Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One Book 2: Human Enlightenment of the First Axial 2.A. A Genealogy of Testamental Religions Chapter 5: The meaning of the sacrifice of Jesus: (A commentary on Mort pour nos péchés) ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2005, 2006 by L. C. Chin. All rights reserved.

The meaning of sacrifice in general: résumé

If our analysis of sacrifice is correct, together with our assumption about testamental religions (that they are differentiated versions of myth), then there should be clear linkage in meaning between sacrifices in intraworld religions and Jesus' sacrifice. This, despite the apparent incompatibility between two in ordinary people's consciousness. Let's take another example of contemporary intraworld religion, that in Taiwan, where even today Christians only constitute about 3 to 4 percent of the total population.¹ The religious situation in Taiwan has been rather primitive. While the traditional religion in Taiwan is a polytheistic blend of ancestor worship, religious Daoism, Buddhism, and folk religions, ancestor worship constitutes the bottommost layer. The Government Information Office of Taiwan (Culture) gives the following descriptions:

These are the relics from the Neolithic age! Before, we could hear repeatedly of the importance of regularly offering food to the ancestors; if not, they would turn hungry, come mess up your house and your projects, and even eat your children. But if you have sufficiently nourished them, they would be strong and happy, and make you prosper in life. Ancestors also needed money, and so during festivals one burnt fake paper money to them. (Evidently in this thinking some sort of reciprocity between the offering descendant and the worshipped ancestors was implicit which the older generation of Western scholars have correctly characterized as do ut des.) All sorts of other gods besides the Earth God were also found in the pantheon: Quangyin, Matsu... Television dramas always showed how a murderer was tormented by the ghosts of him or her that he had killed. Justice was certainly assured in the world by the survival of souls as ghosts. Even the missionaries today still speak of the problem that ordinary people either do not want to accept Christ at the expense of the ancestors or would only do so by assimilating him to the pre-existing pantheon as just another god besides Buddha, Buddhisattva, the ancestors, the other nature gods and so on (Robert Bolton, "Taiwan's Ancestor Cult: A Contextualized Gospel Approach").

On the other side, we have already spoken much about the Protestant Evangelical present-at-hand view of the thoroughly de-animized world, of God, and of His creatures. It seems quite in accordance with their modern, materialistic, de-animized worldview that the American Protestants should interpret the sacrifice of Jesus as some legalistic sort of substitutive punishment -- that Jesus, being sacrificed, was punished in our stead for our "faults" so that we may be cleansed of our "sins" and reunite with God, "sin" and "fault" being understood legalistically and moralistically. Would this rather be a modern notion anachronically projected backward? How exactly did the first Christians see the death of Jesus as sacrificially redemptive?

"Primitive", i.e. pre-salvational or intraworld religions are awfully similar to one another. Even in the present context of a commentary on Mort pour nos péchés, for example, René Bureau's description of the sacrificial praxis of Duala strikes one as so familiar, so similar to the Taiwanese ancestor cult, at least in substance. But in these sacrificial praxes of intraworld religiosity there is no sense present of a substitutive legalistic punishment. Vergote himself, whose thinking we shall consider in detail below, denies that juridical punishment can in any way be substitutive (p. 55). We are here concerned with the relationship between the sacrifice of Jesus and sacrifice in its original, "primitive", meaning. While the usual approach has been to analyze pre-salvational primitive religiosity by projecting the (modern!) meanings of Christianity backward (René Girard, Rudolf Otto), here we do the reverse. Let us first resume the essence of what we have discovered about intraworld religiosity in general. Afterwards we shall see that the modern juridical meaning of Jesus' sacrifice as substitutive punishment, although somewhat present among other strands in the interpretations of the first Christians, is nonetheless a modernized version of the archaic juridical form.

Since the "lowest stratum" of Taiwanese religion seems logically the simplest possible -- essentially deisidaimonia -- it has seemed possible to construct on the basis of this personal experience a preliminary scenario of the origin of human religiosity in general and of sacrifice in particular. Since, as said, religion has been universal across the most "primitive" peoples, its motivations must have been extremely common sense. The problem is merely to reconstruct the (animistic) perspective in which they are common sense.

• 1. In the beginning human religiosity concerns itself with the problem of order, or rather with the maintenance thereof. The "sacred" is just energy, or power; and human consciousness since the beginning has understood, correctly, that it is only through the perpetual consumption of energy that an order can maintain itself. Otherwise an order, such as a biological organism, will, as time passes, dissolute and reach equilibrium with the less-ordered environment: the second law of thermodynamics.

