How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? One way. Part 3. Preparation for Sacrifice.
This is an article in a series. Please see:
How Can a Person Die in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.
The Preparation for Sacrifice: Our Messed Up Moral Theology
Well, first, why is a sacrifice for sin, and collectively for the world’s sin, even needed? What is this whole business in Judaism and Christianity about sin atonement through a sacrifice of a living thing that brings satisfaction with God and, in the Christian version, an ultimate kind, for a final sort of redemption?
You know, in this whole search for how the mega-Day of Atonement works, this is the most important starting out: to begin with, what is a sacrifice?
That’s easy.
It’s a token to God, a symbol of you. In the symbol, you are putting a replacement value for yourself, for which you need representation in a way that you could not do otherwise.
But why do you need a symbol for yourself given to God? Why cant he just look and see what you are without it?
He can and does, but without your attention to him, and only by his attention to you, this is the gazing of a creator on his creation but not the view of a creator on a creation that is himself a creator (hey, you know I could not edit that out!). A creator has free will, personal loves, and motivations, and a creator who is a creature has a vital interest in the judgment of and between propositions of reality for his survival. Therefore the position of the minor creator who is judged is of one who engages voluntarily in this his created function for his ultimate life and expression of love. The creature gives back to the Creator a token of his creators will for him, an expression that the Creator has claimed all space and things in it, even those that can deny Him.
If the sacrifice is of an animal, the animal, in an economy of a people who depend upon them for day-to-day existence, represents the highest non-human value. Its death in the sacrifice is your loss of carnal profit. To God, it is an expression of faith that He will accept your sincerity in placing him above people and things, and spiritual life above the highest carnal life.
So, you are saying in one symbol something about your belief in a higher existence. In that existence is both the conception of ultimate value and an idea of its future acquisition. The acquisition is by your sacrifice a returned value by God. But this is by the God who replaces your value expression of faith in Him through that sacrifice as your final intrinsic value. Your faith, so represented through this mediator, is what God accepts, to life, when that faith is equal to God.
It’s the most consequential, active, and sincere kind of communication to another person, not only because its to God. God is only an idea before this sacrifice. This sacrifice is to be the result of plumbing the depths of your soul, given to the highest imaginable person. The expression is by an expensive proof of the depth of that sincerity. This is your evidence that, to you, he not just an idea but a reality.
A few interesting things come out thinking of sacrifice like this.
1. This sacrificial picture is of you and your symbol, a mediator between you and God.
2. Given to God is not you before his acceptance of you, its a better mediator of your particular faith in a Truth about him.
3. Given to you is not God in a sacrificial exchange, it’s the better mediator of a specific proprietary truth of God of which he places highest.
4. In the whole picture, the object of focus is not the act of sacrifice, the objects of sacrifice, or the two parties in communion through the sacrifice. It’s not about things. It’s about meanings, not things, objects, persons or ideas. We could only refer to the focus as a particular truth. Yes, a truth of persons, things, and ideas, but about what it is that those are to hold in which is placed the most significant value.
First Things First
I hope you can see things and persons are not important before any sacrifice is given and accepted, only after as your practical means to their understanding and access. Of first importance is not a goat, a priest, a “Law,” not you, not “God” or any idea. A mediator is not just a thing; its a meaning first and foremost. A goat is just a means of its carrying. But you have to have a particular goat. It cant be diseased, unclean, of the wrong sex. It has to show as a great value, and that value is not a general, voluntary, indistinct value to whoever is giving or accepting this sacrifice. Ultimate cost as not in things of carnal value and another name for spiritual value is a knowledge of it, not its discursive tokens. If we hold this truth dearly and tightly, it will prevent us from thinking that the worship of the idea of God is a substitute for the supreme valuation and instrumentality of an idea’s very spiritual and informative reason for being. Everything is about knowledge, information, not stuff. After you have that knowledge, then things, people and ideas can represent it, while never replacing it. They become only its means of access in consciousness.
Now, does not this principle of first-things-first in consideration of the meaning of the Christ on the Cross speak of a moral obligation before even trying to divine it? I say that we don’t understand the depth of first-things-first because of our abject immorality in refusing the essence of that principle. But it’s all about maintaining minimal honesty. I say that it is not honest, in so many ways that I will speak of here, that Christ/Cross is not ultimately represented by “propitiation,” “death,” “love,” “mosaic Law fulfilled in a universal, “atonement,” “the burden of the sin of the World,” “murder,” “the intersection of God’s love and His justice,” “redemption, “persecution for righteousness,” “the redeeming benefits of his Passion and death” or any other current or historical after the 1st century. These are no meanings, they are the ideational symbols of meaning. Meaning is knowledge, information, and that is a very different thing. First-things-first and first is supposed to be about the specific biblical revelation which is going to be put for God himself long before we choose a few words to represent it.
