed true that God is vulnerable and depends on sinners.97 In case the response is absent, there is something in God that remains unfulfilled, namely God’s desire to be in a mutual relationship of love with humanity.98 The possibility of divine–human mutuality does not obstruct the fulfilment of human and divine life, as it would in theologies of strict divine unilaterism. Rather, without it love cannot be fully actualized.

93. For this reason, praise involves trusting in God’s promise. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 398. 94. Moltmann, The Trinity, 221. 95. This is the main thesis put forward in Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 387f., 95. 96. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1927), 239. 97. Contra Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit, 297. 98. Pool, God’s Wounds 1, 128.

Chapter 11 SELF-SACRIFICIAL LOVE AS THE LOVE THROUGH WHICH WE SOMETIMES TRULY LOVE ONE ANOTHER

Systematic theology is not an abstract endeavour the theoretical purity of which can ignore its moral and socio-historical implications. As Søren Kierkegaard noted, our understanding of the love of God is not exhausted when exclusively treated as a determination of God’s relationship with Godself and humanity in Jesus, taken as an isolated personal event. It is also the ‘middle term’ in social relationships lived in God’s Spirit.1 1 Jn. 4.12f. reads: ‘No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit’ (see also Lk. 17.21; Rom. 5.5). A systematic re-evaluation of the notion of God as sacrificial love must consider the third question posed in the introduction, namely whether or not sacrificial love should be recommended as an ethical ideal to be pursued by the human beings who recognize themselves as living within the relational spaces generated by divine life. Should a Christian theology aiming to provide a sound moral vision for Christian living in its socio-historical dimension rid itself of semantics of sacrifice, or is the life and death of Jesus understood in terms of sacrificial love constitutive of the moral antidote to socio-historical victimization? While the focus thus far has been dedicated to the relationship between God and humanity (and vice versa), in this chapter I will be explicating the argument indicated above that self-sacrifice is a morally justifiable inter-personal course of actions, yet it can only be thought of as love’s ultimate fulfilment on the presupposition that human living transcends natural death. While inherently valuable qualities of our token relationships may be temporarily lost coram mundo/hominibus, they are never lost coram deo. With John Milbank, I will argue that self-sacrifice is only morally good when resurrection is thought of as integral to it.2 Only if this is the case can we affirm that God is the ultimate unifier of the different also in the moral realm, that is, the living source of the love through which we truly love one another.

1. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 58, 107. See further Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 158ff., 176ff. 2. Milbank, ‘The Midwinter Sacrifice,’ 122ff.

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11.1 Self-sacrificial Love as ‘The Greatest Commandment’ As noted in Section 4.1, oneself belongs to the order of others which may be the intentional object of violent sacred actions. In the Christian tradition, selfsacrificial love (in the sense of selflessness or altruism) has evidently been put forward as the counterforce to the uninhibited ‘erotic’ self-seeking that has been taken to characterize sin, and as such it has constituted the ultimate meaning of Christian faith and life. 1 Pet. 2.18–21 reads: Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.

Beyond biblical texts such as this (see also Mk 8.35; 10.39; 1 Cor. 11.1; 1 Thess. 1.6; Phil. 2.3f.; Col. 1.24; Heb. 12.1-3, 22-24), Anselm’s notion of satisfaction and various ideas of Christ as a moral example each in their distinct way constituted theological arguments for making selflessness a Christian virtue. While Anselm refused to call martyrial suffering a sacrifice, he exhorted Christian believers to freely accept violence towards oneself insofar as it imitated the suffering freely accepted by Christ in obedience to God. Likewise, Abelard taught the church that the cross revealed acceptance of suffering as the ultimate expression of love. True Christian penance consisted in imitating the self-denying love of Christ. Luther argued along similar lines insisting that Christian love is exclusively love of the other, not of oneself.3 Referring to Jesus’s words in Mt. 5.39, Luther stated that ‘a Christian should be so disposed that s/he will suffer every evil and injustice without avenging himself; neither will he seek legal redress in the courts but have utterly no need of temporal authority and law for his own sake. … Suffering! suffering! Cross! cross! This and nothing else is the Christian law.’4 Self-protection cannot be a result of intentional self-love. It may only be a contingent by-product of our protection of others.5 Suffering was not only a consequence of doing good.

3. Martin Luther, ‘Temporal Authority: To what Extent it should be Obeyed,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Walther I. Brandt and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 45 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), 96, 101ff., 118. It should be noted that Luther’s message is addressed to the oppressed farmers, and not to their oppressors, the Lords! 4. Ibid., 101. See also ‘Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Robert C. Schultz, vol. 46 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1967), 28, 31, 35f. The only form of active self-protection not sanctioned by the ruling authorities that is allowed is fleeing (ibid., 37). 5. Luther, ‘Temporal Authority,’ 104, and ‘Whether Soldiers, too, can be Saved,’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Robert C. Schultz, vol. 46 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1967), 120.

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Luther ascribed a positive meaning to suffering, according to which God lets the devil heap misery on Christian believers to show them that God is their only true guardian and shield. In so doing, their faith increases and ‘therefore we should accept all suffering as a holy thing, for it is truly holiness’.6 Like Luther, Søren Kierkegaard was adamant that the Christian believer should imitate the self-sacrifice of Christ. Yet he rejected Luther’s appreciation of sustaining losses for the purpose of increasing faith because it contradicted Luther’s own contrast between selfish love and the Christian love that ‘does not seek its own’ (1 Cor. 13.5).7 According to Kierkegaard, true (Christian) love neither loves another for its own sake, nor in order to make the beloved like itself. Rather he seeks to preserve the distinctiveness of the other at all costs. True love is ‘self-denyingin-all-things’.8 It does not require anything in return, not a strengthened faith, not even the recognition of itself as love. Yes, the Christian lover must ‘willingly endure being hated as a reward for one’s love’.9 He must resist any impulse towards preferring to secure one’s own well-being to the well-being of others. The Christian person truly loves only insofar as he recognizes himself as exclusively for others. On this background, contemporary theologians such as David Wheeler are firmly situated in the Christian tradition when stating that a Christian believer is called to self-sacrifice because it ‘absorbs-neutralizes-buffers-heals the pain, disappointment, and mistrust of a compromised relationship’.10 Self-sacrifice is the painful price to pay for healing a distorted relational life. Jesus paid this price, and Christian believers should not flee from the duty to do so as well if the flourishing of human life requires it. In fact, many Christians today would readily insist with Jeff Pool that desisting from self-sacrifice would prevent human beings from actualizing their highest calling, namely to live the imago Dei as love.11 To Nietzsche, such ideals were abhorrent: ‘Christian faith has meant a sacrifice: the sacrifice of freedom, pride, spiritual self-confidence; it has meant subjugation and self-derision, self-mutilation’.12 Many contemporary voices echo the words of

6. Luther, ‘Preface the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings’ in Luther’s Works, ed. Lewis W. Spitz, vol. 34 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1960), 287. Similarly, Aquinas argued that tyrannical persecution is good because it evokes the virtue of patience in martyrs. Aquinas, ST 1, 123. 7. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 53ff., 264ff. See also Welz, ‘Love as Gift and SelfSacrifice,’ 239ff.; Green, ‘Kierkegaard,’ 571ff.; and Paolo Diego Bubbio, Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivsm, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 104ff. 8. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 268. 9. Ibid., 114. See also ibid., 119f., 131, 194, 276f., 358, 374. 10. David Wheeler, ‘The Cross and the Blood: Dead or Living Images?’ Dialog 35, no. 1 (1996): 12. See also Worthington, A Just Forgiveness, 34. 11. Pool, God’s Wounds 1, 200. 12. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 44. See also Nietzsche,

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Nietzsche. Today a human being living according to an ethics of selflessness is often regarded as ‘a deserter in the great battle for the moral right to self-realization’.13 At best, if someone were to deny themselves something, they should not disregard each and every self-interest. This critique not only comes from non-Christian voices. As emphasized in Section 4.2, contemporary feminist theologians have criticized traditional theologies of atonement for making a virtue out of selfsacrificial love, and by doing so defuse resistance and effectively ‘entrench victims in systems of violence’.14 If this were the case Jesus would make a mockery out of his own message of non-violence, and would have freely and knowingly carried out what his opponents did blindly: destroying themselves.15 Failing to take account of this contradicts the great commandment taught by Jesus himself: to love one’s neighbour as we love ourselves (Lk. 10.27b; 6.31; Mt. 7.12; See also Gal. 5.14). In the paragraph to follow, I am going to discuss whether, and how, this commandment of Jesus can be integrated into a theological ethics of self-sacrificial love.

11.2 Self-sacrificial Love Between Self-destruction and Self-fulfilment My point of departure for the following ethical considerations is the conceptual scheme developed above. The question that must be addressed is whether victimization, self-limitation, self-destruction/self-annihilation, self-sacrifice or self-giving are to be recommended as ethical ideals guiding the morality of Christian believers? The criterion to be employed to answer this question is whether or not any of these relational modalities generate and support oppressive relationships. In the case of victimization, the verdict seems obvious enough. A victimizing relationship is characterized by the failure of a victimizer to recognize the personhood of the victim. In such a state of oppression love cannot flourish. For an oppressive

Genealogy of Morals, 66, and further Bubbio, Sacrifice, 117ff. What should be noted, however, is that Nietzsche himself encourages self-sacrifice as an ideal: in acknowledging the responsibility of sacrificing others for the prosperity of the species, the overman sacrifices his exclusive commitment to himself. On this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, see ibid., 125f. 13. Spaemann, ‘Opferbegriff,’ 12. See also Strobel, ‘Feministische Kritik,’ 54, Lothes Biviano, The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice, 68ff. 14. Brock, ‘Communal Redemption,’ 248. See also Brown and Parker, ‘For God so Loved the World?,’ 11ff.; Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, ‘Agape in Feminist Ethics,’ Journal of Religious Ethics 9, no. 1 (1981); Beverly Wildung Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985), 19f., 262f.; Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, 77; Saiving, ‘The Human Situation’; Welch, Risk, 161ff.; Catherine Keller, ‘More on Feminism, Self-Sacrifice, and Time: Or too Many Words for Emptiness,’ Buddhist-Christian Studies 17 (1993): 215; Coakley, Powers and Submissions, xv; and Weaver, Self Love, 2, 8, 61f. 15. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 157f.

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relationship to be transformed into a non-oppressive one, the victim must be brought to recognize its capacity for moral agency. A rhetoric of ‘victimism’ which describes the situation of the victims as exclusively determined by forces outside of their control will be unable to achieve this.16 This does not mean that victims should assume some of the blame for their actual misery.17 It means that they must be brought to recognize that they are more than objects of abuse. The accent should lie on affirming the creative strategies of resistance that they actively engage in under abuse,18 and the capacity to break out of the oppressive structure of which they are part. This happens when they are not treated simply as a ‘you’, but as another ‘I’, that is, as a person capable of affirming oneself as more than a victim.19 It includes recognizing oneself as taking part in a collective complicity in the societal structures that made one’s victimization possible.20 When saying this, I want to underline that it does not amount to blaming the victims for their actual abuse, but to simply affirm their capacity for participating in a creative collective transformation of the situation that made it possible.21 Without it, social transformation would only take place as a result of the initiative of others, which is to say that one’s passivity is merely re-affirmed. However, this does not mean that we should put the concern of the victim above that of the victimizer. Rather for an oppressive relationship to be healed, we must be equally concerned with both. If a certain course of action leads to the empowerment of the victim and the moral transformation of the corrupted

16. The term was first used by Kathleen Barry in Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 37ff. On the general problem of this rhetoric, see especially Hooks, Killing Rage, 51ff.; Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Vagabundinnen: Feministische Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), 45ff.; and Moser, Opfer, 419ff. 17. Although in some cases this may indirectly be the result. 18. Allan Wade renders the story of Katie who, upon recognizing her own history of resistance, exclaimed: ‘I feel like I could lift up my fucking car’ (Allan Wade, ‘Small Acts of Living: Everyday Resistance to Violence and other Forms of Oppression,’ Contemporary Family Therapy 19 (1997): 37) See also Mercedes, Power for, 114ff. 19. Christina Thürmer-Rohr notes the problematic fact that women often only get help when labelling themselves victims, ‘Frauen,’ 22. 20. Ibid., 31ff., ‘Mittäterschaft,’ 89ff., and Hirschmann, ‘Domestic Violence,’ 142f. Thus, comments like that by Cynthia Crysdale that it is important for every human being to be ‘owning one’s own pain and recognizing one’s complicity in it’ is fatal in its lack of nuance (Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 65). A failure to distinguish between individual and collective complicity is absolutely crucial. 21. Brison, Aftermath, 77. Societal structures are often ignored as accomplices in the destructive violence of personal relationships (Mercedes, Power for, 10, and van Nistelrooij, Self-sacrifice, 221). While collective resistance against such cultural violence needs to address the larger collective (i.e. society), they should do so through the critical examinations of smaller collectives which, as such, have a greater dynamic capacity for envisioning change. See Suchocki, The Fall to Violence, 155.