• 2. Matter, e.g. in ordered forms, is in final analysis made of energy, this being just as much demonstrated by the relativity of Einstein as intuitively known by the primitive humans. Hence in order to obtain the energy which not only has created the order of the world (diakosmon) before but can also maintain this order today, we must destroy another order and liberate the energy therein contained. This understanding not only implies that human beings, as biological orders, must kill animals and destroy plants in order to nourish themselves, but also that, in the beginning of time, there must have been a primordial event of the destruction of some primal order which liberated the necessary energy in order for diakosmon to begin. In the primitive perspective what is thus destroyed is the primal ancestor or god: the most primitive theme of creation myths, where not only is the differentiated order of the cosmos – river in differentiation from land, and heaven from earth, etc. – established by the energy liberated from the destruction of the primal ancestor, but all the components of the cosmos themselves are just his present manifestations. Nature is "ancestral." Today we know that the diakosmon of the biosphere is dependent on the daily self-destruction of the sun which liberates the energy necessary for life on earth.

• 3. The primitives understand life as the function of the animation of the body by "soul," which itself is identified with breath, as air. Moreover, they think that soul survives death because they have understood the ultimate truth of the universe: nothing is ever destroyed or created; everything is transformed. Physicists today articulate this truth under the principle of the conservation of matter-energy (the first law of thermodynamics), but for the primitive this means that life (or the principle of life, that which animates) must continue after death but simply in a different form. Since the principle of animation – and in animation is included consciousness – i.e. the soul, is breath, which returns to the atmosphere at death and blends and diffuses there-into, the ancestral spirits are thence considered as governing atmospheric phenomena and all the other internal movements of the cosmos. In the final analysis, however, atmosphere is identified as the left-over breath of the primal, generic, ancestor or god to whom the ancestors are assimilated.

• 4. All these together mean that the atmosphere enveloping the cosmos is the sacred, the energy, the ancestral power; that the atmosphere is just the new form of the ancestor after his death. Natural phenomena are the acts of ancestors. The sacred ancestor or the divine is just “wind,” the qi, the mana, the anima, the pneuma hagios by which Virgin Mary is impregnated,² the pneuma which “maketh live” (J. 6. 63), the manitou carried by the wind, the orenda that passes from the ancestors to the present animals and humans… The ancestral atmosphere, moreover, looking after us, produces for our nourishment all the plants and animals which are thus simply manifestations of the ancestor, the “gifts of god”; especially animals, which are animated by the anima of the ancestors.

Given these primitive experiences of the sacred, of order, and of energy, the reason why primitives sacrifice becomes clear. First of all the survival of the ancestral spirits after death and their assimilation into the atmosphere to govern the structure of the cosmos mean both that they must be nourished in order to be able to maintain the differentiated order of the cosmos – as, when the ancestors have assumed the new form of nature, their weakness, their disorder resulting from their hunger would lead to the degeneration of the cosmos into the equilibrium state where, for example, river merges with land: the deluge – and that the orders in which they manifest themselves (vegetal and animal) are endowed with the sacred quality, i.e. power, or energy. Just as the order of the individual cannot be maintained except by periodic consumption of food or energy, society, regarded by the primitives as a single, organismic unit, cannot maintain its order except by periodically consuming the manifestations, or gifts, of the ancestor: the sacred animals. Here we have communion sacrifice with its formula: we eat god. But such consumption risks exhausting the ancestral atmosphere so that it would not be able in the future to produce more food nor uphold the differentiated order of the cosmos: the ancestral order itself degenerates not only in accordance with the arrow of time but also after each round of production (after each season of harvest, for example). The ancestor, his order, must also be periodically renewed by – strange? – the very food he himself has produced. Hence the sacred animal, for example, is killed and burnt to release the sacred energy needed to re-fresh the ancestral atmosphere. This is expiatory sacrifice with its formula: god eats god himself.³ (Of course this can only be done in societies where a surplus of food exists for such ritual purposes; within the most primitive societies with little such surplus to waste people might just perform a drama of cosmogony to renew the diakosmon of the cosmos.) This "expiation" can be done in several fashions: either through the simplest way of firstlings sacrifice (firstfruit offering) before our own consumption of the harvest or the animal (the undifferentiated form in which the law of the first-borns [la loi des premiers-nés] is rooted); or through a solemn and joyous holocaust or thusia; or -- because, the order of the cosmos being exhausted after producing so much fruits for us, the ancestral spirits become dangerous, forces of disorder -- through a apotropaic sacrificial ritual during which one believes that one can set them away by, once again, the energy released from the destruction of a nutritious animal or plant... This general structure of the consumptive aspect of sacrifice moreover must not be confused with the defecatory sacrifice, of which scapegoating is an example: when one is unfortunately possessed by "disordered spirits" (instances of pollution or impurity) one must expel them, and, these "spiritual disorders" being contagious, one does this by transferring them to a scapegoat and expelling it out of society. Insofar as the consumption of energy by society to maintain its order (communion), the deposit of energy in the cosmos to renew its order (expiation as replenishment), and the defecation of disorder from social order all have to be done periodically after every definite interval of time (of degeneration) -- after every month, every season, or every year, hence the replenishment of the cosmos during the New Year Festival -- a sacrificial calendar results marking the dates of "refuelling" which the scholars of religion have identified as the "sacred time" in opposition to the "profane time"; but in fact the distinction between the "sacred" and the "profane" is misleading in this way, since everything in the world is just sacred, the difference being that the daily consumption of energy by individuals separately is not peculiar and so not ritualistic, whereas the monthly, seasonally, or yearly consumption of energy by society or refuelling of the cosmos is special and so ritualized, the concentration of its acts thus appearing more "sacred" in contradistinction to everyday consumption. The general structure of sacrifice we have arrived at (slightly simplified below) is of utter importance in understanding presently the complex meaning of Jesus' sacrifice:

• 1. Ergonic
  • (a.) exergonic: communion (sacrifice for us ourselves to eat in order to maintain or renew our own order)
  • (b.) endergonic: expiatory (sacrifice for gods and spirits to eat in order to maintain or renew their order, i.e. the order of the cosmos)
• 2. Defecatory: expiatory (sacrifice in order to expel disorders within ourselves)
• 3. Non-ergonic
  • (a) accompaniment (for the dead)
  • (b) divination (communication with spirits or gods)

Remember that endergonic sacrifice appears frequently in the form of reciprocity (do ut des) because, in order to withdraw a desired state from the cosmos in the future, one must beforehand deposit the necessary energy. By reflecting therefore on the cultic experiences of such otherwise a simple people we have discovered a whole "ergonic" structure which resembles, or is just the primitive equivalent of, modern engineering. Through sacrifice the primitives really believed that they could change the state of nature: primitive religiosity is not a symbolic order, except in the most trivial sense -- just as, though different types of food may be embedded in the referential symbolic order of a culture, we do not eat them simply as a matter of engaging in communicative symbolism but because we would die otherwise: reject then immediately the definition of or approach to religion by both the French school (c.f. that of Jean-Pierre Vernant earlier, and even of the British Mary Douglas) and the American sociology of religion (c.f. that of Robert Bellah and Peter Berger). Just as we have seen that the confinement to the perspective of modernity and the failure to comprehend the religious experience of traditional peoples have resulted in so much distortions in the field of religious studies in the West, we shall see below that these same factors have generated much confusions in the understanding of Jesus' sacrifice even among these otherwise well-learned scholars of Christianity.

(While we moderns know that the biosphere is automatically "fertilized" everyday by the sun without our worries, the primitives believed that it was up to human beings to regularly fertilize it through endergonic sacrifice: humans are for the cosmos what enzymes are in an organism. This, as said, is due to the egocentric definition of disorder or entropy in primitive consciousness.)

The meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice

Mort pour nos péchés is composed of four essays written by four scholars to interpret the meaning of Jesus' death from four disciplinary perspectives: Léon-Dufour from the textual-historical ("La mort rédemptrice du Christ selon le Nouveau Testament"), Vergote from the anthropological or that of religious studies ("La mort rédemptrice du Christ à la lumière de l'anthropologie"), Bureau from that of ethnology ("La mort rédemptrice du Christ à la lumière de l'ethno-sociologie des religions"), and Moingt from that of theology ("La révélation du salut dans la mort du Christ: esquisse d'une théologie systématique de la rédemption"). We are not here to delineate exactly their respective conclusions, but to learn what in their analysis may illuminate the primordial meaning of Jesus' sacrifice such as when first constructed by the earliest Christians. Our goal is therefore closest to Léon-Dafour's, and Bureau's analysis is mostly ignored as he concentrates on the contemporary case of the reception of Jesus' sacrifice among the Bwiti Fang.

Vergote rejects, seemingly plausibly, immediately Girard’s interpretation of Christ as scapegoat; we have already commented that the latter's interpretation of all sacrifices as scapegoating is totally anachronistic. Since “Enlightenment” Westerners have felt tempted to see society as formed on the basis of a “contract” between humans who are supposedly so aggressive that they cannot come together into a unity without some mechanism consented by all which restrains their murderous instinct toward one another: otherwise they would kill each other in a war of all against all. Girard takes the scapegoat as the primitive equivalent of a social contract. (c.f. Nancy Jay, ibid., Ch. 9, "Theories of Sacrifice".) It is totally inappropriate to project onto the innocent primitives such degenerate notion of human nature which characterizes only the moderns.