I thought a lot about how to best illustrate this, that knowledge is first and it symbols second, especially with God. Let me just go with this.
James Tour is a synthetic chemist of renown. In a presentation about the impossibility of man creating life, a pretense that the Science has taken up as it intruded into metaphysics in the 20th century, he showed this slide:
Tour is saying that in the lab, the DNA and RNA code determines everything else. This is the means by which life looks and functions, not its matter. In the fantasy that science creates life in the lab, it is assumed that taking only one existing carbohydrate and copying existing DNA and RNA code, all by human intervention, is the creation of life. But the ugly truth is that when we do this it is by the intervention of intelligent beings. The replicate the origin of life it has to be untouched by people. You leave the right building blocks of life in a soup under a lamp, wait, and see what crawls out. But we cannot even get without human intervention one single carbohydrate, nucleic acid, lipid and protein, the basis for all cell life, let alone the code to run them in a cell. The upshot is that the cell may be our natural focus as a lifeform, but what is life ultimately is that DNA, which is a very abstract thing, and even more impossible, without which nothing lives a nanosecond. Even if the impossible happened, that a frog crawled out fo that soup, where did the DNA come from?
We look at Christ on the Cross, and we think “cell.” We as theologians are like scientists, who think that we can explain the whole of this mystery by using certain formulas and phrases which go only as far as revealing the external appearances of a theological cell and call it a sufficient reveal. We wickedly replicate Jesus on the Cross as “Jesus dying for our sins,” or “Jesus fulfilling the Jewish sacrificial Law,” or “Jesus showing his love for us by being our substitution before the wrath of God.” Perhaps “Jesus laying down his life for his friends.” These are not life. These are ideas, cells, the possible containers and signposts of life, but not life itself, which is that biblical code, that knowledge, which makes the whole thing run in the first place.
And these are our fakes, our replacements for life, created examples which we hold up as truth so we can think of ourselves as having a handle and a part in the impossible. They make us feel big. But the ugly truth is that we can’t reproduce the cell of Jesus on the Cross, and I mean that not only in the sense that we can’t do it ourselves. We cant produce it because of the impossible distance we are from divine knowledge in which we can only show, never imitate out of our minds.
We can’t because that knowledge, that information, is far more important but even more impossible for us than the theological cell. The only thing we can do is, first, admitting that the code, the divine knowledge behind it, is first, and then admit that our place is only to show it and put it first as our impossible reason for being that came from God exclusively. The impossibility of a relationship with God is not because of cells, it’s because of knowledge, and our only duty is knowing, confessing, repenting and then showing it as God’s ultimate value, not only God’s cells.
Christ on the Cross is an ideational cell, but using ideas as the whole of their meaning makes it easy to say that its meaning is something like “propitiation for sin.” It looks sort of like life, like what Miller-Urey cooked up in the lab the ’50s called it life, but real life is something that happened without the taint of human hands by an impossible act of God alone. This is not to be some naive possession of faith. In the Bible, there is an even more remarkable objective demonstration of a singular divine source for spiritual life than DNA is of a cell. DNA is the ultimate mark of God in a biological entity. Shall we leave it out of a spiritual entity, or shall we hold it up before all of our expressions of faith are uttered?
Our Theology: Fixing or Breaking Humanity?
No matter your theory of soteriology, everyone pretty much agrees that what Jesus was doing up there on that pole was being the subject of a sacrifice to God for sin. I’ll get to this shortly, this necessary instrumentality of the sacrifice as a means of communication with God. But before I do, you know I’m going to give you a preview of where I’m going.
What people debate is the extent to which this understanding of the Christian sacrifice is primarily the appeasement of God’s wrath. The summing up all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). A ransom paid to or victory over Satan and satanic powers (Origen, Mark 10:45). Fixing of broken humanity. Of the punishment of Christ in our place. There are many others. Most are a mixture of them, with one leading. But all attempts are to argue based on one against another, among the choices that historical scholarship has given us. To assume that we must take our alternatives from among the biblical interpreters after the apostles is, however, only safe if they are also offering us a more fundamental choice. They are not, because they don’t know what would be alternative other than some new and creative conclusion over biblical knowledge which speaks to our un-revelational bent. I’m asking if the more fundamental choice is not of a conclusion as the first value of the study, as important as it is, but the only possible biblical motivation that morally precipitates the survey from the outset.
