Like many Christ-followers in the England, including Anglicans, I am a Protestant evangelical. As such, I have enjoyed the experience of God’s forgiveness in my life and of the living reality of a Christian community in which the Holy Spirit is at work.  

But I have always had a secret problem. How was I to offer unbelievers an intellectually coherent account of the propositional basis of my faith — something I, as an evangelical, was certainly obliged to do? In the language traditionally adopted by Protestant evangelicalism, this boiled down to the single all-important question: why those benefits Christians now enjoyed of forgiveness and Spirit-led community should have required the cross as the necessary means of their accomplishment. The burgeoning literature on atonement suggests that I am not the only Christian to have experienced this difficulty. 

Unfortunately, the quasi-unanimous response of our church leaders to this question — penal substitution — is not one I have ever been able to accept. For a start, it failed me as an explanation of our experience of God’s forgiveness: what sense could be made of the notion of justification understood as a person paying the penalty for the misdeeds of another? And as for that other key aspect of our experience, the living reality of Christian community, this was not something penal substitution even attempted to address. In short, a problem of moral logic (or rather illogic) was compounded by the relegation of our experience of Christian community to a theological bolt-on — as if church were just a mutual support-group for those ‘being saved.’ 

On the whole, I felt a sneaking sympathy for those evangelical rank-breakers (Chalke, McLaren, Bell) who preached God’s forgiveness, and the inauguration of His Kingdom in the mission of Jesus as retold in the synoptic Gospels — and simply left the whole notion of sacrifice to one side. At least, that account of Christianity did not overstep the bounds of my credibility. But was it a viable option for an evangelical simply to set sacrifice to one side in this way, given its prominence in Scripture? Somehow, that didn’t feel right either.  

So here was my evangelical problem. The answer to it came later in life and as a result of a quite fundamental about-turn in my thinking about sacrifice. I leave it to any fellow evangelicals reading this post to determine whether that answer has taken me beyond the bounds of evangelicalism; but I am at least confident of now having a respectable account I can give of my Christian faith.  

Space does not allow me to describe all the twists and turns of my journey. However, the conversion in my own understanding of Christ’s sacrifice can be conveniently encapsulated in terms of my encounter with a particular book. This was Robert Daly’s Sacrifice Unveiled. 

In retrospect, I find it hard to explain how, as a Protestant evangelical, I could have been reading this book at all. For a start, it is about the eucharist, a topic I would not have seen as particularly relevant to my own soteriological enquiries. But – far more importantly – I had always viewed Roman Catholic understandings of sacrifice as somehow marginal to that most fundamental and distinctive tenet of Christian doctrine, as I understood it. This was that the sacrifice of God in Christ was an event in which the agency was entirely God’s, and our own role was limited to that of recipients of His grace. As expressed in those most famous words of Cranmer’s liturgy: ‘Although we be unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service.’ An axiom constantly reinforced by such Evangelical luminaries as Miroslav Volf or Philip Yancey. 

The reason I took the book off the shelf at all was that Daly is a well-known follower of René Girard, who is the author of a theory of sacrifice that at that time seemed to me, as it has to many others repelled by penal substitution, to offer a basis for an alternative, non-substitutionary account of the relevance of the Christ-event. I would probably not have got beyond the opening of this volume if its first pages hadn’t claimed to be offering their account of sacrifice as an alternative to penal substitution. That at once caught my attention. As a result, I was induced to consider whether Daly’s very non-Protestant account of sacrifice would indeed, as he assured me, render penal substitution and other such models and theories altogether redundant. Strangely enough, by the end of the book, I was persuaded that it did! 

Here, then, is that account of Christian sacrifice.  

The self-offering of the Son, Daly claims, is the ultimate response to the self-emptying (kenotic) generosity of the Father. All the Father’s earlier gifts to humankind culminate in the offering through the Son of the means by which humans themselves can make, in the power of the Holy Spirit which the Son leaves behind, an adequate sacrificial response to His own initial generosity – a response they could not have made unassisted in this way. Not only, then, does the Son himself make this adequate sacrificial response to the Father. He also, with the advent of the Holy Spirit that is consequent on his death, enables his disciples to share his adequate sacrificial response. So, the accomplishment of sacrifice involves a mutual giving between the persons of the Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Into this sacrificial movement of self-offering humankind is progressively drawn, first in Christ alone, then in the entire Church, which, through the Holy Spirit, returns to the Father what, in the Son, it has already received from Him. Sacrifice, then, is a reciprocal gift of love and self-offering between the persons of the Godhead, which engages humankind through the ecclesial community instituted through the self-offering of Christ. 

Now the first thing to note here is that Christian sacrifice so defined is not restricted to the once-and-for-all suffering and death of Jesus for our sins (that is, the cross). It is also an ongoing cosmic action of sacrificial worship and self-offering. Still more important, from my point of view, is that this sacrifice comes to involve ourselves. Through the Holy Spirit, we, as church, actually come to share in the sacrificial agency of God in Christ. In Daly’s vision, sacrifice is NOT something in which the active role is entirely Christ’s and ours just to receive; it is something in which Christians come to share. In other words, Christian sacrifice is participative, not merely receptive. 

Actually, as I now see it, this is the proper understanding Christian sacrifice. On this understanding, Christ’s sacrifice was not simply about funding God’s forgiveness, and did not therefore have to be understood wholly in terms of its accomplishment of that end. It was about enabling us to offer ourselves back to the source of our being in an act of total worship – something other religions have always sought to do, but Christ allows his church to do worthily. I could see how  Christ’s self-offering (even ‘unto death on the cross’) would have been necessary to this broader end, in a way that it simply wasn’t necessary for the accomplishment of forgiveness. But this understanding of sacrifice also explained that other aspect of my Christian experience that penal substitution didn’t even address: the institution (through sacrificial worship)  of an ecclesial community. It placed the inauguration of God’s Kingdom front and centre. But it did so not — as McLaren, Bell, Chalke et al. — by marginalizing the role of sacrifice, but in a way that made sacrifice fundamental. In short, it simultaneously resolved two problems of our Evangelical presentation of the faith: the illogic of our doctrine of justification and the insufficiency of our ecclesiology. 

The realization did not come to me solely through Daly’s study. Readers of his book will know that, for various reasons, Daly prefers not to associate this sense of sacrifice with eucharistic ritual, preferring to see it in ethical terms. This struck me as implausible, and set me searching for theological approaches to sacrifice that saw his participative understanding of sacrifice paradigmatically embodied in the eucharist itself. These I almost immediately discovered in liturgical studies emanating from a range of non-Protestant theologians: Gregory Dix, Alexander Schmemann, Louis Bouyer, and Henri de Lubac. 

The eureka moment, however, was this realization itself. That, if we evangelicals could only adopt a participative, as opposed to a receptionist, understanding of Christian sacrifice, there would open up a possible understanding of the Christ event  that was relevant to our lived Christian experience. Atonement theories like penal substitution would simply become unnecessary. So far as I am aware,  Daly’s book is unique, not in proposing  a participationist theology, but in locating  our soteriological difficulties in the lack of one, and recommending such a theology as their solution. 

This is a message I would like to share with fellow Protestant evangelicals — not necessarily because we love rituals or have a sacramental view of the world (we may well not), but because we are serious about our evangelism, and need our account of the propositional basis of our faith to make better sense on our own terms!