Vergote has well understood that, in the beginning, “sin” does not mean something moral, but rather “impurity” or “pollution” (souillure). Using Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer he notes that impurity was understood by the primitives as some quasi-physical thing, i.e. as a disordered spirit which can pass from one being to another. (Refer back to Jane Harrison's statement earlier ["Greek Religion"].) It is for this reason that the expulsion of a scapegoat carrying the polluting spirit, or the expiatory (endergonic, apotropaic) sacrifice which satisfies this spirit, can liberate us from it.

Vergote then goes on to confuse the meaning of expiatory sacrifice in general, but let's ignore that. What is important is to understand that at this primitive level "fault" is not of an abstract moral quality but brings into being disorders in the physical reality caused by disorderly conducting "spiritual" entities:

Hence Vergote not only rejects the notion that Jesus could be some sort of scapegoat (p. 52) -- remember Evan-Pritchard's description of how in the Nuer's sacrifice of a goat whose back has been rubbed with the ashes representing the "faults" they have committed, the blood flowing into the earth is supposed to carry these faults away? (1.1. Ch. 4: "The Logic of Sacrifice") The designation of Jesus as the “lamb” must have some other meaning than this. But perhaps Girard has found some signs in the Bible which points to scapegoating? -- but also, noting that the Hebrews have advanced beyond understanding "fault against God" as some sort of quasi-physical thing to perceive that "fault [evil: mal] is pardoned by religious conversion which is attrition" (p. 56), dismisses the meaning of the death of Jesus as in any way a "propitiatory sacrifice" (which, of course, he didn't quite understand even in the case of Nuer; ibid.).

He next tackles the popular notion of Jesus' sacrifice as a substitutive punitive expiation, which is expressed as early as by Saint Anselm:

Such an expiatory punishment in the way of inflicting on the guilty party an amount of suffering equivalent to that of the victimized and which constitutes a reparation for the latter lies at the foundation of even the contemporary notion of justice but has a quite ancient origin, as, remember, Nietzsche has noted, in the reciprocity in commerce -- not just among the ancient Germans but everywhere. And we have further noted that this kind of justice and necessary reciprocity constitutes also the foundation of the Indic notion of karma and the general imagination of the judgment of the dead. "Expiatory punishment" is therefore also a primordial human experience, is motivated by, as noted, the comprehension of the necessity of equilibrium in nature, and characterizes as well the anxiety which, as noted by Lanternari ("Origin of Primitive Religion", ftnt. 10), motivates the primitives to sacrifice (endergonically) after a successful hunt or harvest.

We have thus identified two very ancient lineages of the meaning of sacrifice which may possibly be found in the sacrifice of Jesus: the ergonic and the juridic based on the understanding of necessary equilibrium even in the case of fortune. But Vergote also rejects any understanding of Jesus' sacrifice as juridical. For him, the essence of Christianity is the forgiveness of God (is this reinterpreted in a modern sense?) and, for that, "a sincere faith and contrition suffice... The doctrine of substitutive expiatory sacrifice, on the contrary, poses God as in a relationship of symmetric equality with His partner... One maintains the idea of an equilibrium between fault and satisfaction, which makes no sense except in a relationship of equality established on strict justice." (Ibid., p. 57; "... la foi sincère et contrite suffit… La doctrine du sacrifice expiatoire substitutif, par contre, pose Dieu dans un rapport d’égalité symétrique avec son partenaire… On maintient l’idée d’un équilibre entre faute et satisfaction, ce qui n’a de sens que dans un rapport d’égalité établi sur la stricte justice.") He notes further that "the idea of substitution gets its rationality only from the inadmissible concept of the vengeful divine justice." (Ibid., p. 58; "... l’idée de substitution ne tire sa rationalité que du concept inadmissible de la justice divine vengeresse.") He admits that, certainly, the Old Testament has preserved the image of "a terrible God whose jealousy must be satisfied" -- which is found, for example, in the instance where "in order to save their first-borns from the hands of a 'God of blood', the Hebrews will offer afterwards a sacrifice of repurchase" (p. 59; "pour sauver leur premiers-nés des mains d’un ‘Dieu de sang’, les Hébreux offriront par la suite un sacrifice de rachat"). He tries to explain this image with the sort of primitive psychic mechanism such as underlies also psychoanalysis: "Experience has shown in effect that in the obscure regions of his psychism, man is haunted by the idea of a mean God, monstruous superego, doubly magnified by the Oedipal fantasy about a jealous father who requires the sacrifice of life as the price for his love." (Ibid.; "L’expérience montre, en effet, qu’en d’obscures régions de son psychisme, l’homme est hanté par l’idée d’un Dieu méchant, surmoi monstrueux, double agrandi du phantasme oedipien du père jaloux qui exige le sacrifice de la vie comme prix pour son amour.") But then he considers to be precisely the essence of Christianity the fact that "the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ has exorcized the divine phantom with which the unconscious ambivalence of man peoples the sky" (p. 61; "... que la manifestation de Dieu en Jésus-Christ exorcise la fantôme divin dont l’ambivalence inconsciente de l’homme peuple le ciel").