Looking at the list of theories I just gave you, can you classify this as a whole? If you chose “conceptual” instead of “phenomenal,” then you are right. In the place of “phenomenal” could be factual, demonstrative, practice, informational, or that about knowledge instead of the mental symbols, the conclusions, used for their representation. Miraculous phenomena of scripture are entirely unstated or subordinate and only supportive of a particular way of thinking summarized and never self-contained in a theoretical idea.
It’s the opposite of revelation. In revelation, our theories are optional and can only be supportive of the content of the discussion, a vision of transcendent reality. Not formative of that reality. That original appearance is what it is, and how we think about it is not to confused with that appearance but is only a means of its understanding. What happens when you forget this and start to believe your theories determine truth, reality, fact, their master? Do you realize how much blood spilled over creedal theology that places religious propositions as the faith itself? Not just physical blood, I’m talking about spiritual blood. When such things invite as much opacity and paradox and divisiveness as they may give in elucidation? We cry about the fragmentation and disunity of the church because we can’t bear to see it smaller when what is formative goes relegated only to a moment of antiquity.
One choice, theirs, is the biblical truth thought given understanding is because of true religious, philosophical propositions supported by their independent reasonability and biblical proof texts. They have made up their minds, correctly, that what the Bible is offering and the way it provides it in the form of revelation is the same as what they have determined is its ultimately revealed cognitive object. Still, they have also decided that this is an idea. God’s revelation gave us a notion, and we sort it out by a discussion of competing notions. Since these notions are the goal, they are the end and the greatest value in the knowledge within the biblical truth dialectic, they determine the kind and power of their derived biblical information. That, whatever you come up with, it ends in a superior idea, with the Bible brought only to serve it and give it such substance as to bring any sense of a theophany of God brought essentially by human hands and thoughts to human construction.
Our choice is that God is to be thought functional and productive not of ideas but appearances of himself by revealed miraculous information, not its symbols. It may just be that what we should be talking about is how the historical fact of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is collectively the informational equivalent of God first, not a particular idea of God. Instead, an event divinely intended to orient and clear not our reason by rehashed ideas but our vision of transcendence by His intended device of display: a limited but powerful cognitive manifestation of himself. The knowledge of God is not a submissive puppy to our ideas about it but meant to stand in for God himself at the place in the mind which would otherwise turn toward itself.
This is not a description of our “apologetics.” Our apologetics involves all manner of argumentation for the truth of a religion, most of which are the same propositional logic and thinking. This is a description of Christian thought, which produces nothing more than what historical fact and prophetic fulfillment reveal about the mind of God and his Son. By which end-product is not ideas but the reality, power, and nature of his existence which form for us competent representative ideas, ideas which can’t detach, become independent or superior in the mind to that appearance.
concept of biblical data toward the construction of a Christian thought over it
or
biblical phenomena of God’s knowledge to phenomena of his cognitive manifestation.
Why this latter is not defaulting is plain to see. To religious philosophies, this would be offensive. It seems to be a predetermination that the Bible is a supernatural revelation before a focused search, serious thought, and honest discussion. That serious search and discussion are to be that determinative exercise. Question: what kind of search and discussion over what essential biblical information? Of course, to presuppose such a thing that the Bible is a value before correct absorption is a great evil. But as great and destructive an evil is to presume that the Bible can’t support itself, which is the working presumption that no objective deity produced it and a particular revelation shows it.
Our divines and laypeople may believe that it is a supernatural document, but also that it’s not so easy to see without a finely milled and polished lens by some expert theological artisan, or from the naïve fever swamps of the emotions. That its lines of evidence may interpret in other ways that make it ambiguous without a lot of help by smart people, or else interpretation informs by how a person might feel that day and its ability to get him through the night. These deny that an honest study of the material is possible and a true conclusion forthcoming outside of cultural or practical norms of thought and production. These reject a presupposition that the subject and biblical object in view is intrinsically prepared for the naivety and misunderstandings that come from hypocritical motivations. They deny that the object of revelation contains its own means of penetration into a subject that is sufficiently willing to receive it. They deny that the Bible has a theological “vital center.” They reject those ideas. The only divine things of an idiomatic and idiosyncratic possibility. Nothing, if not potentially Holy mental objects, can save us, sanctify us, and release us from the presence of sin.
