Saved From Sacrifice

There is a saving act of God in the cross, and there is a sinful human act. The two are so close together that it is easy for them to get mixed up in our understanding, and in our theology. The saving part is so real that it exercises an effect even when distorted almost beyond recognition in our interpretations. The sinful part is so ubiquitous that even the best theology is subject to a kind of gravitational degradation. Without the language of sacrifice, innocence, guilt, punishment, substitution, and blood we can’t tell the truth about our situation and what God does to liberate us, a truth that the cross makes available to us in a new way. With it, we always run the risk of taking the diagnosis for a prescription. Sacrifice is the disease we have. Christ’s death is the test result we can’t ignore, and at the same time an inoculation that sets loose a healing resistance. The cure is not more of the same.

This is why Christian theology has what sounds like the same language overlaid on this event twice, once for what it means according to our sacrificial usage, once to turn it around. Christians say the cross is a sacrifice….but to end sacrifice. They say “blood shed for us,” but blood shed once for all. They say “We are reconciled in his blood,” but they mean we have been freed to live without the kind of reconciliation that requires blood, the kind Caiaphas, and Pilate and Herod had in mind.

S. Mark Heim
Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology
Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross p. xii.