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relational modality of the victimizer (who is also often a victim in certain respects), it should be recommended. If it benefits only one of the parties, as it usually does, it cannot constitute a solution to the relational problem (although such strategies might solve other problems on one or the other side of the conflict). Yet, does not the concern of the victimizer logically exclude concern for the victim, and vice versa? If the only ethically adequate response to victimization is to simply legitimize the incessant anger of the victim towards the victimizer, the answer would be yes. Although I agree with the healing significance of affirming the legitimacy of resentment (understood as moral indignation), this cannot be the final station in a healing process. While Thomas Brudholm is right that resentment is integral to relational healing, he is wrong that it excludes forgiveness.22 If it were, ‘perpetual acting on anger, resentment, and vindictiveness, even if righteous, can via the destruction of relationships, eventually undermine the very sense that justice is a worthy ideal’.23 An incessant refusal to enter into processes of forgiveness would erode the basis upon which societal living is built, that is, the capacity to live with, for and from others (including our victimizers) in just institutions.24 Having said this, I must pause to insist that the justice inherent in forgiveness is different from juridical justice. It does not exclude the punishment of victimizers by recourse to stipulations of societal law. Forgiveness is rather the justice of mutual self-limitation from which every moral relationship is born, and without which it cannot be re-established on an inter-personal level.25 From this perspective, ‘This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.’26 The person who refuses to offer forgiveness risks becoming hard-hearted, incapable of love and compassion.27 He or she remains captive to the destructive relational dynamic of his or her 22. Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 4. 23. Gheaus, ‘Unconditional Forgiveness,’ 62. 24. On an individual level, it could also give rise to what psychologists term ‘chronic embitterment syndrome’, a state in which, in particularly serious scenarios, increases the risk for suffering post-traumatic stress disorders. Brigitte Boothe, ‘“I can’t have done that, my Pride says”: Psychoanalysis of Motivated Forgetting,’ in Forgiving and Forgetting: Theology and the Margins of Soteriology, ed. Hartmut Von Sass and Johannes Zachhuber (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 65. See also Roy F. Baumeister, Julie J. Exline and Kristin L. Sommer, ‘The Victim Role, Grudge Theory, and Two Dimensions of Forgiveness,’ in Dimensions of Forgiveness: Psychological Research and Theological Perspectives, ed. Everett L. Worthington (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 1998), 97ff., and Jeannie G. Noll, ‘Forgiveness in People Experiencing Trauma’, in Handbook of Forgiveness, ed. Everett Worthington Jr (New York: Routledge, 2005), 365ff.. 25. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 43ff. See also Lévinas, Entre Nous, 230f. 26. Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985), 73. 27. Griswold, Forgiveness, 69f.

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victimization. Thus, if we presuppose that the healing of oppressive relationships is to be recommended in most cases, how does it come about? An attempt to answer this question from the point of view of theological ethics should first consider in detail the moral significance of the strategy chosen by Jesus, reconstructed in Section 5.4. In Col. 3.13, we read: ‘if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive’ (see also Mt. 18.22). In the context of Jesus’s life and death, a specific kind of creative resistance is the key to relational healing. As argued, this is found in the impulse towards mutual self-limitation unfolding in Jesus’s offer of forgiveness to his victimizers. As noted, self-limitation counteracts the failure to recognize the other as truly other that lies at the heart of the victimizing relational modality. Yet, because it is so easily misconstrued in ways that prove fatal to relational healing, great care must be taken to clarify the relevance of the dynamics of forgiveness for inter-personal relationships. That we should offer forgiveness does not mean that a victim should suppress, or circumvent, emotional pain by simply ignoring his or her relationships with his or her victimizers.28 Nor is healthy resistance to be found in strategies that avoid resentment, as can happen when the victim moves too quickly to offer forgiveness.29 In fact, this is not an instance of offering forgiveness but servility.30 Rather a space must be opened up for the victim to express her anger and indignation towards the victimizer (Mt. 18.15)31 along with a space in which she can mourn her losses.32 Indignation and grief must then be brought into the presence of God, because only in and through the source of enemy-love can these emotions give rise to a will to save the victimizer from destruction.33 If they are left to operate incessantly outside the realm of will and reason, human beings will be unable to break the cycle of violence created by the abuse.34 We must take to heart Jesus’s call to ‘resist, but

28. This is JoAnne Marie Terrell’s suggestion. Power in the Blood?, 139f. 29. Gheaus, ‘Unconditional Forgiveness,’ 64, and Griswold, Forgiveness, 40f. 30. Griswold, Forgiveness, 18. 31. I here presuppose that the translation of this verse should read ‘If your brother and sister sins against you’. Italics are mine. 32. The emotional component in resentment does not come automatically for victims of traumatizing violence. For a long period of time, many are incapable of experiencing anger towards their victimizers (Brison, Aftermath, 13f., 63, 74f.). The cognitive component of truth-telling is an important, yet not always sufficient, step towards releasing the anger necessary for healing. For Susan Brison, for instance, self-defence training and listening to the stories of other rape-victims was the trigger. 33. I base aspects of this suggestion on a reconstructed aspect of the logic underlying some of the so-called enemy-psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures. See Janowski, Ein Gott, der straft und tötet?, 200. 34. Thus, a paradigm of forgiveness, such as that offered by Anca Gheaus, exclusively concerned with ‘emotional dialectics’ is too restricted in scope (see her ‘Unconditional Forgiveness’). For a persuasive argument against understanding forgiveness exclusively as

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not in an evil way’ (Mt. 5.39; see also Eph. 4.26)35, and Paul’s words to Christian believers warning them ‘not to repay anyone evil for evil; … do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ (Rom. 12.17, 21).36 A relationship can be healed only when both victim and victimizer are recognized as more than a subject/ object of abuse.37 They must bring each other to a ‘place’ where they can become connected anew as true persons despite the (fully legitimate) painful emotions that may well prevail indefinitely.38 This place is not necessarily a shared physical or psychological space. In inter-personal relationships, healing may, in many cases, require the temporary or continued preservation of physical and psychic distance between victim and victimizer.39 Physical and psychic self-limitation may not only benefit the victim who searches for a way to be relationally redefined, but also for the victimizer who in this way is kept away from the temptation to further abuse. As long as the victimizer refuses to seek out this place together with the victim within a space of genuine confession, forgiveness and personal transformation, he

overcoming certain emotions, and for understanding it also as an exercise of will (Suchocki, The Fall to Violence, 145ff.), forgiveness thus understood counteracts the emotional merging of the victim and the abuser in the victim’s psyche that perpetuates the violence. 35. Arguments for this particular translation of the expression ‘me antistenai to ponero’ can be found in Neufeld, Killing Enmity, 25. 36. I am not promoting pacifism here. We live in a world where non-violent resistance often fails, no matter how creative it is. Not all people are open for reconciliation, but intensify their abuse until they achieve the sought-after domination (see Mt. 18.28-30). In such cases, the exercise of enemy-love cannot restrict itself to non-violent strategies, but must exercise their ‘responsibility to protect’ the victims from further abuse, and the perpetrator from succumbing to his/her own destructive impulses. Sometimes we are morally obliged to ‘just policing’ (Gerald Schlabach, ‘Warfare vs. Policing’). As David B. Hart writes,‘the self-adoring inaction of those who would meet the reality of, say, black smoke billowing from the chimney of death camps with songs of protest is simply violence by other means’ (Hart, Beauty, 342). We are required to exercise violence in cases where the refusal to do so would have an increase in violence as its consequence. However, even if pacifism may be sentimental utopianism for human beings, it is not so for a God whose love cannot be overcome. 37. This does not imply that the victim should ignore the victimizer’s responsibility for his/her actions. It only means that the victimizer must be recognized by the victim as something more than an abusive person, which amounts to a recognition of their shared humanity. Griswold, Forgiveness, 57f., 72, 77ff. 38. I emphasize this against those who claim that forgiveness involves the cessation of anger or resentment (e.g. Baumeister, Exline, and Sommer, ‘Dimensions of Forgiveness,’ 85, 88). The presence of these negative emotions does not make forgiveness hollow if the final aim of forgiveness is to let go of them. Griswold, Forgiveness, 42. If we succeed in reaching this goal, the physical, psychological and social benefits are considerably more substantial than in decisional forgiveness. Worthington, A Just Forgiveness, 79. 39. Suchocki, The Fall to Violence, 146, and Noll ‘Trauma,’ 367.

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or she should be left literally alone, that is, not at healing distance but in a state of absence.40 While this may prevent the healing of the relationship, both within the dynamics of forgiveness and in the state of absence, the victimizer has at least lost a significant degree of control over his or her victim(s).41 Furthermore, it should be emphasized that the self-limitation unfolding in the healing resistance of forgiveness is never the act of an isolated individual. Although offering forgiveness always involves the initiative of the victim, for healing to take place, it is of vital importance that the victim redefines him- or herself through his or her commitments to non-victimizing relationships. Offering forgiveness is always a cooperative action insofar as it presupposes the reconstruction of selfhood through relationships that empower the victim to will the well-being of victimizer(s). As Jesus drew on his relationship to the Father when forgiving his victimizers, other victims are enabled to forgive through the power of their (other) relationships. When Jesus commanded his followers to love their enemies (Lk. 6.32f.; Mt. 5.46f.), he was speaking to people who were supported by their communities.42 Offering forgiveness is an expression of a shared craft, that is, our power-with others. But what of those who are not victims in the strict sense, that is, those who are not forced to give up something for the good of others, but freely choose (or accept) to exercise self-limitation or act self-sacrificially? What must be said first is that freedom of choice does not automatically make the choice good. There is always a distinct contextually shaped value-orientation involved that may be controversial. What to an observer may count as (cultural) victimization might, from the perspective of the acting subject, be experienced as a free act of limiting, giving or sacrificing oneself.43 Furthermore, that such courses of

40. Thürmer-Rohr, ‘Frauen,’ 33f. What must be said, however, is that driving victimizers to quickly confess and repent is often counter-productive when they lack the sufficient degree of self-understanding required, merely intensifying their experience of self-loathing. Considerable time spent on therapy, etc. may be required for them to reach the level of psychological maturity needed for a productive confession. See Fiddes, Participating in God, 218. 41. It does not necessarily prevent significant degrees of change in cognition, behaviours, emotions and motivations that facilitates intraindividual healing. Kenneth I. Pargament, Michael E. McCullough and Carl E. Thoresen, ‘The Frontier of Forgiveness: Seven Directions for Psychological Study and Practice’ in Forgiveness: Theory, Research, Practice, ed. Kenneth I. Pargament, Michael E. McCullough and Carl E. Thoresen (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 302. 42. Stephen G. Post, ‘The Inadequacy of Selflessness: God’s Suffering and the Theory of Love,’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 2 (1988): 223. 43. This underlines the necessity of recognizing, but not absolutizing, the perspective of the acting subject in ethical discourse. Like the unaware child saved from an approaching car that we spoke about in Section 4.1, adults might also come to realize that what they first judged to be a violent interference with their personal freedom was actually an act that

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action are freely chosen does not make them good.44 We can always make bad choices. While self-sacrificial (etc.) actions may indeed be carried out also in relationships that are not oppressive, a freely undertaken self-sacrifice (or act of self-limitation) can also be oppressive.45 This happens when it becomes a manipulative show off that is designed to create a bad conscience in the other and so bind him or her to a relationship of mutually destructive dependency. Heaping of coal on the abuser’s head (Lev. 19.18; Rom. 12.20), easily makes the freedom of the one become the unfreedom of the other: the martyr’s misery becomes the bond between them.46 The structure of domination and submission is merely reversed.47 We now arrive at the centre of the problem of self-sacrifice understood as violence: what from the perspective of the acting subject is experienced as an expression of freedom, is from the perspective of the victim a violation of freedom: the freedom of the one presupposes the unfreedom of the other. And if the victim reacts by seeking to overcome the threat of the violent subject experienced as a violation of freedom, the roles are switched. In a relationship, each self is a complex unity of passivity and activity.48 In what follows, I will attempt to develop an ethical paradigm of selfsacrificial love that resolves these tensions. The first step will be to advocate the need to further unravel self-limitation as constitutive of a relational structure in which true love is experienced. In the conceptual scheme developed above, self-limitation was defined as actions that aim to preserve the recognition of the freedom of the other as the source of my freedom, and vice versa. Insofar as it allows for no break in the continuity of personhood, it is a phenomenological constellation that falls under Paul’s category

preserved it. The latter realization is the criterion that this was indeed not an act of violence, yet it is only available in retrospect, and reached through self-critical ethical discourse. See Moser, Opfer, 433f. 44. McIntosh, ‘The Concept of Sacrifice,’ 219, and the analysis of ‘O’’s reasons for allowing herself to be tortured Pyyhtinen, The Gift, 114ff. 45. Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 46, 65. 46. Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 41; Brock, Journeys, 31; Dalferth, ‘Opfer als Glückfall des Lebens’ 133; and Griswold, Forgiveness, 53f. In these cases, love is in fact the willingness to break a bond, as Rebecca Parker herself experienced (Brock and Parker, Proverbs of Ashes, 104ff., 95ff.). 47. Anna Mercedes thinks that there is a healthy masochism that avoids this danger. According to her, the empowering element in masochism is located in ‘the way in which the bottom gets so good at being bottom so as to slip into more of a top’ (Mercedes, Power for, 97). Insofar as it makes the top bottom and the bottom top, it is just a reversal of the domination–submission structure. In this logic of empowering self-mutilation (regardless of how pleasurable it may be), the more abused someone allows herself to be, the more powerful she becomes vis-à-vis the abuser. As such it does not offer an impulse towards mutuality. 48. Moser, Opfer, 425f. See also van Nistelrooij, Self-sacrifice, 89.