Have They Seen the Miraculous in Scripture?
The reason we reject the truth that sits right before us is that by so doing, it restricts the quality and raises the number of the participants in the church by asserting a single, overarching biblical locus and most fundamental biblical ground: that God has appeared, in a biblical manner and with divine, otherwise impossible information that he intended to stand in his place to faith. Some don’t see it, so we have to give them something else so that they will believe. The problem is that there is no other kind of revelation suggested in the New Testament, as all that profess “faith” there either saw the Lord with their own eyes perform the miracles he did or they saw the same miracle through the historical fulfillment of the prophets. Not my dreams, not by Anslem, not by the Host, not by baptism, not by tradition, not by reason and not by “penal substitution theory of atonement,” regardless of how accurate reflections of biblical truth they may be. But the world must bring in these choices, or else how small would be a church that had a faith that only God himself in a public miracle justifies a choice? A faith processed to holiness within a spirit open to anything that will show him the truth, which truth is God’s highest value? Not sermons, songs, works, “faith” as “trust” or any other definition that itself requires definition, programs, tithes, theology books, syllogisms, and religious propositions and creeds. What would the church then do except, meeting to meeting, give understanding into the mind of God through what the prophets said should come (Acts 26:22)?
Are the Church and its churchmen the successors to the apostles in any sense, or, spiritually, people of the world? This one thing we know, that, typically, if they have seen the miraculous in scripture, it is based on a rational or emotional persuasion after an accumulated moment of personal need or an easy decision after a long tradition. Any prophetic miracle, if acknowledged at all, becomes only but a tool for persuading the hard-hearted who do not have a faith built primarily on common persuasion, but only on a superior divine construction. To would not be faith built on our modern opacities of emotion, reason or tradition, and must be pushed out at all costs either consciously or subconsciously.
It is easy to see that a concept is a construction, an entirely artificial and changeable mental object, and is not in the place of the progenitors of its existence and use, but is its child. Its child is its reality. No one sane presumes that he will form an idea, a settled view, of anything without first having exposure to what exists to necessitate it. Christianity should not be in the business of persuading anyone who can’t see the miraculous in messianic prophecy, for example, and accept in its place of revelation the Christus Victor theory of atonement or “when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.” But that is the de facto Christian business as universally conceived.
Liberal/Conservative Sin
Everyone who is a conservative knows this, but they ignore it. Invested in the whole of the monolithic Christian establishment in increasing its numbers, but also while insisting, correctly, that “faith,” or some work in response, is indispensably emblematic of a genuine convert. The two are mutually exclusive. The church, in the conservative functional estimation, is in existence imitate only what only God can do. But a faith thought supernaturally generated is faith against God and in the miraculous abilities of humans if such a belief represents by such pedestrian proofs as “I believe in Jesus,” giving to the poor, or the “ransom theory,” your feelings or your dreams. Conservatives must wake up to the fact that their theology is a fool’s errand if their “faith” and “sacrament” grounds in statements and physical actions around propositional instead of demonstrated, revealed biblical truth. The proof of prophetic promise and its historical fulfillment. Their counter-revelational alternative will grow numbers but also make a mere chimera of a church.
The Christian kind of truth awakens faith only in the divinity of an unconstructed and original manifestation of God. A sacrament is the reflexive, original, and unconstructed animation of the body in exclusive response by its obvious implications. Everything else is sophistic at best. If there is one thing that the church is not in business for it is persuading someone that God appeared before them in scripture since you don’t persuade someone that your tire is flat of the Fuller-Brush salesman is standing before them on their doorstep (I don’t think they make door-to-door visits anymore, but I’m thinking of my childhood and its a nostalgic choice. Anything will do). If the appearance is by an objective scriptural display such persuasion not piety is by the persuader the presumptive putting of himself in place of God. Peter, in context, makes clear that to give everyone a “reason for the hope that is in you” is not a call to preach the Ontological Argument. Or Calvin, to take communion, to give money, to be nice, to implore the audience to accept his personally preferred argument for God, but to give everyone the prophets fulfilled predictions of the Son of God and its spiritual implications.
All that said, I have not given you my answer to what the image of Christ on the Cross means. It’s just to prepare you a little. I am sorry if I seem overly harsh, but this subject so amps me up emotionally, and this I dare not hide too much, or else you may miss what is at stake here.
