The Cross

ABSTRACT

My aim is a philosophical understanding of sacrifice, and especially of the Christian conception of sacrifice. Initially distancing myself a little from the strictly ritual notion of sacrifice, I work with a concept of sacrifice as 1) a voluntary choice (2) to forgo or lose or give away (3) something costly, perhaps supremely costly, (4) as an expressive action, where (5) what is so expressed typically is or includes devotion or loyalty to something exalted. I consider three historical examples of political sacrifices, sacrifices made for a cause, and three literary examples of personal sacrifices, sacrifices made by one person for another. I note that in the Christian context it is very common for sacrifices either political or personal to be taken to be imitations of Jesus’ sacrifice as presented in the New Testament, and ask therefore how we are to understand that. My conclusion is that Jesus’ sacrifice can be seen as involving both a political and a personal aspect—but that in fact, it can only be made as intelligible as may be by understanding it, as the Letter to the Hebrews does, in ritual terms.

KEYWORDS:

• sacrifice
• political demonstration
• love
• friendship
• justice
• St Paul
• Romans
• Hebrews
• justification
• atonement

Notes

1. I thank Fiona Woollard for alerting me to one exception to my generalisation: Thomson 2008. But in that paper Thomson only briefly considers the option of self-sacrifice, and she is against it: in the case she considers, she thinks it would be a bad thing to do. And she’s right, it is bad there, because her case is like this. Suppose you learn that, for abstruse causal reasons, if you die now then 5 lives elsewhere, no matter where, will be saved, and you therefore resolve to die now. That, says Thomson, is a bad thing to do. She’s right of course. But it’s not a typical self-sacrifice case, precisely because of its complete lack of a normal moral context.

2. Articles retrieved November 2017.

Some academics turn up their noses at Wikipedia. This seems a false fastidiousness, especially since the same academics are often very happy to cite sources that take a great deal less trouble to tell the truth, such as newspapers. Of course Wikipedia should be treated with caution as a source. But that is a substitution-instance of a platitude. Any source should be treated with caution as a source.

3. Which “brothers and sisters”? Does Stein mean her fellow Jews, or her fellow Catholic-convert Jews, or her fellow Catholics? In the Wikipedia article that I quote, the context suggests her fellow Jews; but the point has been disputed, and both Stein herself and her Catholic admirers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have been accused, like Kolbe and his, of various forms of anti-Semitism. I have no dog in these fights.

4. Of course, Hugo’s authorial intentions were not about Gilda in Rigoletto but about Gilda’s original in Le Roi s’Amuse, who was called Blanche. No matter.

5. Of them and, be it noted, pretty much only them. Mostly, while writing this, I have actively avoided reading anything except the NT itself. My aim is to try and see, with as fresh eyes as possible, what it says about the Cross. That is quite hard enough to do on its own.

6. The letter to the Hebrews—of which more in Section V—has gospel-talk going back even further than the later prophets: “we received the gospel (esmen eueggelismenoi) exactly as they [the unbelieving Jews in the wilderness in Exodus] did” (Hebs 4.2).

7. While I was writing this essay, my attention was drawn by a friend to this interesting essay in the New York Times: David Bentley Hart, “Are Christians supposed to be communists?”, Nov. 4 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/christianity-communism.html.

8. In my unpublished essay “Soul Food”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [MRF 2016-100];