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of ‘living sacrifice’ (Rom. 12.1).49 In a living sacrifice, a human being expresses his or her freedom to limit him- or herself in order to preserve the freedom of others, and in so doing also preserves the freedom of oneself. Paul Ricoeur identifies this relational dynamic as the heart of the Christian ethical vision: The ethical function of the gospel seems to me to be to restore the intending of the other person. It is the whole morality of the love of neighbor, an expression that signifies that the fundamental motivation of ethics is to make your freedom advance as mine does. The ethical process is unceasingly reborn from its origin in the mutuality of freedom.50

On a similar note, Hegel stated in his Phenomenology of Spirit that ‘to know one’s limit, is to know how to sacrifice oneself ’.51 As noted in Section 5.1, without selflimitation true otherness cannot arise among social beings. The appearance of otherness requires that the subject responds to the call of the other by integrating his or her own limit within him- or herself. Only where this is the case will a human being be able to transcend him- or herself in the direction of the other, and vice versa. By preserving the other as other, I become myself, and the other is affirmed in its freedom, that is, as a distinct source of agency that calls me to responsibility.52 Mutual self-limitation produces the freedom without which a good and living relationship between persons would not be possible.53 To recognize that limits are part of who I am enables me to participate in a societal ‘we’.54 Understood as self-limitation, a living sacrifice is the opposite of sin. Sin is not a necessary expression of human finitude, but an expression of the freedom of the finite insofar as a finite being may choose to refuse to accept its limitations vis-a-vis other finite beings (either as self-destruction or as uninhibited selfassertion), and ultimately in relation to the infinite order of Being itself. It is by accepting their limitations that human beings will regain a sustained relationship to human and divine others. It is only the person who is capable of self-limitation

49. Hans Weder, ‘Lebendiges Opfer,’ in Opfer: Verschenktes Leben, ed. Hans-Jürgen Luibl and Sabine Scheuter (Zürich: Pano Verlag, 2001), 138. 50. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Problem of the Foundation of Moral Philosophy,’ Philosophy Today 22, no. 3 (1978): 190. 51. Hegel, Phenomenology, 492. 52. Hegel, LPR 3, 292, and Philosophy of Mind, 176f. 53. This claim also has empirical support. Among couples, there is, for instance, a positive correlation between mutual self-limitation, the experience of commitment, marital adjustment and a lesser degree of perceived harmfulness of self-limitation for oneself. Scott M. Stanley et al., ‘Sacrifice as a Predictor of Marital Outcomes,’ Family Process 45, no. 3 (2006), and Sarah W. Whitton, Scott M. Stanley and Howard J. Markman, ‘If I Help my Partner will it Hurt me?: Perceptions of Sacrifice in Romantic Relationships,’ Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 26, no. 1 (2007). 54. On this, see also Weir, Sacrificial Logics, 71, 84ff., 132.

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vis-à-vis the other that can remain fundamentally open to the other, and it is only the person who is fundamentally open to the other that remains capable of limiting him- or herself. Self-limitation is no longer experienced as a restriction (violence) in a relationship characterized as living. A transformation of values has taken place. Because I receive myself from the other what I considered a loss (i.e. my/other people’s unrestricted exercise of freedom) becomes a gain (Phil, 3.7f.). The one who through the eyes of an observer appears as completely passive (i.e. a victim), may actually express a profound commitment to a particular good that the observer does not see, or does not recognize as constitutive of his or her selfrealization. When Paul speaks of serving ‘in the new way of the Spirit’ (Rom. 7.6; see also 2 Cor. 3.6), service is metaphorically transformed into an expression of freedom (Gal. 4.6f.; Rom. 8.15; 2 Cor. 3.17b).55 Service (not servitude or servility!) is the exercise of power for and from others.56 Again, the source, sustenance and flourishing of just relationships arises when each person acknowledges his or her responsibility for preserving the freedom of others. Only where the mutuality of freedom is preserved is God the source and sustainer of ‘the love through which we love each other’.57 A closer consideration of Rom. 12.1f. offers an impulse to further explicate the biblical material undergirding my reconstruction of self-limitation as integral to self-sacrificial love as an ethical ideal: Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Italics are mine)

Paul here employs a semantic of sacrifice to make two interrelated points. He wants his readers to understand that self-destructive violence cannot be an ideal of Christian living. The Christian sacrifice is not destructive, but alive. To sacrifice oneself means to live one’s whole life dedicated to the actualization of God’s will which is to overcome evil by doing good (vv. 9, 17, 21). Christians are to live a consecrated life. They are not to destroy themselves, but let the relational structure of their lives be transformed by the true spiritus vitalis: ‘The mind governed by

55. See Pannenberg, Jesus, 177. See also Mercedes, ‘Who are You?’. 56. Susan Nelson Dunfee, Beyond Servanthood: Christianity and the Liberation of Women (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989), 123, and Jacquelyn Grant, ‘The Sin of Servanthood: And the Deliverance of Discipleship,’ in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (New York: Orbis Books, 1993), 209. 57. Welz, ‘Love as Gift and Self-Sacrifice,’ 262. She draws on Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 107, 142.

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the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.’ (Rom. 8. 6) Life is not released into the world by bloodshed, but by the consecrating power of the Holy Spirit (v.11). Divine love is not actualized through victimization or self-destruction, but in a specific way of living with, for and from others. Similarly, when the author of Eph. 5.2 admonishes Christians to love in the manner of Christ as he gave himself up to God for our sake, he is not glorifying the martyr’s death. As he unfolds the meaning of this utterance in the context of how a man should relate to his wife and vice versa (vv. 25–33), he speaks of self-sacrifice as a manner of living in which both self and spouse give themselves to the other. Although Paul construes this relationship as asymmetrical in a way in which is no longer ethically tenable, he also affirms the actualization of love as internally connected to the realization of a good life for all creation (Gal. 3.28). The primary focus of both texts is not on the vices this form of life forgoes but on what one cannot forgo, namely universal love. As emphasized in a previous section, the connection between love and the actualization of good life has its source in the structure of Triune divine life. Ecclesiologically, ‘the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes the church as a “community free of dominion”. The Trinitarian principle replaces the principle of power by the principle of concord. Authority and obedience are replaced by dialogue, consensus and harmony’.58 This statement by Moltmann is true insofar as the Triune life of Father, Son and Spirit is constituted by the eternal mutuality of love where each experience of love has its source in the love of the other: each divine person is made capable of loving the other(s) by allowing the other(s) to love oneself (as another). Triune love is life-sustaining in an absolute sense because it radically includes both self and other. In other words, life and love flow from a Triune relationship where all live with, for and from each other. From this reality comes the call of Jesus admonishing human beings to love God and to love our neighbours as we love ourselves (see also Phil. 2.4). Also in human relationships, self-fulfilling love and other-fulfilling love cannot exclude one another, but mutually condition each other. However, this must not be understood as transactional love, that is, a love unfolding as a conditional reciprocal exchange of goods. The Triune persons do not love the other in order to be loved (do-ut-des), or love because one is obliged to return the love that was first given by the other (do-quia-dedisti). Rather as the one opens itself to the love of the other, it experiences itself as capable of loving in freedom. True love is self-oriented in a relationship where the exclusive aim of both relators is the loving relationship itself. If we follow the structure of Triune love, what must be said is that self-limitation or self-sacrifices can only be lifesustaining for both me and my neighbour in a situation of mutuality.59 The capacity to love oneself has its source in other persons’ capacity to love us, and vice versa. In

58. Moltmann, The Trinity, 202. 59. Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self,’ 75ff. See also Andolsen, ‘Agape,’ 73ff. who echoes Martin Cyril D’Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn: A Study in Eros and Agape, Rev. ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 275.

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other words, I cannot live well for others if I do not also live well from them, and others cannot live well for me if they do not also live well from me. Following the structure of the Triune self-revelation in Christ, the moral vision of the greatest commandment presupposes that everyone invests their own most resources for the well-being of everyone if divine love is to be actualized in the world. Only thus can self-limitation or self-sacrifice result in abundant life for everyone. Now, the problem with this Trinitarian moral vision is that it seems utterly utopian. When Wolfgang Palaver writes that Jesus’s call to neighbourly love consist in imitating ‘the creator love that in the beginning created the world out of nothing’, and Carter Heyward speaks of God as a specific mode of human relationality, one must ask if these are real possibilities for finite creatures.60 While Paul indeed exhorts the Christians of Philippi to have the same love as Christ (Phil. 2.1ff.), the self-emptying subject of Phil. 2.6ff. is not a powerless one, but a person who is equal to God. Whereas God, in the creative power generated by the mutuality of the Triune relationships, can love God’s enemies without giving Godself up, humanity, insofar as it cannot unfold itself as an eternal dynamic of complete mutuality, does not have life in itself and will therefore risk losing themselves when attempting to preserve the freedom of others. To love like the Triune God is to move far beyond the limits of human nature (even human communities). Human beings alive now do not live in the times of Abraham and Lot, where a conflict concerning land – the basis of their continuing existence – could be solved simply by one of them leaving for other pastures (Gen. 13.5ff.). In a world where love is a limited good, and remains highly preferential, it is hard to maintain the kind of mutuality that secures a good life for all living beings. Christ’s ideal of ‘pro-existence’ implies loving those who reciprocate with hate. And even though it may be said to happen ‘out of divine plenitude’,61 it involves the risk of dying away from this world. Sometimes love requires us to give up our earthly mode of existence. In these cases, we should only resist sacrificing ourselves if a refusal to

60. Wolfgang Palaver, ‘Globalisierung und Opfer: Carl Schmitts Lehre vom Nomos,’ in Das Opfer: Aktuelle Kontroversen, ed. Bernhard Dieckmann (Münster: LIT, 2001), 199, and Heyward, The Redemption of God, 2f., 6, 40ff., 129. See also Sölle, Suffering, 92, 149. Heyward is admittedly ambiguous on this point. While she refuses to ascribe personhood to God, preferring to call God ‘a transpersonal power’, describing it as the specific quality of the human capacity to create and nurture mutual relationships, she is adamant that ‘God is not only our immediate power in relation, but is also our immediate re-source of power; that from which we draw our power to realize actively who we are in relation. It is to this God that we pray. It is this resourceful God “whom” we “love” and “who” we may believe, “loves” us – our Mother or sister or Brother or Father or Friend’ (Heyward, The Redemption of God, 6). The power of mutuality is ‘at once human and divine’ (ibid., 66). For a more radical moral theology of pure immanence, see Welch, Risk, 173, 77ff. 61. Bo Kristian Holm, ‘Justification and Reciprocity: “Purified Gift-Exchange” in Luther and Milbank,’ in Word – Gift – Being: Justification – Economy – Ontology, ed. Bo Kristian Holm and Peter Widmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 110.

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do so would lead to an increase in violence.62 Does this mean that it is impossible to fully actualize the commandment to love both self and other within a realm of being that is merely finite? We are seemingly caught in a double paradox: on the one hand, securing a good life for everyone through violence, and on the other, accepting the destruction of one’s own life out of an absolute respect for life.63 To resolve this paradox, could we not simply postpone the fulfilment of our human self-other relationships until the afterlife: even if I sacrifice myself now for the well-being of others, will my living relationships continue beyond natural death? John Milbank, and more recently Julia Meszaros, have proposed this as one of the criteria that makes self-sacrifice ethically justifiable.64 When the seven Maccabaean brothers decided not to meet violence with counter-violence, they did so because of their faith in the resurrection from the dead, that is, from their faith in God as the creator and sustainer of their lives (2 Macc. 7). But does not this solution presuppose a negative view of creation: in order to actualize true love, my life in this world must be forfeited. Not necessarily. First of all, we would not strive to preserve others in this world if such a life was not equally good as (or better than) fulfilling love beyond our natural deaths. Self-sacrifice consists in the temporary loss of something good, not in the negation of something bad. But if a choice had to be made, should I not prefer to present the greater gift to my neighbour – a life without tears or pain – and the lesser one to myself: a continued existence in a world of both good and evil? If loss of something good is the very nature of self-sacrifice, and ultimate self-sacrifice would be the forfeiture of an ultimate good, then the forfeiture of eternal life would be the ultimate selfsacrifice of Christ and Christian believers. Following a similar line of reasoning, Emmanuel Levinas concludes that a truly self-sacrificial act consists in accepting death in the ‘generosity of sacrifice outside the known and unknown, without the calculation for going on to infinity’.65 The ultimate self-sacrifice is self-annihilation for the sake of others, or perhaps better: self-annihilation for others is ultimate self-actualization. In other words, only the secular person can truly sacrifice himor herself.66 While morally justifiable within the framework of a secular ethics,

62. Richard Schenk, ‘Opfer und Opferkritik aus der Sicht römisch-katholischer Theologie,’ in Zur Theorie des Opfers, ed. Richard Schenk (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 195. See also John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 4. 63. The latter is the practical contradiction of pacifism. See Jan Narveson, ‘Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis,’ Ethics 75, no. 4 (1965): 268f. 64. Milbank, ‘The Midwinter Sacrifice,’ 117, 122, and Meszaros, ‘Sacrifice and the Self,’ 69, 76ff. 65. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Enigma and Phenomenon,’ in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 76. See also Totality and Infinity, 305; Emmanuel Lévinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 73f.; Entre Nous, 217, 228; and Sölle, Suffering, 138f. 66. See Milbank, ‘The Midwinter Sacrifice,’ 111, 122.

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from a theological perspective such an alternative does not identify the greatest good: an everlasting good life for both me and my neighbour.67 Ultimately this requires the notion of a power of life that is able to connect finite beings without having to give itself up. Thus, in contradistinction to the former two relational spaces, I am arguing, with Milbank and Meszaros, that sacrificial love adequately determines some inter-personal courses of actions as expression of an ultimate good, but only on the presupposition that human flourishing transcends natural death. While valuable qualities distinct to our token relationships in this world may be temporarily lost coram mundo/hominibus, they are never lost coram deo. When loving our enemies, we may be ‘struck down, but not destroyed’ (2 Cor. 4.9b; see also Lk. 9.24; Jn. 12.32; 1 Cor. 15.22; Rev. 21,5). Self-sacrificial love brings to expression that, ultimately, pain and loss cannot separate us from a world that unfolds in God. Self-sacrificial love is the experience of loss within a world created, sustained and nourished in and by God. It reveals the sacred character of finite life itself, that is, that it unfolds within the power that unites everyone in difference without opposition. Thus, from the perspective of Christian faith, enemy-love does not risk non-being because God does not abandon any human being (Mt. 18.10–14), but invites us to a feast in which ‘we eat only because and when others eat, and yet we do not renounce ourselves, for we eat also’.68 Participation in this feast is not what motivates a self-sacrificial action, but is the result of a gift of self, a gift beyond calculation, made in God. This conclusion is only tenable if God’s love is not reduced to a mode of human love, but understood as its eternal source and sustainer.69 Still, ‘what happens after death – no matter how welcome – does not make present evil good’.70 Suffering a violent death is evil, even if less so when caught in the fall into nothingness by the arms of God. What is important to recall is my constant emphasis on the fact that that self-sacrifice involves a distinct valueorientation.71 How can self-sacrifice be carried out joyfully by a mind at peace if an experience of personal loss is considered a central characteristic of sacrificial acts (see Phil. 2.17f.)? Self-sacrifices follow from convictions of what it means to follow a life-fulfilling path. They involve a double focus on the values that are given up (my life in this world) for the sake of other higher values (e.g. the preservation of the freedom of both self and other). It is the positive ethical vision of the latter that makes the experiences of loss bearable: it knows that it cannot ultimately defeat the power of life and love. It was such a vision that motivated civil rights activists

67. It should also be noted that the many others whom we love, will come to love us, and would be deeply hurt if we come to harm, or let ourselves be harmed. 68. Milbank, ‘The Midwinter Sacrifice,’ 117. 69. Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 177f. 70. Grace Jantzen, ‘Do We Need Immortality?’ Modern Theology, no. 1 (1984): 40. See also Sölle, Suffering, 149. 71. Sidney Axinn, Sacrifice and Value: A Kantian Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).