Now, the liberal view of Christ’s sacrifice essentially is that, with a view of sin as against God because of our actions and attitudes against others, what God intends of an ultimate moral example is putting others before our neighbor. Sin is acting greedy, cruel, and prejudiced, from a heart which is the same. To them, the whole of Jesus’ ministry was teaching the world how to be kind and compassionate for its moral education. It’s for those that may spend too much time pining away for objective spiritual objects and qualities that will give them something while neglecting those closer to home, in the here and now. To liberals, you deal with sin by taking the compassion of the Cross to gauge our consciences against its highest possible state of cleanliness, where the essence of the act lies entirely between one person and another. Both sin and the Sacrifice for it are here, “at hand,” and within our power. Sin is not loving your neighbor, and salvation is loving your neighbor by its most excellent example of Christ on the Cross.
To conservatives, though, Christ’s sacrifice is more than this. Sin is not just what we do. It’s who we are naturally, and it’s deep in a place where we can’t reach. The sacrifice of Jesus was in itself propitiatory by virtue of the act itself, which set a bridge between our hopeless condition and God’s nature. Although the essences of sin and its solution are unseen, we have to believe that they are there. Whatever we do, we have to respect the distance between ourselves and their inviolate spiritual objectivity, which requires our obedience to laws over which we have no control, not what we can achieve if they had no power or reality. This sacrifice realigned the potentialities of a relationship with God. An act that we are to emulate but could never duplicate.
To conservatives, the benefits of the Cross to us are made first accessible through a heartfelt belief in the independent power ex operato of the Lamb in the covering of our sin, with resurrection following as the seal of its truth, long before we think that what we do subsequently is important. Sin, manifest in actions but not seen, is spiritual disobedience to the unseen, God’s Holiness, revealed through God’s manifestation of it by the Cross of Christ, his obedience to God in consummating sacrificial Law. So salvation is the result of a kind of obedience to that which is unseen but manifested by God to us in Christ’s transcendent obedience. All of this sounds so pious, but its far from pious when you discover their view of the nature of this obedience, of Christ’s and ours.
Conservative Protestants also go a step further as a kind of blend of the liberal and conservative takes, both closing down faith as locked to God’s agency and opening it up to a voluntary definitional content. Particularly the Calvinists.
What protestants generally do is center the appropriation of the virtues of Christ on the Cross upon our sin and faith in this his work, where our faith and Christ’s work come together, and Christ’s virtues imputed to us in our unworthiness and hopelessness. This is the same as most protestants where a biblically-centsacrered “faith” is key, something that resists the subjective insularity of the liberal point of contact with God and the objectively displayed sacramental mysterium of the Catholic one. Faith is faith in Jesus as the sole judge of men’s souls and only means of salvation. Trust in his work, and the revelation of the doctrines of salvation that come through it compensates for our sin, allowing God to see us as he sees his Son and have salvation.
But the consequence of the Calvinist idea is when you make “faith,” the idea, of highest theological importance while also insisting that this is something very different from “work” as used biblically, you conceive of faith which you can’t describe in any terms that infer work. If no kind of work it can only be a sort of feeling in response to God, which is perfect if you want to value an idea, not its revelation, supremely. Thought around information then has no part in the initiation of faith, since faith is limited to the idea, not what informationally motivates it. Then, a faith with no moral implication for man for its legal engagement in a kind of initial synergistic exchange with God. Conservative protestants generally do this by refusing to identify the content of faith as one thing biblically, and the Calvinists go one step beyond and kill it off entirely by refusing to consider faith as anything but a vague and divinely infused sense.
When ones initial faith can’t be in any essential sense a work, thought only given by God and not performed by man, you no longer have to ask “what, exactly, beyond persons, propositions and objects is faith in. Because “faith” has an understood instead of scripturally experienced meaning as I describe, thorough some kind of learned and handled personal or biblically un-speciated information, its then not passively consequential by the influence of a certain of God’s power in his scriptural appearances alone. Faith is to them by definition a kind of work if it’s not around feelings with general scriptural knowledge, and this cannot stand because “faith is not by the works of the Law.” So faith becomes only an effect, and the exact nature of its spiritual power within the individual becomes religiously inconsequential and not worthy of prolonged reflection. My thought is, isn’t the essential nature of “work” spiritual, and the description of that work a knowledge which necessitates an appropriate idea of “faith?”