We hesitate to agree with him. First of all, the image of a vengeful God, as we have seen, does not derive from some primitive psychism, but from the experience of the exhaustion of the cosmos which is supposed to consequently degenerate into disorder (hence natural catastrophes). Psychoanalysis, and all the fashionable talk about the unconscious and emotional ambivalence, are dispositifs of modernity, to use Foucault's words, and, by moulding modern subjectivity, they only characterize the moderns: it is therefore, again, anachronistic to apply these to the primitives. Secondly, in the experience of the primitives equilibrium is considered the necessary or final state of the nature of things, as modern thermodynamics has confirmed on the structural level of reality. In this regard, the inequality between man and God is irrelevant.

Participating in the trend of interpreting away this substitutive punitive notion which underlies the vulgar understanding of Jesus' sacrifice in the contemporary Protestant world, Moingt adds that "if one objects that in effect there is reparation, for redemption is an act of justice [restoration of equilibrium], then one commits anthropomorphism, lending to divine justice the exigencies and trivialities of human justice (p. 150; "Si on objecte qu'en effet il y a réparation, car la rédemption est acte de justice, alors on commet un anthropomorphisme, on prête à la justice divine les exigences et les petitesses de la justice humaine"). He does much rationalization of the "sacrifice" of Jesus in the sense of offrande -- the self-offering of Jesus he interprets as just the expression of total obedience to God, of the "perfect faith" (p. 151 - 2) -- and of rachat -- through the total obedience which Christ expresses in our stead to God ("OUI total à Dieu", p. 154), so Moingt says, we have been re-created by God anew (given, of course, our "deliberate participation in the faith of Christ", p. 155). Below we'll see how senseless are these sorts of rationalization of the unavoidable archaism preserved in the presentation of Jesus' sacrifice. Note, moreover, that he suffers also from the secondary problem shared by all, that he simply does not understand the multiplex meanings of sacrifice, confusing "offering" (alimentary) with "expiatory suffering" (juridical, punitive), thus mistaking even do ut des for legalistic forgiveness or cancellation of fault, and consequently misinterpreting redemption as "l'acte de faire grâce" (p. 150).

Léon-Dufour, on the other hand, is able to justify Jesus' sacrifice as substitutive expiatory. First of all we must know that he has denied the common identification of Jesus with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (p. 23 - 4). Now consider Marc 10, 45:

Here lutron anti signifies substitutive expiatory sacrifice. Léon-Dufour goes to great length to explain how substitution may function, i.e. "how another may take upon himself the acts of which one is fully the author, and the consequences of these acts" (p. 22), because his understanding of the meaning of Jesus' sacrifice is just this, in terms of ransom. He notes first of all that lutron, and the related apolutrosis and redemptio, translate the Aramaic gôêl which refers, in the familial law, to "the close relative to whom is incumbent the duty of re-purchasing the property and persons who have become the property of a stranger" (p. 19; "... le proche parent auquel incombe le devoir de racheter biens et personnes qui seraient devenus la propriété d'un etranger"; Lv. 25, 26 - 49). In the context of commercial law, it is the equivalent of the Hebrew pâda, "to deliver against an equivalent": "one re-purchases the life of the first-borns or the slaves with a ransom" (ibid.). But how does Jesus re-purchase our life with his death? Léon-Dufour notes two possibilities. First, he "pays" with his own pain (p. 20): the same old theme of reparation through one's own equivalent suffering which compensates the original victim by giving him the sadistic pleasure of watching the guilty suffer (Nietzsche). But Léon-Dufour does not like this possibility, probably because it puts God in a rather undignified light. The second is reconciliation with God through the blood of Christ, which re-introduces us into the alliance with God (the new testament). But how does blood do this? He notes that the blood of the sacrificial animal is traditionally tabooed because it belongs to God -- let's give him this for now even though he does not really understand the meaning of sacrifice. This blood, when poured out (versé), is supposed to fill up the gap separating man from God so that the two may commune again. We completely reject this interpretation because it is based on the erroneous understanding of the function of sacrifice as communicative (below) -- and finally of the function of "religion" as linking up man with God: we know that the lamentation over the separation from God does not arise until the speculative power on the human condition has been unleashed, such as with Hesiod: these concerns are already "post-sacrificial." In fact, it is the first possibility that is meant in lutron: the question is not whether God may be such a sadist but whether human beings at the time can only understand "reparation" in this rather un-dignified way. Furthermore, his explication of the meaning of substitution in terms of "solidarity" fits better with the first possible meaning of ransom than with the second:

As the "king of the Jews," then, Jesus is the representative of the Jewish people who suffers an equivalent amount of what God himself has suffered because of the transgression of Israel, in order that the cosmos may find its equilibrium again: the juridical notion of Jesus' sacrifice as substitutive and as punishment is thus established.

But let's consider all the other instances Léon-Dufour has cited where the New Testament writers speak of the sacrifice of Jesus:

Note that in the Septuagint "holocaust" is precisely translated by qusian eiV osmhn euwdiaV. Christ is then here presented as an expiatory (endergonic) sacrifice: food for God in order to make him strong or renew his order (the fertilization of cosmos-God)! God eats himself here. Next:

Jesus is here presented as a scapegoat (defecatory sacrifice), an innocent victim who is imbued with our "sins" and takes these with him to the far-away corner of death. Girard's interpretation thus seems to be able to find some justification here. But for this to be, "sin" must signify some quasi-physical thing, a "pollution" or "impurity," i.e. disordered and disordering spirits. This is indicated by tais hamartiais apogenomenoi: the degeneration unto death happens through the disintegration of order. The primitive experience of the cosmos and human society as incessantly degenerating in accordance with the arrow of time is very much present here. Remember also that the prophets have already experienced the human defection from Yahweh's order as necessary, as simply the "natural course of things" (i.e. as the arrow of time). In this sense we are indeed degenerating away into disorder with our "sins" (defection). Moreover dikaiosune means originally, as in Plato or Paul, "order", so that Jesus' carrying away of our disorder results in our restoration to order and, thus, to life: the same "eternal return to the origin of Time" after entropic exhaustion of which Mircea Eliade speaks. All this shows that, however, as Vergote himself has noted, Girard didn't even understand the meaning of scapegoat since he sees it as just an arbitrarily chosen victim on whom people may vent their instinctual violence rather than as a depository of some actual, physical pollution. Now let's consider the last example from John 6: 32, 35, 6: 51, 6: 54:

We eat Jesus by believing in him. As said, with John Jesus is presented like a totemic sacrificial animal for a communion feast (exergonic sacrifice): the manifestation of God himself which we eat to regenerate our order. The "eternal return to the origin of Time" happens at the end of Time: linearization (below).

Finally, there may also be instances where the meaning of sacrifice in terms of its efficacy remains unexpressed altogether. E.g. Ga. 1. 4.:

Here it is only said that Christ's death is to deliver us -- the manner unspecified -- from the miserable life in the temporal world where we need to labour in hardship. (Side-point: anti-work ethic!)

Having grown up in a world already de-animized, both Léon-Dufour and Vergote can no longer see in sacrifice any ergonic sense and thus erroneously, following the path of the French school, interpret sacrifice as communicative, the former seeing the blood of Jesus as forming a bridge, the latter basing himself on Lévi-Strauss' interpretation of sacrifice as metonymically symbolic (and using throughout, again, the sacralization-desacralization schema) and then seeing Jesus' sacrifice as re-establishing the link between man and God: the alliance with God which has been broken by Israel's defection from the covenant with God (the old testament) is restored in these two ways (the new testament). But there is simply not the slightest meaning of communication or "linkage" in the sacrifice of Jesus, which is characterized, in all instances cited, rather by meanings already archaic from the point of view of Yahwism, insofar as the "laws" of the Jews -- the contractual mode -- are supposed to have rationalized the cosmos (Berger, Weber) and rendered sacrifice (ergonically) useless. The prophets have already warned that it is obedience to Yahweh's justice, not sacrifice, which can render man pleasant to God, i.e. which can restore the alliance. This is the consequence of the transcendentalization of God: ergonic sacrifice will not work except for gods that are immanent within the cosmos, that is, within the atmosphere. The Jews have already passed beyond the method of sacrifice, which seems moreover incompatible with "alliance" (the contractual mode). Because of this transcendentalization which de-animalizes the cosmos for the first time, the Hebrews understand "sin" more and more in the modern juridical sense of legalistic and moral faults and less and less in the primitive sense of "disorder", "impurity", "pollution". Just like the modern Protestant Evangelicals. How then to explain the sudden appearance of a relationship between Jesus' "sacrifice" and the new "alliance"? We propose a possible scenario.