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such as Martin Luther King and Fanny Lou Hamer, or Carlos Alberto’s and Ivan Bettencourt’s fight against exploitation of the poor. This does not mean that their sufferings and violent deaths as such had any redemptive value. The significance of their lives is exclusively found in the supreme values that they actualized. What these supreme values are may of course be a matter of contention. It is only those which can be properly justified that make their actions self-sacrificial rather than self-destructive. Properly justified are not those that lead into relational surplus because of loss, but that does so despite loss. From this perspective, we are better equipped to understand the suffering undoubtedly envisioned in the biblical literature as sometimes connected to the path of the Christian. A consideration of 1 Pet. 2 offers a good point of departure for answering this question. In it the author offers a vivid description of the risk of living fully dedicated to God’s will. V. 5 reads: ‘As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him – you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’ The author here makes a similar point as Eph. 5.2: the Christian believer is to live a consecrated life, that is, a life fully dedicated to call forth the glorification of God (v. 11) by living a good life among pagans. Yet a close look at 1 Pet. 2.18–21 leaves no doubt that unjust suffering was a possible consequence of embarking on such a mission (see also Jn. 15.12f.; 1 Jn. 3.14–16; Eph. 5.2, 25). It reads: Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.

Here suffering as such is not put forward as an ethical ideal. It is explicitly an unjust consequence of doing good (see also Mt. 5.10). To follow in the footsteps of Christ means to love despite suffering. Even when the letter to Ephesians portrays the Christian way of life as that of a sacrificial offering, the focus falls not on what is given up (vices), but what one stays true to, namely the virtues of kindness, compassion, forgiveness, (Eph. 4.31–5.2) that reflects the character of Godself (v. 2). Living with Christ in our suffering means living in and through the love of Christ, because the suffering that is truly Christian is a consequence of the unconditional refusal to give up on universal love. Yet, living with the love of Christ does not necessarily require suffering, as for instance Luther taught.72

72. Luther, ‘Sermon on Cross and Suffering,’ 206, 208. This implies a decisive break with the logic of imitation. We should not be ‘like’ Jesus, but with Jesus (Kathryn Kleinhans, ‘Christ as Bride/Groom: A Lutheran Feminist Relational Christology,’ in Transformative

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Suffering may only be a contingent consequence of living out the love of Christ in a finite world. As Salvatore Natoli notes, ‘The high-point of neighbor love … is not to suffer with others, but to enjoy the joy of others.’73 Does this mean that we should, as Karen Baker-Fletcher argues, adopt an ethics of risk instead of an ethics of self-sacrifice that makes acceptance of violence into an ethical ideal?74 While the latter is of course deeply problematic, risk is not something we may choose. Being social means living in a world where suffering is shared. It involves vulnerability to the needs, desires and actions of others, and the uncertainty that comes with the contingency of social relationships. Vulnerability is constitutive of the love through which we truly love one another.75 Various kinds of suffering are part of any good life with, for and from others in just institutions. In other words, the needs of others are a vision that is constitutive of our moral agency. Ethically justified self-sacrifices arise out of the recognition of this fact.76 The line of reasoning suggested so far makes sense of the ideal put forward by Jesus to take up one’s cross (Mk. 8.34, par.), and the call to become less in order for the other to become greater (Jn. 3.30). Taking this path is good only if the relationship between self and other is here not that of an inverse proportionality so that salvation means the dissolution of oneself in the other in the manner of the mystics. The relationship must rather be understood as one of direct proportionality: as I become less, I become greater. This sounds like a paradox. It is not. Rather what is considered a loss within one framework of values is considered a gain within a different one. Or better, to take up one’s cross is to empty one’s past of victimization and/or self-destruction ‘into the ocean of relational life, from which one perpetually receives oneself back again’.77 For Luther, suffering without selfregard did not diminish the true selfhood of the Christian believer. It anchored the self outside itself in Christ and thus gave her access to the superabundant riches of God through which she receives herself back when giving herself up (Lk. 9.24).78

Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 126f.). As Kierkegaard insisted (see above), I do not love the other if I want the other to imitate me, to become like me. We should not become like Christ, but relate to Christ in a way that transforms our relational modality into that of true love. 73. Salvatore Natoli quoted by Sergio Manghi, ‘Niemand Ausgeschlossen: Die Sorge um den Nächsten, Sozialleistungen und Demokratie,’ in Das Opfer: Aktuelle Kontroversen, ed. Bernhard Dieckmann (Münster: LIT, 2001), 237. Author’s translation. 74. Karen Baker-Fletcher and Garth Baker-Fletcher, My Sister, My Brother: Womanist and Xodus God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 79f., and Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 42ff. 75. Brümmer, Atonement, 30. 76. Groenhout, ‘Kenosis,’ 309. 77. Keller, ‘Feminism, Self-Sacrifice, and Time,’ 214. 78. Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian,’ 365ff. This point was also made with emphasis in the influential and much-debated book by Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans.

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Insofar as oneself is among the others (or neighbours) whom God loves, giving oneself to God also means accepting that God loves me.79 It is because of this that the burden is described as light, and as a mark of one’s dignity. But while Jesus is indeed saying that salvation of the self happens in and through the other (Mk. 8.35), the other is not a passive, yet necessary, instrument of self-actualization. Christian love is not that of loving others in order to become greater than them. Rather in loving others for the affirmation of his or her intrinsic value, that is, their dignity as persons, I receive myself, because relating means receiving in giving and giving in receiving. Love is neither a preferential option for others nor for myself. It is a preferential option for the good relationship between self and others. In other words, the good life consists in living well as another with, for and from other persons. The universal union of persons living well with, for and from each other is the meaning of Christian fellowship. Again, we are reminded that Christian sanctification does not involve the destruction of the self, but rather the transformation (consecration) of its relational life achieved in and through a divine mutuality that is, ultimately, truly fulfilling. To sum up, in contradistinction to the former two relational spaces I have been arguing that the notion of sacrificial love coherently determines some inter-personal/-human courses of actions as ultimate goods, but only on the presupposition that human living transcends natural death. While fundamentally valuable qualities of our token relationships may be temporarily lost coram mundo/hominibus, they are never lost coram deo. This does not mean that self-sacrificial love is a refusal of human finitude, but the affirmation of finitude as always unfolding within the relational dynamic of divine life.

Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 210, and more recently by Risto Saarinen, ‘Im Überschuss: Zur Theologie des Gebens,’ in Word – Gift – Being: Justification – Economy – Ontology, ed. Bo Kristian Holm and Peter Widmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 82. 79. On this point in Kierkegaard, see the fine analysis of Dalferth, Selbstlose Leidenschaften, 194.

Chapter 12 THE MONOTONY OF SACRIFICE – NO END IN VIEW?

According to Hartmut Raguse, ‘In the kingdom of God, whether understood as the chiliastic kingdom of this world or the kingdom of final completion, there is no sacrifice.’1 I formulated three different interpretations of such visions of nonsacrificial existence above: Was Jesus the last and consummate cultic sacrifice, did he replace the cultic sacrificial institution with a different, or even non-cultic, framework of sacrificial practices, or was he the end of sacrifice as such because in him we come to see that semantics of sacrifice misconstrue the relational dynamic which brings human and divine life to its fulfilment? The argument developed in this book has followed the third path when it comes to understanding God’s relationship to humanity, and humanity’s relationship to God respectively. While the notion of sacrificial love served as my heuristic point of departure, and as such had a hermeneutic-criteriological function, my systematic unfolding of it has attempted to show that there are several reasons why it should be left behind. The case was different when I moved on to critically develop a moral vision of the way in which human beings ought to relate to one another within the finite relational spaces generated by divine life. By metaphorization, the semantic field of sacrifice offers several insights of positive significance for a contemporary Christian ethics. In this latter perspective, one must ask: is there really no end to (self-)sacrifice within the created world? To properly answer this question, we must carefully distinguish between the moral struggle to abolish a specific kind of action and the discussion concerning the ontological import of the notion of sacrificial love as an anthropological determination, that is to say whether or not it is possible to conceive of a truly human life within in the present world without some notion of sacrificial love. In what follows, I will argue that human beings (believers and non-believers alike) should engage themselves in the moral struggle to end the need for sacrifice even if the human world as we know it could ever become completely 1. Hartmut Raguse, ‘Opfer als Glückfalls,’ in Opfer: Verschenktes Leben, ed. Hans-Jürgen Luibl and Sabine Scheuter (Zürich: Pano Verlag, 2001), 69. Author’s translation.

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non-sacrificial. I will defend the thesis that the affirmation of sacrifice as an anthropological determination and the negation of (self-)sacrifice as an ethical ideal are co-determinative aspects of what it means to live as human beings in a world created by a God who is love. First, why do we need the notion of sacrifice as an anthropological determination, and in what sense do we need it? Günter Bader arrives at the crucial distinction between sacrifice as an anthropological and a moral category by evoking the interpretative power of a genealogy of sacrificial symbols. He identifies two disjunctive understandings of ‘sacrifice’, corresponding to the fundamental difference between, on the one hand the Protestant traditions, and the Catholic tradition on the other.2 First, sacrifice can be construed as a particular kind of action. The reformers Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin follow this line of thought, understanding sacrifice either as a meritorious kind of action or as sacrifice of thanksgiving. Christian life consists in eliminating the former from the structure of its praxis, living only according to the latter. Alternatively, we could follow the etymologically oriented argument of Walter Burkert in understanding human action, as such, as sacrifice. Even if the physical violence of the primordial praxis of sacrifice has been continuously transformed through symbolic and metaphorical processes, violence as such cannot be extinguished.3 Bader elaborated and radicalized this latter perspective claiming that every process of communication is sacrificial in the sense that when something is said something is always excluded. Sacrifice is thus an immanent dimension of each and every finite (discursive) choice. This means that Christians who continue to proclaim the end of sacrifice in order to establish a counter-world to the ‘old’ world built on the foundations of sacrifice do so within the order of a world that is also old. The linguistic possibility of such counter-worlds is found in the structure of metaphorical discourse. Attempts to construct non-sacrificial theologies are always developed in contrast to sacrificial theologies, that is, by articulating what they are not. Thus, non-sacrificial theologies actually contribute to positively determine sacrificial theologies. A theology of sacrifice is thus always integral to a theological critique of sacrifice.4 In the most basic sense that all meanings in historical languages are related in a network of mutually determinative opposition, there is no end in

2. On this and the following, see Günter Bader, ‘Die Ambiguität des Opferbegriffs,’ Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 36 (1994). 3. Against Lévinas who claimed that ‘an exteriority without violence is the exteriority of discourse’ (Lévinas, Entre Nous, 22.) Italics in the original. 4. While Ruben Zimmermann is right in claiming that both a theology of sacrifice and a theological critique of sacrifice are found in the NT literature (Zimmermann, ‘Opfertheologie und Opferkritik’, he does not explicate the necessary internal connection between them. It cannot be otherwise. On this see Derrida, Acts of Religion, 217, de Vries, Religion and Violence, 205, and Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55.

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view for theologies of sacrifice.5 Even those not using vocabularies of semantics are silent in relation to the semantics of sacrifice already manifest in language. Furthermore, insofar as every instance of language-use creates and sustains in-groups (the likeminded) and out-groups (the dissenters), it is sacrificial.6 In such a metaphysics of communication, ‘rules the monotony of sacrifice without end’.7 Sacrifice becomes an ontological dimension of human (communicative) existence. With these insights, Bader touches on the anthropological deep-structure of the problem of sacrifice, namely finitude. He echoes the claim made by Paul Tillich that ‘finitude demands the sacrifice of potentialities which can be actualized only by the sum of all individuals’.8 An anthropologically oriented theory of perpetual sacrifice is also found in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, there in the form of a metaphysics of modern subjectivity. In their Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno described the civilized rationality’s ‘dominative renunciation’ of itself as nature in the following manner: ‘Though its irrationality makes the principle of sacrifice transient, it persists by virtue of its rationality, which has been transformed but not disappeared. … The transformation of sacrifice into subjectivity occurs under the sign of the artifice that was already a feature of sacrifice.’9 The paradox is this: in order to preserve oneself, civilized rationality renounces that which it is supposed to preserve, namely the human being as living organism. Peculiar as it is, the cure for sacrifice prescribed by human rationality is the sacrifice of oneself. Is there escape from sacrifice only for those who sacrifice themselves? This paradox is similar to the problem of Hebrews in which the end of sacrifice is understood to be achievable only through the sacrifice of sacrifice. As noted in Section 3.1, in Faith and Knowledge Jacques Derrida captures well the peculiar character of this imploding paradox.10 While Jesus, on the one hand, displays an ‘absolute respect for life’ by abstaining from violence he is, on the other hand, required to display a ‘universal willingness to sacrifice’. According to Derrida, the

5. On this see also Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), 89, and Writing and Difference, 145f., 162. 6. While Daphne Hampson thinks this is a particular characteristic of monotheism (Hampson, After Christianity, 126), I would argue that it is equally true of feminism, insofar as it is taken as normative (true). 7. Bader, ‘Die Ambiguität des Opferbegriffs,’ 72. 8. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (London: SCM, 1978), 270. See further, Philipp Stoellger, ‘Ende des Opfers und Opfer ohne Ende: Neuere systematisch-theologische und religionsphilosophische Perspektive zum “Opfer,”’ Verkündigung und Forschung 56, no. 1 (2011): 64ff. 9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979), 53f., 56. 10. See Derrida ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ 50ff. See also de Vries, Religion and Violence, 204ff., Nancy, A Finite Thinking, 54ff., and Dalferth, ‘Self-Sacrifice,’ 78f.

