All Souls
Bethlehem
Church

Several recent surveys attempting to measure religious attitudes in America reveal a disparity between a surging interest in spirituality and a growing disdain for organized religion. As a minister I can only say, Who can blame them? Who wants to believe in a God that required the bloody sacrifice of his only son? Even many Christians, truth be told, are uneasy with this idea. Yet I know of very few churches that would tolerate a flat out critical inquiry into this long-cherished dogma. Thankfully All Souls Bethlehem Church is the kind of place where we can ask the hard questions. So let’s take a look at the murky subject of sacrifice.

I was visiting a parishioner named Bob the other day who remarked, "I can’t write, but if I could, I would write a book asking the question: ‘What kind of religion would you have if Jesus wasn’t killed?’" What a courageous thing for a parishioner to say to his minister!

Thankfully I was able to admit to having entertained similar thoughts myself, after which we talked about some alternative points of view emerging on the theological scene. I told him about Dolores Williams’ book, Sisters in the Wilderness, in which she questions the wisdom of viewing the cross as the ultimate triumph over evil given the horrors of the twentieth century and especially the Holocaust. It makes more sense, she argues, to think of Jesus’ execution as the tragic climax to his reconciling work in the world—work that remains for us to carry on.

Matthew Fox, the former Catholic priest who was silenced by the Catholic church and when that didn’t work, ex-communicated, has put forth another refreshing alternative to the traditional, Fall/redemption model. He critiques the tendency within western religious thought to begin with the notion of sin, which leads to the desperate groping around for ways to appease an angry God. In the opening verses of the Biblical text itself, he argues, God breaths the cosmos into existence and pronounces "It is good." What about the billions of years of goodness prior to the advent of human folly, Fox wants to know, and why the moribund emphasis on human evil?

A few obvious answers present themselves—obvious, at least, to those who don’t fear being silenced by the church. One reason for the fixation on sin demonstrated by the Church at large is the human institution’s investment in social control. As long as people believe they are weak, flawed and in danger of eternal hellfire, they’re going to toe the line (giving their money, their time, their children, etc.). Start telling the people about the idea of Original Blessing (the name of Fox’s first and most influential book) and they’re liable to start asking why they need the Church at all (the current state of affairs anyway, as it turns out).

Then there’s the anthropological approach that treats humanity as a newly self-conscious species of primate understandably terrified by the overwhelming vastness of the cosmos. How natural, even understandable, for these fearful apes to devise little systems of sacrifice and appeasement in order to secure a psychological toe-hold in the world.

Needless to say, volumes could be (and have been) written concerning why we are mired in a sacrificial mindset. The odd thing is so few people are cognizant that we are so mired. The small but notable victory for our species in pardoning the Nigerian woman who faced death by stoning pales against the smooth running death machines of Texas.

If we survive long enough as a species, the anthropologists (or primatologists) of the future will no doubt look back on the first few millennia of human history as a series of genocidal disasters during which we struggled to curb our killer instincts. Perhaps they will even draw a connection between the early sacrificial rituals of Mesopotamia and the sacrificial mindset that swept the world under the guise of fundamentalist Christianity.

But I wonder what they will say about the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth. Not the unblemished sacrificial lamb of theology, but the actual man and his teachings. Jesus doesn’t appear to have been real big on sacrifice, or any kind of killing for that matter. We don’t know if he thought of himself as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of the world. But those of us working for change within the Church can no longer afford to assume that he did. Maybe he didn’t believe in an angry God thirsty for blood. Maybe he believed in a God that counted the hairs on our heads and sensed the death of a single sparrow. Maybe he believed in a God who wanted a change of heart. Maybe we killed Jesus because it’s scary to think that life is essentially good, that we are free, and that we each, in the end, must contribute our own small part to the ongoing work of reconciliation.