May 6, 2006

• Bishop Spong, the retired Bishop of the Diocese of Newark (NJ, Episcopal) was asked the following question by Allan Hytowitz via e-mail: "How do you personally, and Christian doctirne in particular, reconcile the contradiction of that biblical prohibition against child sacrifice with the claim that 'God sacrificed his [sic] child' in explaining the horrific death of Jesus? It seems to me that rather than the 'sacrifice of Jesus' being of benefit to Christians, it serves more to threaten them with death and/or eternal punishment if they are not obedient to the wishes and decrees of the Church."

  
  

  Part of Bishop Spong's response reads, "I think you have hit the Christological nail right on the head.  The whole sacrifice mentality that permeates Christian theology needs to be raised to consciousness and expelled from Christianity... Child sacrifice was part of ancient religion even in Judaism as the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac suggests.  It was later replaced with animal sacrifice that was very much a part of worship in the Old Testament.  The Passover observance was marked byt the sacrifice of the paschal lamb.  Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was also marked by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, whose blood was thought to cleanse the people from their sins.  It was all but inevitable that the crucificion of Jesus would be interpreted against the background of these two Jewish worship traditions... Even the story of the cross in which we are told , 'none of his [Jesus'] bones were broken' was drawn from the liturgy of the Yom Kippur sacrifice.  Because that was how the 1st century Jews interpreted the death of  Christ does not mean that we are bound by that thinking forever.  Humand attitudes toward child sacrifice are today violently negative.  Attitudes towards animal sacrifice are expressed in such words as 'cult worship', 'black magic', and 'dveil liturgies'.  I wonder why these negative concepts are not allowed to flow toward the interpretation of Jesus' death as a sacrifice required by God to overcome the sins of the world.  That idea makes God barbaric.  It makes Jesus the victim of a sadistic deity.  It introduces masochism int oChristianity and it deeply violates the essential note of the Gospel, which is that God is love calling us to love.  Why can we not see the cross, not as a sacrifice, but as an ultimate expression of teh humanity of one who was so whole he could give his life away and of one who wanted to demonstrated that even when you kill the love of God, the love of God still loves its killers?  why can we not get away from that message of guilt and control that is found in the pious but destructive phrase 'Jesus died for my sins'?  I believe that the future of Christianity rests on our ability in the Christian Church to aescapte the language of sacrifice and punishment and begin to think in terms of finding in Jesus the power to live fully, the grace to lvoe wastefully, and the courage to be all that we can be."

  • 6:44 pm
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