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paradoxical notion that life must be violated to retain the inviolability of life is a characteristic trait of religion. As the later Girard came to recognize: for sacrifice to be abolished a (self-dissolving) sacrifice is needed.11 These different entry-points make the same basic claim: because of its finite character human existence is inherently sacrificial. Insofar as human finitude comes to expression in the fact that all human life takes place as a spatiotemporal realm of fragile interdependency, I can only endorse Sigrid Brandt’s succinct claim: Human reality is a reality of sacrifice, just as all life is in a sense sacrificial life. … All life lives in certain respects from, through, and for other life. This insight stands in my opinion – in a highly direct or even a very marginal way – behind the many-faceted notions of sacrifice and behind the many-faceted talk about sacrifice. That life is due in many respects to other lives, as well as vice versa, is a basic condition of human life.12

Yet an affirmation of the monotony of sacrifice is not the final word. The end of sacrifice comes into view precisely in the experience of finitude. The anthropological deep-structure of sacrifice manifests itself in the experience of the world as created. From this recognition, an ethical vision arises. Both in the form of an anthropology of sacrifice and as a structural semantic of sacrifice can Christian theology retain the end of sacrifice as a regulative idea, that is, an idea that enables us to determine the fulfilling relation between the finite and infinite dimension of Being as love. How? While finite love not actualized in and through divine love fulfils itself as unity through difference, a love that is truly infinite comes to expression as unity-in-difference.13 The relational dynamics of the Triune God are not one that represses difference (except of course the principle that does not allow for any differences), but rather includes and facilitates it. Pseudo-Dionysius says: We, in the diversity of what we are, are drawn together by it and are led into a godlike oneness, into a unity reflecting God. … He brings everything together

11. For an analysis of common structures in Derrida and Girard, see Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 12. Brandt, Opfer als Gedächtnis, 354. Author’s translation. Italics in the original. See also Gunton, ‘The Sacrifice and the Sacrifices,’ and Hans-Martin Gutmann, Die tödlichen Spiele der Erwachsenen: Moderne Opfermythen in Religion, Politik und Kultur (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1995), 62. 13. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 446f., and Jesus, 179. See also Ratzinger, ‘The Theology of the Liturgy,’ in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, trans. Margareth McHugh and John Parsons, ed. by Alcuin Reid (Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), 25f.

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into a unity without confusion, into an undivided communion where each thing continues to exhibit its own specific form and is in no way adulterated through association with its opposite, nor is anything of the unifying precision and purity dulled.14

The love of the Triune God infinitely transcends everything not because it is external to the finite realm, but in that it, unlike any finite being, gathers everything within itself without annihilating differences. The relational dynamic of unity and difference should not be understood, as Wendy Farley suggests, as countermovements in an ideal balance.15 Rather the relation is directly proportional: ‘That … increasing differentiation (and above all increasing consciousness of such differentiation) is a condition for increasingly intensive community and unity, holds true of all personal community.’16 As Triune love is constituted as a love that includes the genuinely other within itself, the consummation of both true divine and true human love does not result in the abolishment of finitude, but in the affirmation of finitude as such, that is, in passionately letting finitude be what (not as!) it is.17 The possibility and the limits of sacrifice are both determined in the way the human being is constituted as a finite being, namely through the recognition of God as the source and limit of oneself. Divine love is not an identity constituted of difference, but a unity of the different living freely with, from and for each other. This unity reflecting God is a unity in difference because ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.18). With his concept of the ‘true infinite’, Hegel attempted to elaborate this perspective in an interesting manner.18 Traditionally the infinite was understood as the negation of the finite. Insofar as the finite was understood as that which is defined by relation to something else, the infinite was that which was not so defined, but defined only in relation to itself. The definition becomes selfcontradictory because the infinite is defined precisely in relation to the finite. The only way to solve this problem would be if the infinite was able not to negate, but to integrate finitude within itself. Aside from the fundamental problem noted above connected to the structure of his dialectical logic, the limitation of Hegel’s notion is that it remains unclear how this process of integration unfolds. Hegel was right that the infinite and the finite orders are both fulfilled in and through the preservation of the other, and that this cannot be coherently thought about

14. Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘Divine Names,’ in Pseudo-Dyonisius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 51, 122. See also ibid., 61. 15. Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, 132. Moreover, unity is not the opposite of difference, identity is. While unity presupposes difference, identity does not. 16. Pannenberg, Jesus, 348. 17. Michael Welker, ‘Romantic Love, Covenantal Love, Kenotic Love,’ in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 134. 18. Hegel, LPR 3, 279f. See also Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 400, Human Freedom, 168, and Metaphysics, 36.

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if we construe God as being part of the whole, as for instance Daphne Hampson suggests.19 It can only be actualized in and through a dimension of reality which is not part of the finite world, determinable only in opposition to other parts, a dimension that transcends the finite order. But Hegel’s dialectical construal of the true infinite fails in this respect because it remains unclear how the true infinite can arise out of the dialectical opposition between finite moments that are purely immanent.20 As I have been arguing above, the Triune self-revelation of God in Christ revealed how the finite can be taken up into Godself so that the opposition between God and humanity is (non-dialectically) transformed, that is, a dimension of reality comes to expression capable of mutual integration and participatory belonging (Zech. 14.21; 1 Thess. 4.7f.; 2 Thess. 2.13; 1 Pet. 1.2; Eph. 2.11-21). God cannot be thought of as a dimension of reality, the transcendence of which consists in standing in opposition to the finite world, but as a transcendence that stands in a direct proportional relation to immanence in the sense that God becomes more transcendent the more immanent God becomes. In other words, God is transcendent because God creates, sustains and fulfils immanent reality as such. No dimension of reality is more transcendent than that which the finite dimension as such and as a whole is dependent upon for its existence and fulfilment.21 Furthermore, the only dimension that can fulfil the relation between the infinite and the finite orders of being is one that can hold unity and genuine difference together without opposition. Above, I attempted to show how God, understood in a specific way as Trinity, is the only mode of Being capable of achieving this. The interactional field that constitutes the Triune God is love in its fullness. In his influential attempt to elaborate on the theological significance of Hegel’s notion of the true infinite Wolfhart Pannenberg’s systematic explication becomes ambiguous at a crucial point. If the fulfilment of creation means that any individual person within universal history is identified in their true relationship to one another, does this mean that historical life comes to an end? Pannenberg’s constant insistence that the meaning of human existence is only manifest from the perspective of the end seems to imply this.22 As is also his endorsement of Augustine’s claim that for God time is present as an

19. Hampson, After Christianity, 9. 20. I am indebted to Lorenz Puntel for reaching this insight through our conversations. For the general problem of dialectics as a process of determination, see Puntel, ‘Begriff der Dialektik.’ 21. ‘Kann es gelingen, innerhalb eines Systems zus Raum und Zeit zu einer Gesamtschau der Dinge zu gelangen?,’ in Kann es gelingen, innerhalb eines Systems aus Raum und Zeit zu einer Gesamtschau der Dinge zu gelangen?, ed. Thomas Busse, Raumzeit-Zeitraum (Neubrandenburg: Rethra, 2005), 328, 39f; Luther, Epistle Sermon, 2; and Puntel, Being and God, 260ff., 296. 22. Pannenberg, Metaphysics, 87f., 109.

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eternal now.23 On the other hand, Pannenberg insists that personal existence presupposes freedom: Human beings are persons by the very fact that they are not wholly and completely existent for us in their reality, but are characterized by freedom, and as a result remain concealed and beyond control in the totality of their existence. A person whose whole being we could survey and whose every moment we could anticipate would thereby cease to be a person for us, and where human beings are falsely taken to be existent beings and treated as such, then their personality is treated with contempt.24

This means that if human personhood is to be fulfilled (and preserved) in God, there always must be a future, that is, temporal difference. Human personhood, constituted as it is by freedom, can never become a fact of past time. If the full determination of each individual person is achieved only through the structure of the Triune unity-in-difference manifest in Christ, it is only achievable through freedom, that is, in a relation that fulfils itself by preserving the otherness of the other. Pannenberg affirms this when rejecting that the resurrection of the dead actualizes ‘a fellowship with the eternal God without subsuming their creaturely identity into the divine being’.25 But if this means that the truly infinite can only be what it is in time, is it then not reduced to the order of the finite? No, not if the truly infinite becomes what it is precisely by being related to the finite (again: direct proportionality) as a whole. The idea of the truly infinite as expressing and preserving personal community as a structure of unity-in-difference cannot be but a regulative idea of temporal existence.26 That God is eternal thus means that infinite temporal life is in God.27 While Hegel Pannenberg is thus right that true infinity is that which is not itself part of something else, he is mistaken in presupposing that this idea necessarily implies that finite reality must come to an end in order to be fulfilled. What distinguishes finite reality from divine reality is not that the former will come to an end while the latter will not, but that finite reality, unlike God, depends upon

23. Augustine, Confessions, 236f.; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 168ff. 24. Pannenberg, Human Freedom, 112. 25. Metaphysics, 65. This goes against the insistence of Augustine who speaks of the destiny of Christians as one of becoming one person in Christ to the point where there will only be ‘one Christ, loving himself ’. Augustine, ‘Homilies on the First Epistle of John,’ in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956). 521. 26. As regulative idea, this notion does not contain the full meaning of history (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 66). It is a minimal notion, nothing but a glimpse of what is to come. 27. Insofar as the true infinite is not a quantitative determination, finite space-time can expand infinitely without expanding beyond God.

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something else for its existence.28 Paul Fiddes writes, ‘When we are dealing with [human] persons, we cannot separate the road from the destination.’29 If this is the case, then finitude is indeed ‘the unsacrificable’, to borrow an expression from Jean-Luc Nancy.30 Eternity is not something which comes after time, but the horizon of time (beyond which it is incoherent to ask what is).31 The notion of eternity must be compatible with the notion of personal existence constitutive of the unity-in-difference which is the destiny of human life, if a truly human (i.e. personal) life there is to be. Only in this sense can eternity be said to be ‘in the human heart’ (Eccl. 3.11). There are those who would deem this moral vision of unity-in-difference without opposition an excellent example of an ethically problematic utopianism. Walter Wink wrote of the sado-masochistic tendency inherent to it: Driven by their ideals they [social reformers] denigrate their own accomplishments as inadequate, as if they should have been able to do more. Or they change the goal just as they are close to realizing it so that they never get to celebrate victories along the way. They burn themselves out trying to live in utopian fashion with all their old socialization intact. … Rather than recognizing that we are all racist or sexist or undemocratic as a result of our social upbringing, and developing ways to assist people gently in the needed transformation, the movement declares that anyone with these attitudes is a traitor or deviant.32

In our perennial attempts to be perfect we lose our humanity. So why not just stay satisfied with the enjoyment of the present?33 First of all, because we need a moral vision of unity-in-difference in order to understand our own finitude as such, that is to say the possibilities and limits of human moral endeavours.34 It tells us that the fulfilment of love ultimately depends on divine self-giving. Secondly, we need it as a critical ‘social imaginary’ that makes it possible to

28. Thus, Paul Tillich was wrong when writing that ‘The main category of finitude is time. Being finite means being temporal’. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951), 82. 29. Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 105. 30. Nancy, A Finite Thinking. See also The Experience of Freedom, 80, and further de Vries, Religion and Violence, 203. 31. Temporal reality is not a limit but a boundary. For an analysis for this Kantian distinction, see Eikrem, Being in Religion, 172f. 32. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 71. 33. For similar reasons, hopes for change were considered dangerous by many twentieth-century thinkers. See Bernard N. Schumacher, ‘Is there still Hope for Hope?,’ in Hope, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 209ff. 34. Paul Tillich ascribes a similar function to the Spirit with regard to sacrifice: it reveals our finitude to us. Tillich, Systematic Theology 3, 270f.

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distinguish between present actions and practices that actualize the human desire to live well with, for and from others in just institutions and those that do not.35 A present problem is what it is because the present does not conform to how we imagine society could, and should, be. As such, the moral ideal of unity-in-difference protects society against enforcing principles that do not allow unity-in-difference to occur, that is, the forces that lead to the destruction of communal living.36 If our finitude means that we are all at all times both victims and victimizers, we lose a morally significant distinction. We are robbed of conceptual means to critique and to conceive of various forms of violence as solvable social problems.37 If everyone is necessarily violent, what makes violence unjust? An inflationary use of the concept so that everything becomes violence could give rise to the illusion that violence is normal, or that nothing is really violence. Such a conceptual strategy can be used to desensitivize us to destructive practices and conceal the fact that various phenomena of violence are placed differently on a moral scale. We need to take heed of Jon Sobrino’s warning of turning ‘the cross into nothing more than a paradigm of the suffering to which all human beings are subject insofar as they are limited human beings’.38 Exaggerated utopianism is counterproductive when seeking to alleviate suffering (or even in assisting someone in their attempt to survive), but so too is passive passion-mysticism. Where love reaches its fulfilment in the acceptance of suffering, as for instance in Abelard, then love becomes ‘the contagion of pain’.39 We must avoid cynically resigning ourselves to the present status quo or legitimize suffering as contributing to intensify the ‘delayed gratification’ of heavenly bliss.40 Having said this, I readily acknowledge that moral resignation is also a danger to those preoccupying themselves with moral ideals. The tension between the grandeur of a moral vision and the current suffering of human beings makes many resign to the status quo. As Hegel once noted, an inflated moral idealism of universal harmony can become the opposite of love if it makes us blind to the needs of 35. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 171ff. I should add that this does not amount to a preference for future generations. A future society can only be better if we concern ourselves with making the world better now. See Thürmer-Rohr, ‘Mittäterschaft der Frau: Analysen zwischen Mitgefühl und Kälte,’ in Mittäterschaft und Entdeckungslust, ed. by Studienschwerpunkt ´Frauen-forschung` am Institut für Sozialpädagogik der TU Berlin (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1989), 91ff., and Heyward, Saving Jesus, 68. 36. In this limited sense, Derrida is right that ‘eschatology is not possible except through violence’ Derrida, Writing and Difference, 162. Italics in the original. 37. See Burgess-Jackson, ‘Violence,’ 996. 38. Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, 373. See also Crysdale, Embracing Travail, 63. 39. Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, 297. 40. Harrison and Heyward, ‘Pain and Pleasure,’ 154. See also Sölle, Thinking about God, 4f.