The first Christians were completely shocked by the execution of Jesus. How to explain such unjust event? (The problem of theodicy.) Now that our master has been put to death, what are we to do with our faith?⁴ They tried to find a meaning for this, to imagine a design of God which they did not yet comprehend but wherein the death of Jesus would have a historico-redemptive function. And they found it in the traditional praxis of sacrifice: the death of Jesus is a sacrifice to redeem us! But which kind of sacrifice: communion (exergonic: John), expiatory (endergonic: Ep. 5. 2), defecatory (1 P. 20, 21 - 4), or juridical (Mc. 10. 45)? They didn't really decide on this definitively, or perhaps it was the unification of all types. Hence all these meanings of sacrifice are present in their interpretation. It is because the first Christians tried to explain an unexpected "accident," so to speak, that they had to re-institute an archaism that the religious framework of the Jews had already surpassed. Ever since we become obligated to interpret the link between the sacrifice of Jesus with all its archaic alimentary and punitive meanings and the more advanced alliance with God: so Léon-Dufour, Vergote, and Moignt all try hard to interpret away these archaic meanings from the "sacrifice" of Jesus.⁵ This, despite the obvious exergonic meaning fixed within the Eucharist. This does not mean that the death of Jesus as sacrifice is false, but only that, from the perspective of a believer, the design of God for our salvation is located more in the framework of traditional, intraworld sacrificial religiosity than in that of Yahwism: the universality of Christianity! It is within this traditional or universal framework that the death of Jesus as sacrifice constitutes the advancement as indicated ("The Logic of Sacrifice"): instead of being a temporary restoration which lasts only for definite interval of time and which thus needs to be periodically repeated -- like ordinary sacrifices -- the sacrifice of Jesus is once and for all, at the end of time, and lasts for eternity in its effect: linearization of an originally circular operation, just like the constitution of the Yahwist eschatology in the hands of the prophets. Universalization and linearization: Jesus then has died for all people, even those who have not yet been born.

This (linearization) means that while what we have so far been preoccupied with is in respect to the manner of the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrifice (in which of the four ways is Jesus’ sacrifice meant to work? The question of meaning) we should not lose sight of the fact that this sacrifice itself is for the sake of the eternal salvation of our soul, i.e. of our order. As said, the negation of Time, or of the Arrow of Time, aimed at by the salvational traditions, is not just conservation in the usual sense (of material) -- which is self-evident -- but conservation of order, which is what "eternal life" means. Thus John 3. 16:

Without the sacrifice of the Son, the world necessarily degenerates away, just as according to the arrow of Time, although the language here shall be legalistic, in terms of "sin" and "judgment". But this latter means that linearization is also interpretable in accordance with the two ancient lineages: one the linearization of alimentary function (the Arrow of Time and Eliade's eternal return) and the other the linearization of karma (see "Orphism"). So from the exergonic alimentary symbolism in the description of Jesus' body as the bread John here in 3. 18 switches back to legalistic symbolism of judgment.

John's first mode of salvation shares with the second mode the same understanding that the majority of the human race detest (salvational) truth. (See also "The comparision of Logos with Dao")

Just as in Plato's allegory of the cave the majority of people, as prisoners, prefer the shadows on the wall to the real things the perception of which can liberate them, and just as in Laozi's words, "When the lowest type of people hear of Dao, they laugh [to reject it]; if they don't, then the Dao is not enough of Dao",⁶ so here John expresses the same tendency of the ordinary people to prefer falsehood and bad work, except that he formulates the problem in legalistic, moral, or karmic if one will, terms. Recall the thermodynamic origin of good and evil: people prefer order-dissoluting bad work, stupidity, and ignorance because these are "easy," going with the flow of the arrow of time instead of going against it. The saved, the good, the truthful, then necessarily contract to a small minority of the "elect" (elektos).

Footnotes:

1. “At present, some 593,000 residents of Taiwan are Protestant while another 298,000 are Catholic. There are also five mosques serving 54,000 Muslims in Taiwan.” The Government Information Office of Taiwan, Q & A about Taiwan: Religion.

2. Matthew 1. 18: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: Mary his mother having been espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child by the 'Holy Wind'": ... mnhsteuqeishV thV mhtroV autou MariaV twi Iwshf, prin h sunelqein autouV eureqh en gastri ecousa ek pneumatoV agiou.