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the neighbour standing beside us.41 In order to love universally we must love each neighbour in particular.42 Yet, is the idea of the infinite embrace of the finite a utopian ideal strictly speaking, that is, a notion that regulates our thinking (and acting) without human beings necessarily conceiving of it as a historical possibility? Two points must be made in answering this question. First of all, a regulative notion is not to be understood as somehow located in the future. It is a notion that makes us prefer some courses of action to others here and now.43 The alternative cannot be to discard any regulative idea. If I should choose to be unable to make choices, this would just amount to having (implicitly or explicitly) adopted an alternative regulative idea. Secondly, it is of course true that we do not know whether or not the self-sacrifices of any human being will ever be truly redemptive. Hope is based on the indeterminacy of the future. But even if we may know, given the present condition of finite living, that violence as such cannot be entirely extinguished, we cannot know to what degree it can be reduced. Furthermore, human reality is not trapped in its own horizon of possibility. It is also God’s horizon of possibility. Although the future is not strictly foreseeable, we can be radically non-sacrificial in a resisting hope based on the Triunely shaped promise manifest in Christ of the unity in and among the different without opposition. Christian hope is not that of human self-justification. It is the self-justification of true love itself – Triune love. Only Triune love itself is capable of generating an unconditional power for life that remains forever undefeated. For this reason, our present failures (for some even death) need not end in despair. The Christian hope is engendered by the power of Triune love, a power that transforms the opposition of death into that of mutual self-giving, the opposition of the proud into that of trust, and those living in selfdenial into self-affirming human beings. Historical transformation comes about in and through a humanity who lives by the hope that God eternally is the fulfiller of God’s promises. Only in living in and through the protesting hope inherent in such a love are we in a position to announce the end of sacrifice in an actual historical process, that is, in a perpetual ontological ‘must’ of ‘already but not yet’. Within the present order of things, this is the hope that saves us. By preserving the freedom of each and every other, acts of self-limitation, self-sacrifice and self-giving integrate the desire for unity and difference within themselves. They are instances of simultaneous giving and receiving difference. Their active dimension comes to expression as creativity, openness and curiosity. What Nietzsche terms the ‘madness’ of love is a movement transcending the real towards the possible (that may even seem impossible), that is, a resistance

41. Hegel, LPR 3, 118. 42. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 44ff. 43. Derrida speaks of the adoption of a regulative idea and the ‘singular urgency of a here and now’ as if these were possible to temporally separate (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 105. Italics in the original). This cannot be the case because the regulative idea is implicit in every urgency to act in a specific way here and now.

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to status quo grounded in an unquenchable desire for experiencing the fullness of life.44 Hegel writes, ‘This wealth of life love acquires in the exchange of every thought, every variety of inner experience, for it seeks out differences and devises unifications ad infinitum; it turns to the whole manifold of nature in order to drink love out of every life.’45 This positive creative openness to the fullness of life is the hope that dwells within the heart of love – human and divine. The hope constitutive of self-limiting, self-sacrificing and self-giving love is not directed towards the actualization of an external good. To love, and thus also to hope, is the highest good of both self and other. This means that there is an intrinsic relation between hope and these expressions of love: the one cannot be without the other. The content of Christian hope is love itself. Love is not fulfilled in a grand final gratification of (metaphysical) need (i.e. lack). Its fulfilment is the infinite increase of the excess inherent in desire: there is always something more to him, to her, to it, to us.46 From the perspective of finite human living, the only love capable of satisfying sacrificial love is an insatiable love that, although it comes from beyond ourselves, becomes manifest in our attempts to live well with, for and from others in just institutions. The character of the love worthy of praise as truly divine consists in the commitment to love everything (i.e. as God loves). Because it comes to us from God, it is not like ‘morning mist, like early dew that disappears’ (Hos. 6.4b), but truly steadfast (Mt. 12.7; Hos. 6.6) in the trust that one day God will be fully at home among mortals in a world that has been transfigured into a place where ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’ (Rev. 21.4).47 This trust is not escapism.48 It is a hope active in love for every being even when finite love neither stands a calculable chance of immediate nor ultimate fulfilment. By refusing to give in to resignation, it is a way of life that transforms the present. True hope is the creativity of loving resistance in God.

44. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Thomas Common (Auckland, NZ: The Floating Press, 2009), 91. Yet against Nietzsche I would argue that this madness does not necessarily involve contempt for the real. Love does not arise out of recognition of lack (as eros is characterized by Plato (Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 183ff.)), but is simply inherently creative. 45. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 307. 46. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 34, 50, 63, 117, 179, 304, ‘Enigma and Phenomenon,’ 76, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 143, Derrida, Writing and Difference, 115, and further Henriksen, Desire, 36. 47. The rather gloomy predictions of the fate of our universe add intensity to the need of a creative act of God the result of which is a realm for human living qualitatively different from the present one. 48. As for instance Sölle and Lévinas have argued. Sölle, Suffering, 4, and Lévinas, Difficult Freedom, 99ff.

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INDEX Abelard, Peter 24–5, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 70, 74, 75, 85, 228, 255 actualization 1, 12 n.15, 15, 17, 34, 36–8, 41, 45, 51, 80, 81, 92, 95, 99, 101, 104, 105, 107, 111, 115, 127, 129, 130, 135, 137, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148 n.132, 152, 153, 158, 161–4, 165 n.217, 167, 168, 170, 173, 179, 181, 182, 185–9, 192 n.62, 199, 200, 202, 205, 208, 210, 213, 215, 221, 226, 229, 238–41, 243, 249, 252, 253, 255, 257 self 43, 96, 120, 128, 149, 214, 241, 245 Adams, Marilyn McCord 200 Adams, Nicholas 129 n.49 Adorno, Theodor 249 Anderson, Pamela Sue 98 n.9, 176 n.5 Anselm of Canterbury 19–28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41 n.162, 64, 70, 71, 81, 83–5, 99, 109, 112, 114, 163, 211, 228 aporia 100 n.19, 184 Aquinas, Thomas 25–8, 30, 33–7, 64, 85, 109, 135 n.82, 147, 229 n.6 Arens, Edmund 55 n.26 Aristotle 123 n.17 Athanasius 10 nn.2–3, 12 n.15, 29–30 n.107 atonement 19–20, 25, 27, 34, 35, 45, 70, 74, 81, 84, 85, 89–90, 142, 181, 189, 191, 195, 199, 205, 230 penal-substitutionary view on 20 sacrificial 82 n.109, 83, 84 substitutionary 79 vicarious 86 n.127, 163–74 Aulén, Gustaf 20 n.54, 36 n.135 Axt-Piscalar, Christine 209 n.6 Bacon, Hannah 65 n.21, 108 n.52 Bader, Günter 248, 249 Baker-Fletcher, Karen 244 Barth, Gerhard 83 n.109

Barth, Karl 39, 46–7, 84, 85, 88 nn.136, 138, 108 n.52, 109, 127 n.36, 128 n.46, 137, 150–1 n.149, 189, 211,219 Baumeister, Roy F. 232 n.24 Baur, Jörg 30 n.108 Bayer, Oswald 42 n.166, 43 n.167, 121 n.8, 124 n.24, 131 n.58 Beaudin, Michel 19, 25 Beeley, Christopher A. 14 n.25 Bergem, Ragnar Mogård 126 n.31 Bernard of Clairvaux 108 n.52 biblical references 1, 13 n.23, 25, 50, 69, 81, 86 n.127, 87–9, 91, 93, 94, 102, 105–11, 113–15, 125, 129 n.50, 131–47, 151, 156 n.170, 157–8, 160, 161, 164–9, 171–2, 174, 175, 177–83, 185, 187, 189–90, 192–7, 208–10, 212, 215, 216, 218 n.51, 223–30, 233–45, 251, 252, 254, 257 Biviano, Erin Lothes 98 n.10, 104 n.32 blessing 14, 32, 114, 168 n.229, 220 n.64, 223 Blocher, Henri 83 n.109 Boersma, Hans 186 Boff, Leonardo 99, 66 n.25, 108 n.52 Bøhn, Einar Duenger 220 n.60 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 65, 75, 216 Boothe, Brigitte 232 n.24 Bourdieu, Pierre 60 Bourdillon, M. F. C. 3 n.8 Bradley, Ian 108 n.53, 109 n.58, 114 n.85 Brandt, Sigrid 9n 1, 88 nn.136, 138, 101, 166 n.222, 189 n.51, 195, 226 nn.93, 95, 250 Brenz, Johannes 106 Brison, Susan J. 96, 200 n.5, 231 n.21, 233 n.32 Brock, Rita Nakashima 21 nn.58, 60, 36 n.135, 75, 92 n.149, 97 n.6, 114,

296

Index

129 n.50, 131, 147, 162, 216 n.44, 218 n.51, 220 n.64, 236 n.46 Brown, Joanne C. 21 n.62, 70, 74, 76, 77,80, 84, 88, 104, 108, 110, 119, 147, 162 Brudholm, Thomas 232 Brümmer, Vincent 153 n.158, 162 n.203, 171 Bruno, Giordano 147 Bubbio, Paolo Diego 230 n.12 Bühler, Pierre 211 n.13 Bultmann, Rudolph 82 n.109, 87 Burkert, Walter 54, 177, 178, 195, 248 Bushnell, Horace 41, 64, 74, 87 Buswell, J. Oliver 155 n.167 Calvin, John 33, 34 n.125, 111 n.68, 125 n.28, 211, 248 Campbell, J. McLeod 41 n.162 Campbell-Jones, Suzanne 194 n.69 Caputo, John D. 100 n.19, 184 n.32, 185 n.34, 188 n.47 centred self 80, 211–13, 215–16, 220, 222 Christ-event 23, 35, 42, 49, 67 n.32 Christian meal 18, 27–8, 33–5, 138, 144, 182–3, 191–7 chronic embitterment syndrome 232 n.24 Chrysostom, John 18 n.46 Coakley, Sarah 67, 69, 70 n.48, 72, 79, 99, 116, 161 n.196, 214, 215, 221 n.70, 224–5 collective moral anaesthesia 60 Collins, Adela Yarbro 89 n.139 communicatio idiomatum doctrine 30 compassion 6, 22, 39, 64–6, 74–7, 104–8, 109 n.58, 111–13, 119, 173, 180–1, 205, 232 consecration 13, 15, 17, 28, 65, 79, 144, 168, 169, 177–80, 192–4, 196, 197, 238–9, 243, 245 co-operative forgiveness 114 co-operative violence 60 Council of Trent 34 Craig, William Lane 220 n.60 Crell, Johann 38 n.145 Crisp, Oliver 105 n.36, 106 nn.38–9, 123 n.17, 124 n.25, 125 n.28, 130 n.55, 171 n.244 Crouzel, Henri 10 n.6, 11 n.12

The Crucified God (Moltmann) 65, 66 Crysdale, Cynthia 73, 76, 77, 95, 109, 199, 200, 231 n.20 cultic, Christian notion of 223–4 cultic sacrifice 1 n.2, 16, 51, 56, 89, 144, 165 n.217, 180, 182 n.24, 247 cultural violence 60, 70, 97, 116 n.90, 231 n.21 Cur Deus Homo (Anselm of Canterbury) 19, 23 curse 32, 33, 132, 162, 164, 223 Cyprian 18 n.46, 20 n.54, 33 Cyril of Alexandria 26, 29 n.107, 127 n.40 Cyril of Jerusalem 18 n.46 Dalferth, Ingolf U. 32 n.119, 49 n.1, 72, 73, 83 n.109, 86 n.127, 97 n.7, 99, 100 n.20, 101 n.22, 106 n.44, 133 n.72, 168–9, 211 n.13, 215, 236 n.46, 245 n.78 Daly, Mark 212 n.19 Daly, Robert 34 n.127, 35 n.133, 66, 67 n.32, 103 n.29 Damascenes, John 125 n.28 Daniels, T. Scott 90 n.142 Dasberg, Haim 172 n.249 death see individual entries death of God 16 n.34, 23 n.73, 30, 42 n.166, 44, 120–1, 127, 128, 131 decentred centring relationship 218 Deeg, Alexander 224 Derrida, Jacques 55, 56 n.29, 62 n.13, 99 n.17, 100, 113 n.74, 115 n.87, 128 n.45, 177 n.8, 183–5, 187 n.41, 188 n.46, 191 n.57, 224, 248 n.4, 249–50, 255 n.36, 256 n.43 Desmond, William 128 devil 11–15, 20, 24 de Vries, Hent 62 n.11, 248 n.4 dialectical logic 251–2 Dialectics of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 249 Dieckmann, Bernhard 3 n.8 divine-human communion 144 divine justice 84, 126 n.33 divine violence 187 Dobell, Brian 15, 16 n.34 Donahue, John R. 180 n.21 Drexler, Josef 3 n.7

Index Dunnill, John 103 n.29, 152 n.155, 195 n.70 Durand, Emmanuel 152 n.158 Ebeling, Gerhard 171 n.245 Eberhard, Johann August 49 Eberhart, Christian 196 Eikrem, Asle 108 n.56, 114 n.85, 187 n.41, 200 n.5, 212, 216 n.41, 218 n.50, 254 n.31 Elert, Werner 30 n.110 empathy 77, 104, 106 n.44, 107 Erickson, Millard J. 155 n.167 Erlemann, Kurt 6 eternity 10–16, 22–4, 27, 29–32, 38–9, 42, 43, 44 n.170, 46, 47, 67, 81, 104–6, 108 n.52, 115, 120, 121 n.11, 124–6, 128, 130–2, 135–41, 144, 145, 153 n.158, 154–6, 162–3, 168, 171, 174, 182, 183, 189–90, 196, 202, 210, 225, 239–42, 253–4, 256 Eucharist 30, 191–7 Eusebius 17 n.40 Evans, Craig A. 87 n.129 exegetical thesis 86 n.127 Exline, Julie J. 232 n.24 expiation 27, 32–4, 38, 50, 144, 166 nn.222–3 faith

10, 18, 34, 35, 36 n.135, 39, 50, 53, 57, 105, 114, 119, 133, 134, 136 n.85, 138, 140, 142, 153 n.158, 162 n.203, 168, 177, 182, 192–4, 196, 202, 206, 207, 223–4, 228–9, 241, 242, 249 Christian, as immoral self-sacrifice 210–22 willed self-effacement of 72, 214–15 Faith and Knowledge (Derrida) 55, 249 Farley, Wendy 65, 66 n.25, 69, 79, 251 Feinberg, John S. 155 n.167 Fiddes, Paul 64, 106 n.41, 108 n.52, 110 n.65, 113 n.77, 127 n.38, 136 n.86, 138, 147 n.130, 152 n.158, 219 n.55, 235 n.40, 254 finitude 14, 36, 44, 56, 93, 97, 105, 127, 130, 137, 168, 172, 178, 183, 185, 202, 210, 215–17, 219–21, 237, 240, 242, 244, 245, 249, 250, 254 n.28, 255

297

and infinite 251–2 Finlan, Stephen 2, 10–11 n.6, 175 n.2, 176 n.4 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler 103 n.30 Fitzer, Gottfried 144 Forde, Gerhard 91 forgiveness 13 n.23, 24, 38, 50, 93, 96, 111–17, 139, 140, 144, 171–3, 188, 189, 232, 233–4 n.34, 234–5 For God so Loved the World?’ (Brown) 70 Fortes, Meyer 3 n.8 Fozard-Weaver, Darlene 97 n.6 Friedrich, Gerhard 1 n.2 Frisch, Ralf 78 n.92, 109 n.61 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 169 Galtung, Johan 60 Gauthier, Jean-Marc 19, 25 Gavrilyuk, Paul L. 26 n.89, 107 genetical thesis 86 n.127 Gese, Hartmut 82 n.109, 83–5, 90, 91 Gestrich, Christof 92, 164, 170 n.235 Gheaus, Anca 233 n.34 Gibson, Mel 92 gift, notion of 23 gift-giving, phenomenal ideality of 100 Girard, Rene 54–6, 68, 69, 78, 95, 109, 176, 250 Gladigow, Burkhard 3 n.7 Gleede, Benjamin 30 n.109 God in Gospel parables, notion of 6 Goretti, Maria 52 n.13 Green, Deidre Nicole 112 n.70 Gregory of Nazianzus 14, 17 n.40, 18 n.46, 20, 23 n.73, 29 n.107, 42, 69, 70, 75 Grensted, Laurence W. 90 n.142 Greshake, Gisbert 21 n.59, 153 n.158 Grey, Mary 73 Griswold, Charles 113 nn.73, 78, 114, 172 n.249, 234 n.37 Groenhout, Ruth 95 n.1, 104 n.32, 211 n.18 Gudorf, Christine 78, 172 guilt 21, 24, 28, 33, 41, 49 n.4, 51, 87, 88, 168, 171–3, 176, 202, 209 moral 60 Gunton, Colin E. 2, 147 n.130, 223

298 Habermas, Jürgen 51 n.12 Haikola, Lars 4 n.9 Hailer, Martin 78 n.92, 109 n.61 Hamer, Fanny Lou 243 Hampson, Daphne 34 n.126, 37 nn.137, 139, 70, 75, 80, 107, 148, 151 n.151, 158–9, 162, 194 n.69, 211–15, 217–21, 225, 249 n.6, 252 Härle, Wilfried 93 n.155 Harrison, Beverly W. 21 n.62 Hart, David Bentley 67 n.32, 136, 140, 162, 219 n.56, 234 n.36 Hartshorne, Charles 105 n.36 Harvey, Nicholas 96 n.2 Hedley, Douglas 6, 66 n.25, 200 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 42–5, 56 n.29, 65, 120–3, 125–9, 131, 136, 159 n.186, 172, 216, 237, 251, 255, 257 Heim, Mark 49–50 n.4 Hengel, Martin 82 n.109, 86 n.127, 165 heuristic perspective 2–4, 61, 95, 247 Heyward, Carter 21 n.62, 80 n.97, 147 n.130, 162, 214 n.31, 222, 240 Hinlicky, Paul R. 156 n.173 Hirschmann, Nancy 97 n.6, 231 n.20 historical critiques 49, 82 n.109 historical-evolutionary thesis 86 n.127 historical overview early Christian literature and 9–18 in modern era 38–47 theologies of sacrifice and in Middle Ages 19–38 Hocknull, Mark 212 Hodgson, Peter C. 43 n.168, 129 n.49 Hoffman, Joshua 123 n.17 Hofius, Otfried 83 n.109, 86 n.127 Holy Spirit 132, 161, 225, 239 Hooker, Richard 40 n.159 Hooks, Bell 116 n.96, 231 n.16 Horkheimer, Max 249 Horrell, J. Scott 156 n.170 humanity, as decentred and centred-inrelation to God 218 humanity-God relationship 210–22 The Human Situation: A Feminine View’ (Saiving) 207

Index Hume, David 50, 220 n.60 Hunsinger, George 40 n.154, 83 n.109 hypostatic union 14 n.25 Imbusch, Peter 59, 61 n.9 immanence 30, 42, 44 n.170, 46 n.181, 57, 106 n.39, 120, 138, 156 n.170, 160, 214, 216, 217, 240 n.60, 248, 252 immutability, of God 105 n.36 incarnation 9, 14, 19, 30, 31, 44, 46, 91, 137, 142, 145, 151, 153, 156–8, 166, 167, 171, 201, 205 as compassionate self-limitation 104–8 as kenosis of patriarchy 79 indignation 113, 172, 232, 233 individuation 148 n.132, 155, 157 n.176, 216–17 n.44, 219 infinite hospitality 177, 184–6 infinity 23, 43 n.168, 44, 45, 81, 106 n.41, 120, 122, 125, 127, 132 n.65, 132 n.65, 136, 137, 161, 166 n.219, 174, 190, 202, 206, 216, 218–21, 237, 241, 250–3, 256–7 intercession 11, 13 inter-dependent autonomy 218 intra-Trinitarian asymmetry 81 Irenaeus of Lyons 10 nn.2–3, 17 Jaeschke, Walter 43 n.168 Janowski, Bernd 83 n.109, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89 n.139, 90, 91 n.145, 233 n.33 Jeremias, Joachim 89 n.139 Joh, Wonhee Anne 103 n.30, 109 n.61 Johnson, Elizabeth A. 152 n.158 Jones, Michael Keenan 26 n.88 Jörns, Klaus-Peter 195–6 Jüngel, Eberhard 31 n.114, 124 n.24, 127 n.38, 131, 133, 136, 149–52, 154, 161, 201 Kannengiesser, Charles 12 n.13 Kant, Immanuel 51, 171–3 Kearney, Richard 187 n.41 Keenan, Dennis King 55 n.27, 56 n.30, 101 n.24 Keller, Catherine 73 Kelly, John N. D. 10 n.2

Index kenosis 79, 95, 103–4, 120 n.5, 139, 162 kenotic Christology 66 n.25 Kerr, Fergus 135 n.82 Kessler, Hans 168 n.228 Kierkegaard, Søren 101 nn.22–3, 112 n.70, 212, 227, 229, 244 King, Martin Luther 243 Koch, Klaus 83, 89 n.139 Kojeve, Alexander 56 n.29 Krause, Deborah 151 n.152 Kreinecker, Christina 96 n.2 Kristeva, Julia 114 n.85, 159 n.186 Leftow, Brian 148 n.32, 154 n.162 Leo the Great 90 n.142 Lessing, Gottlob 49 Lévinas, Emmanuel 113 n.74, 114 n.82, 128 n.45, 138 n.93, 176–7, 187 n.41, 241, 248, 257 n.48 Levitical religiosity 166 n.223 Lewis, Alan E. 66 n.25, 108 n.52, 219 n.55 Lewis, Thomas A. 43 n.168, 122 n.15 Lienhard, Marc 30 n.109 Linnemann, Eta 188 Longer Commentary on Galatians (Luther) 32 Lossky, Vladimir 225 Luther, Martin 23 n.73, 28–37, 42–4, 65, 78, 81, 90, 91 n.146, 120, 121 n.8, 124 nn.24, 26, 126, 132, 136, 156 n.173, 168 n.229, 192–4, 211–13, 228, 229, 243, 244, 248 McCosker, Philip 35 n.133 McCullough, Michael E. 235 n.41 McIntosh, Esther 76, 116 McKenna, Andrew J. 250 n.11 McLean, Bradley H. 115 n.89 Marion, Jean-Luc 100 n.19 Markman, Howard J. 237 n.53 martyrdom 13 n.19, 36 n.135 martyr sacrifices, of Christian believers 17 masochism 61 n.9, 90, 109 n.58, 152, 162, 236 n.47, 254 Mattes, Mark C. 43 n.169 Mauss, Marcell 99 n.17 Melanchthon 33, 248

299

Mercedes, Anna 72, 231 n.18, 236 n.47 merit 19 n.54, 23 messianicity, notion of 183–4 Meszaros, Julia 73, 98 n.10, 101 n.23, 241, 242 metaphorizations 18, 89 n.139, 139, 143, 247 metaphors 1, 2, 5, 6, 10 n.6, 11 n.6, 20, 56 n.31, 83, 84, 89 n.139, 141 n.105, 151 n.151, 153 n.158, 157 n.176 Metz, Johannes Baptist 108 n.52, 139 n.95 Milbank, John 100 n.20, 227, 241, 242 Moltmann, Jürgen 65, 71, 73, 75, 80 n.100, 93 n.155, 96, 103 nn.29– 30, 104 n.32, 105, 106, 108 n.52, 131, 132, 134 n.75, 136, 144, 151 n.149, 152 nn.155, 158, 154 n.162, 162, 174, 201, 217 n.46, 221 n.67, 239 Moltmann-Wendel, Elisabeth 54, 66–9, 71 moral claim 101 n.23 moral concerns 50 moral conversion 17 moral corruption 13 moral guilt 60 moralization, of sacrifice 16 moral judgment 211 moral-ontological values 99 n.16 moral perfection 38–9, 85, 86 moral significance 23, 38, 233 moral transformation, of human beings 12 n.15, 13 Moser, Maria Katharina 212 n.19, 231 n.16, 236 n.43 Mouffe, Chantal 183 n.27 Mühling-Schlapkohl, Markus 103 n.29, 109 n.61, 131 n.56, 135 n.81, 147 nn.127, 129, 130, 148 n.132, 150–1 n.149, 155, 157 n.176, 159 n.188, 160 n.191, 161 n.196, 215 n.36, 219 n.56 Müller, Mogens 12 n.14 mutuality 67 n.32, 99–101, 129, 142, 145, 148, 152, 216 power of 240 n.60 true 80, 81, 130, 151 n.151, 183, 206, 223 Nancy, Jean-Luc 248 n.4, 254

300

Index

Narveson, Jan 241 n.63 Natoli, Salvatore 244 Negel, Joachim 108 n.53 Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack 63 n.15, 68 n.39 Neoplatonism 18, 26 Neufeld, Thomas R. Yoder 234 n.35 Ngien, Dennis 31 n.111 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 50, 172 n.249, 188, 229–30, 256, 257 n.44 Niewiadomski, Joseph 54 Noll, Jeannie G. 232 n.24 non-sacrificial world 56 Nordhofen, Jacob 89 n.139 nothingness 127 n.38, 141, 214 Novello, Henry L. 120 n.4, 125 n.29, 127 n.38, 134 n.75, 137 n.91, 174 n.256 Nygren, Anders 244 n.78 Ockam school 31 n.111 O’Collins, Gerald 26 n.88, 96 n.2, 103 n.30 O’Leary, Joseph 11 n.8 On Certainty (Wittgenstein) 2 O’Regan, Cyril 42 n.166, 120 n.5, 126 n.32 Origen 10–13, 17, 36, 42, 70 otherness 129, 150, 177, 188, 216, 237 of God 214 of others 97 pacifism 74, 234 n.36, 241 n.63 Palaver, Wolfgang 240 William Paley 220 n.60 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 91 n.148, 108 n.54, 128 n.45, 130, 131, 136, 141 n.108, 149–52, 153 n.158, 154–6, 159–61, 164, 216 n.41, 217 n.45, 252–3 Pargament, Kenneth I. 235 n.41 Parker, Rebecca Ann 21 nn.58, 60, 62, 23, 36 n.135, 70, 73–7, 80, 84, 88, 96, 97 n.6, 98, 104, 108, 110, 111, 119, 129 n.50, 146, 147, 148, 162, 219 n.55, 220 n.64, 236 n.46 The Passion of the Christ (film) 92 patripassianism 66 n.27 penal-substitutionary view 38 on atonement 20 of reformers 25, 87–8 penal suffering 89

personhood 37, 51, 67, 80, 98, 102, 104, 117, 119, 123–5, 130, 137, 138, 141 n.108, 151, 153, 154, 155 n.166, 156, 158, 161, 173, 205, 212 n.23, 217, 221, 222, 230, 236, 240 n.60, 253 Peterson, Brandon 26 phenomenal ideality, of gift-giving 100 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 237 Phillips, Dewi Z. 1, 213 Plantinga, Cornelius Jr. 153 n.158 Plotin 206 Polycarp 17 Pool, Jeff 96 n.2, 109 nn.56, 61, 114 n.85, 148, 195 n.70, 229 predestination 47 pre-tridentine theology 34 n.127 propitiation 25, 28, 33, 34, 38, 52, 53, 64, 82 n.109, 85, 87, 109, 144, 160 Protestant orthodoxy 88 Proverbs of Ashes (Parker) 96 Pseudo-Dionysius 250 punishment 17, 20–2, 24–6, 28, 29, 33, 40–1, 45, 51, 65, 70, 78, 84, 90, 92 n.149, 94, 99, 113 n.74, 142, 157 n.178, 232 Puntel, Lorenz B. 3 n.6, 6 n.16, 99 n.16, 122 n.12, 124 nn.23, 25, 129 n.49, 200 n.7, 217 n.45, 252 n.20 Pyyhtinen, Olli 100 n.20 Raguse, Hartmut 247 Rahner, Karl 151 n.149, 224 ransom, notion of 10, 87, 89–90, 109 n.57 Rashdall, Hastings 41 n.162 Rawls, John 51 n.12 Ray, Darby Kathleen 56 n.31, 81 reconciliation 12–13, 21 n.59, 24, 25, 33, 38, 44, 55 n.26, 84, 115 n.87, 126, 195, 234 n.36 redemption 68, 69, 72, 74–8, 107, 108, 139, 201, 211, 243, 256 Redmond, Sheila 52 n.13 relational disturbance 21 relational modality 99, 101, 156, 193, 207, 208, 230, 232, 233, 244 n.72 Rendtorff, Rolf 5 n.11