3. As the anima of ox produces oxen, so the replenishment of it to enable it to produce more oxen in the future naturally involves the sacrifice of an ox. Hence the formula that sacrifice is always of an animal particularly sacred to the god in question who is himself often thought of in the form of this animal.

Remember, again, that whether expiatory endergony uses animals or plants, hence involves the suffering of a sentient being or just the waste of some vegetals, is irrelevant to the meaning of offering as "refuelling" or "replenishment." Festus p. 318: sacrima appellabant mustum quod Libero sacrificabant, pro vineis et vasis et ipso vino conservando, sicut praemetium de spicis quas primum messuisseat sacrificabant Cerei." "They called the juice of the vine sacrima because they sacrificed it to Leber with a view to the conservation of the vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as they sacrificed to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first reaped." (Cited by J. Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 84) The fruits of vine are sacred actually already because they are the ancestral manifestations for our benefit; but some of the juice of the vine is given back to replenish the "vine anima" which manifests itself as these fruits: again, like replenishes like.

4. “To speak of the Messiah and crucifixion in the same breath seemed a contradiction – scandalous, foolish… For the ancients, the word itself carried not a single positive connotation. It implied that the crucified person was one who had so offended the much admired laws of Rome as to deserve the most severe and demeaning punishment. Such a person could hardly be a savior… Indeed, the idea of a crucified Messiah was such an astonishing reality that it overturned many of the religious doctrines and expectations [the early Christians] had formerly held. Centuries were to pass, however, before Christians felt at ease representing Jesus on the cross pictorially. In the early days they embraced more positive images of him, such as the Good Shepherd bearing a lamb on his shoulders.” (After Jesus: the Triumph of Christianity, The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. 1992., p. 7) Next to the conception of sacrifice as a means to resolve this contradiction, the early Christians also use for this purpose the idea of resurrection.

A New Catechism (1965; trans. of De Nieuwe Katechismus), which explains the Catholic view on the matter of Jesus' sacrifice, first presents the usual juridical or substitutive-punitive meaning of Jesus' sacrifice and then rejects it: "In the Middle Ages and for a long time afterwards, even in present-day preaching, stress is laid on the following aspect: The Father had been offended, the order of justice disturbed [or the karmic law set going, whichever one of the two ways of justice-conception one wants to employ to look at the matter], and a penalty had to be exacted. The Son was the victim who paid the debt in full. Thus the right order was re-established [and we can consequently resume contact with God, return to God: eternal life].... This view starts from a rather one-sided concept which we can no longer entirely make our own. It is the medieval notion [not so medieval, but rather perennial] that sin or an offence upset the just order of things [the internal equilibrium of the socio-cosmic organism]. But this could be corrected by punishment and the infliction of pain. This is a feeling which we ourselves often share. A wrong-doer will equivalently say -- hit me, I have deserved it. But on the whole, at the present-day, we take a more personal view of guilt and evil. It is not a right order of things but a person who is injured and offended. This is not put right by the infliction of pain and punishment, but by regrets, works, and love.... The Redemption accomplished by Jesus is not seen primarily as the pain he suffered to restore a right order, but the service and goodness of his life, which makes satisfaction for us. The Father did not will the pain and death, but a noble and beautiful human life. That it ended in such a death was due to us" (p. 280 - 1). Redemption is thus not by the destructive debt-paying through pain as the compensating pleasure for the injured (Nietzsche), but by the constructive debt-paying of doing good. But by proposing this modified, positive version of the juridical view, this Catholic has also cast Jesus' sacrifice as an accident caused by us only.

5. As Vergote himself notes in his conclusions: "On peut se demander si le sacrifice religieux au sens ancien aurait pu survivre dans la culture occidentale. Il avait trop partie liée avec les discours mythiques et avec les systèmes symboliques appartenant à l'inconscient collectif des anciennes cultures. Une culture critique, attentive à l'histoire et avertie des symbolismes tend à intérioriser les rites et à les supprimer, que ce soit dans une mystique gnosticisante, se déployant dans les images symboliques, ou dans une disposition de foi orientée vers l'engagement éthique." (Ibid., p. 83) Speaking for himself and the others with him here!

6. Daodejing 41: 上士闻道勤而行之。中士闻道若存若亡。下士闻道大笑之。不笑不足以为道。 "When the highest type of people hear of Dao, they diligently follow it; when the average type of people hear of Dao, some things they retain and others they lose; when the lowest type of people hear of Dao, they laugh out loud at it; if they don't, then the Dao is not enough of Dao."