Index repentance 13 n.23, 18, 24, 34, 50, 77, 173 n.251, 181, 188, 235 n.40 resentment 113, 140, 232, 233, 234 n.38 resurrection 9–11, 13, 14, 28, 29, 32, 38 n.143, 40, 45, 67, 77, 81, 91–3, 111, 126, 127, 130–2, 134–7, 139–46, 158–61, 163–5, 166 n.219, 167–9, 173, 175 n.1, 182 n.24, 185, 186, 189 n.51, 190, 196, 203, 205, 227, 241, 253 Ricoeur, Paul 61, 146 n.124, 187 n.44, 237 Rieger, Joerg 21 n.60, 36 n.135 Ritschl, Albrecht 39–42, 64, 74, 75, 87, 88, 105, 130 Röhser, Günter 89 n.139 Rosenkrantz, Gary S. 123 n.17 Rossé, Gerard 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 209 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 66 n.25, 79, 162, 199 Runestam, Arvid 193 n.65 Saarinen, Risto 245 n.78 sacrament 28, 53, 192 sacred bloodshed 64–82 forgiveness and 111–17 Jesus murder as absolute victimization and 108–11 incarnation as compassionate self-limitation and 104–8 and self-sacrifice 95–104 sacred exclusion/inclusion 175 Christian meal and 191–7 sacrificial love and unrestricted hospitality (im-) possibility and 176–91 scapegoating and 175–6 sacred violence 59–63 sacred bloodshed and 64–82 Tübinger Antithese and 82–94 St. Augustine 14–16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 30, 36, 90 n.142, 107, 149, 156 n.171, 252, 253 n.25 St. Paul 157 n.178, 160, 166 n.222, 167, 168, 189, 194, 195, 208, 225 n.87, 234, 236, 238, 239 St. Victor, Richard 148 n.132 Saiving, Valerie 207, 211, 212 n.19 salvation 24, 32, 37, 46, 47, 63, 67, 70, 84, 91 n.145, 109, 139, 166,

301

169, 173, 179, 208, 209, 215 n.36, 221, 244, 245 as deification, idea of 10 sanctification 13 n.23, 53, 81, 141, 174, 196, 245 Sanders, Fred 126 n.35 Sartre, Jean-Paul 148 n.132, 206 n.8 Satan 11, 46 satisfaction 12 n.15, 13–15, 19 n.54, 21–6, 28, 33, 35, 38, 41, 45, 52, 53, 64, 82 n.109, 85, 87, 90, 99, 109, 112, 143, 144, 160, 228, 257 penal 26, 40, 70 Scanlon, Michael J. 100 n.19, 184 n.32, 188 n.47 scapegoating 69 n.44 as sacred exclusion 175–6 Schaede, Stephan 167 n.227, 170 n.236 Schenk, Richard 3 n.8 Schenker, Adrian 166 n.223 Schillebeeckx, Edward 89 n.139, 108 n.56 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 39–42, 64, 74, 80 n.97, 87, 91, 105, 120, 130, 133 n.70, 147 n.129, 216, 217, 219 Schlink, Edmund 224 Schlitt, Dale 122, 128 n.46 Schröter, Jens 165 n.219 Schulz, Michael 127 n.36, 128 n.45, 150 n.149, 155 n.165 Schumacher, Bernard N. 254 n.33 Schwager, Raymund 6 n.14, 32 n.120, 69, 137 n.88 Schwarz, Reinhard 31 n.111 Schweitzer, Friedrich 63 n.15 Schwöbel, Christoph 147 n.127, 162 n.203, 219 n.56 Seasoltz, Kevin 108 n.53 Seiwert, Hubert 3 n.7 self, centred 211–213, 215–16, 222 self-absorption 37 self-actualization 43, 96, 120, 128, 149, 214, 241, 245 self-affirmation 62, 111, 114, 117 self-annihilation 102, 160–2, 190, 206 self-consciousness 40 n.156, 43, 44, 95, 101 n.23, 126, 128, 129 n.49, 147 n.129, 214, 217–18 self-denial 162, 206, 208, 228, 256

302

Index

self-destruction 98, 102, 104, 130, 148, 156, 161, 205, 206, 215, 230, 237–9, 243, 244 self-differentiation 149, 150, 153, 158, 159 self-distinction 151, 154, 159, 160 self-emptying 66, 67, 72, 79 self-fulfilment 239 self-giving 67 n.32, 79, 96 n.2, 102, 103, 119–20, 137, 191–3, 197, 205, 206, 254, 256, 257 death of Christ as 120–39 loveTrinitarian theology of 146–63 as vicarious atonement 163–74 resurrected victim and 139–46 sacrifice of praise as self-limitation and 223–6 self-limitation 97–9, 111–17, 129, 130, 146, 159, 201–3, 205, 232, 234–40, 256, 257 incarnation as compassionate 104–8 mutual 216, 219, 237 sacrifice of praise as, and selfgiving 223–6 self-protective anger 77–8 self-reconciliation, divine 12 n.15 self-sacrifice 52, 53, 65–7, 69–71, 74, 79, 80, 86, 119, 136 n.88, 138 n.94, 150, 156, 161, 208, 209, 227, 257 Christian faith as immoral 210–22 love as greatest commandment 228–30 between self-destruction and selffulfillment 230–45 sacred bloodshed and 95–104 self-limitation and 98–9 vicarious 88 self-transcendence 128, 129 self-victimization 109 n.56, 201 semantic–pragmatic perspective 3 semantic re-contextualization 16–17 servanthood 15 Sherman, Robert J. 83 n.109, 110, 169, 173 Shultz, Michael 147 n.130 silence 67, 96, 112 n.70, 134, 136, 185 n.33, 214, 225, 249 Simon, Wolfgang 31 n.111, 34 n.125 sin 20–6, 28–9, 34, 37, 39, 41–3, 49 n.4, 50, 65, 77, 83, 84, 93, 107 n.51, 115, 135 n.81, 139–45, 164–6, 193, 195, 197, 201, 228, 237

forgiveness of 144 penalty of 70, 85, 111, 169 as self-assertion and selfsacrifice 207–10 Sinclair, James D. 220 n.60 sin-offering 115 n.89, 119 n.2 Smith, Christian 123 n.20, 155 n.166 Smith, David 52 Sobrino, Jon 255 Socinus, Fausto 38, 52 n.17 socio-historical critiques 51–2 Söding, Thomas 83 n.109 Sölle, Dorothee 71, 73, 110 n.65, 148, 171 n.242, 174, 199, 240 n.60, 257 n.48 Sommer, Kristin L. 232 n.24 Sorge, Helga 162 Soskice, Janet Martin 80 n.102 soteriology 5 n.13, 10 n.6, 15, 19, 24, 25, 35, 49, 54, 59, 69, 81, 88 n.133, 90–2, 103 n.29, 146, 164, 165, 168, 196, 202 Southern, Richard 20, 36 n.135 Søvik, Atle Ottesen 200 nn.5–6 Spaemann, Robert 102 Sparn, Walter 96 n.2 Splett, Jörg 128 nn.44, 46 Stanley, Scott M. 237 n.53 Stanton, Elisabeth Cady 52 Stoeber, Michael 201 Strawson, P. F. 113 n.78 Streit, Magnus 202 n.14 Strimple, Robert B. 33 Studer, Basil 14 n.28 Stuhlmacher, Peter 5, 82 n.109, 83–5, 86 n.127, 87, 88, 89 n.139, 90, 91, 94 Stump, Eleonore 26 n.89 subjectivity 25, 35, 43 n.168, 114, 123, 129 n.49, 161 n.196, 249 substance-ontology 43 n.168 substitutionary atonement 79 Suchocki, Marjorie 173 n.251, 231 n.21, 234 n.34 suffering 106–11. See also individual entries penal 89 vicarious 78, 84, 90, 92 vocational 105 n.35 Swinburne, Richard 148 n.132 symbolic violence 60

Index Tanner, Kathryn 100 nn.19–20, 135 n.82, 141, 217 n.45, 219 n.54, 221 n.65, 225 n.87 Taylor, Charles 255 n.35 Terrell, JoAnne Marie 53, 165 n.217, 233 n.28 Tertullian 29 n.107, 151 n.149 Theissen, Gerd 143 theodicy 199–203 theological critiques 52 theopaschitic formula 30 Thiemann, Ronald F. 181 n.22 Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Girard) 69 third-party forgiveness 114 Thompson, Deanna A. 78 n.92 Thoresen, Carl E. 235 n.41 Thürmer-Rohr, Christina 110 n.66, 231nn.16, 19–20, 255 n.35 Tillich, Paul 116, 249, 254 nn.28, 34 Tiwald, Markus 143 n.111 Tonstad, Linn 152 n.156 Torrance, Alan J. 176 n.3, 225 n.87 totality 177, 217, 253 transcendence 12, 66, 81, 128, 129, 158, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 252 transformative resistance 74 Trelstad, Marit 139, 219 n.55 Triune relationship 11, 14, 32, 46, 67 n.32, 94, 106, 123, 125 n.29, 130, 131 n.56, 136, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156, 161–3, 167, 168, 174, 191, 192, 197, 202, 205, 215, 218–20, 239, 240, 250–2 true infinite 251–2 true sacrifice 14–15, 25 Tübinger Antithese 82–94, 163–5, 168 Tück, Jan-Heiner 202 Tuggy, Dale 153 n.159 Tylor, Edward B. 103 n.28 Unitarianism 52 unity 250–1 unity-in-difference 222, 253–5 van der Leeuw, Gerardus 85 n.119 van Dyk, Leanne 156 van Nieuwenhove, Rik 25 n.83, 26 van Nistelrooij, Inge 100 n.19

303

Vergote, Antoine 151 n.151 Versnel, Henk S. 166 n.222 vicarious death 84, 114 n.84 vicarious punishment 28 victimhood 96 victimization 46, 73, 77, 79, 95, 97 n.7, 106, 108–11, 116, 139, 140, 143, 156, 160, 201, 203, 205, 230–3, 244 absolute 108–11 cultural 70, 235 relative 111–17 self- 95 violence 59–63. See also individual entries Volf, Miroslav 60 n.3, 63, 100 n.18, 173 n.251, 188 n.46, 218 n.53, 225 n.87 Voltaire 50, 52 n.18 von Balthasar, Hans urs 36 n.135, 66 n.25, 85 n.123, 103 n.31, 127 n.36, 134 n.75 von Gemünden, Petra 143 von Rad, Gerhard 5 n.11 Wade, Allan 231 n.18 Ward, Keith 105 nn.36–7, 105 n.36, 124 n.24, 147 n.128, 148 n.132, 154 n.162, 156 n.169 Ware, Bruce A. 148 Weaver, J. Denny 69 n.44, 70, 92, 203 n.18 Webster, John 109 n.57 Weir, Allision 159 n.186, 237 n.54 Welch, Sharon 76, 214 n.32, 240 Welker, Michael 203 Welz, Claudia 101 n.23, 103 n.30 Wendte, Martin 43 n.168, 122 n.15, 125 n.27, 128 n.43 Wengst, Klaus 166 n.222 Wenz, Günther 21 nn.58, 60, 31 n.111, 38 n.142, 39 nn.151, 153, 105 n.35, 127, 128 nn.43, 46, 129 n.50 Westhelle, Vítor 109 n.61, 132 n.66 Wheeler, David 229 Whitehead, Alfred North 66, 226 Whitton, Sarah W. 237 n.53 Wilckens, Ulrich 83 n.109, 89 n.139 Williams, David T. 111 n.67 Williams, Delores 79, 173, 175 n.1 Williams, Robert R. 43 n.168, 120 n.5, 126 n.32, 128 n.47

304 Williams, Thomas 25 n.80, 33 n.121 Willi-Plein, Ina 175 n.2, 197 n.78 Wink, Walter 254 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 146 n.123 Word of God 15–16 Work, Telford C. 124 n.26 Worthington, Everett L. 114 n.85, 234 n.38

Index Wright,

N. T.

129 n.50

Yahweh 179 Young, Frances 10, 11 n.9, 12 n.15, 17 n.40, 52 n.14 Zachhuber, Johannes 41 n.162 Zimmermann, Ruben 1 n.2, 248 n.4