As the world has it, however, since people saved were set to be so before the foundation of the world, the unsaved accept their salvation not by a personal act of any kind but by “receiving or laying hold on what God has provided in the merits of Christ” in a point of their justification. But this brings up all kinds of paradoxical quandaries, making what is it about faith in Christ’s work on the Cross that is in any way essential to justification and salvation very murky. If faith is only an effect of regeneration, and justification and is entirely the result of an act of God, faith is only “the instrument for receiving or laying hold on what God has provided in the merits of Christ” after God lays hold of us. It’s no wonder why the content of the gospel need only be faith propositions, images of truth. Not necessarily faith predicates, truth itself, since entertained propositions may be confidently held without reflection. If by premises, premises must be thought over and experienced if they are to produce truth propositions, and this cannot be. Faith then becomes only something for our education, playing a part in sanctification, accompanying but unnecessary in the justifying faith of salvation.1
Look, I’m not even objecting to the Calvinist view. I mention this, not to upbraid Calvinists, but to establish the kind of cultural forces that have shaped our view of the possibility and power of revelation. You can’t make “faith” normed and undefined as something like “trust” or confidence.” Refusing to identify it with a particular biblical revelation from which it cannot detach by its use, expecting then that it’s not subsequently going up for rejection as playing an active part in your salvation. But, like voting in our country and getting the kind of government we want, we also get the kind of theology we want.
You can see that I am angling toward a view of faith in salvation centered on the Cross as something other than a symbol of a divine substance. I’m going for a divine but accessible knowledge by which God is taught an equivalent to faith’s informed revelatory content. Crucial in justifying faith and sanctification and salvation. The Cross of Christ is not either a religious idea or a mere act of compassion or a rite, which makes it’s meaning vulnerable to ambiguity and the whole question given sophistry.
But I’ll get to that later. All of this is to go beyond proposing either the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is a self-contained symbol for carnal salvation or a transcendent essence for spiritual salvation. I propose, both, but where our faith in Him and it, somehow, in whatever order and sense, completes and shows completion of a connection between God and us through Christ while not being a work of our own.
Sacrifice?
Isn’t this just a very antiquated idea of a mediated and highly conditional relationship with God? After all, we are living in a time when just about everyone takes for granted the truth of the pantheistic story of God in everything and the God who is immediately accessible through sincerity of feeling. Or, that, no worries, you will live again no matter what, just perhaps not in the kind of physical body you would have hoped. What does the idea of sacrifice, before we even discuss the Christian variety, commend itself as a starting point for a revelationally built grasp of God?
I assure you, although you can end up with pantheism, the pantheistic model is not a good start, for no other reason than you begin a search for the understanding of something entirely foreign to our natural understanding and desires and end at the same place. You may end there, but your search starts for something else, and you start with nothing, not something. Dropping the restraints of the idea of some Law standing between you and an ultimate positive state is a prejudice that answers to no authority since you just disallowed it. What you want to believe is not taken as integration into a wider and objective reality in which it fits, but it’s a luxury you can’t afford if what you want is something real and transcendent. So do you mind if we assume that, like all other relations in our lives that demand respect for rules, it might be wise to think that if there is an objective creator God, he might need an approach in a certain way? That takes in to account the ontological gap between him and his creation?
Ok, then, what are we supposed to do to bridge this gap? That’s why sacrifice as a basic relational concept between God and man makes so much sense.
Heres the thing. Sacrifice is the giving up of something of carnal value for something of a higher, spiritual value. But sacrifice is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end of understanding beyond the act. A teaching tool about the meaning of these concepts “spiritual” and “carnal,” with which humanity has so much trouble and defines sin and righteousness. It turns out as well that the understanding of sin and righteousness is not even the end values of the teaching tool of real sacrifice, it’s a vision of God himself in our utter helplessness to see him otherwise.
If you think about sacrifice according to the pagan way, for what use can an interdimensional being have with a dead goat? No, you are not going to give him food. No, if this being is the real God, and you just want you to give him something to show you value him more, what does this “value” mean? Whatever it is, count it as sitting exactly between our righteousness and our sin, our arrogance, and the false sense of power, in his mind, between which He expects us to make a moral decision.
http://www.facebook.com/cmichaelpatton. Do Calvinists Believe in Salvation by Faith Alone? – Credo House Ministries. Credo House Ministries. https://credohouse.org/blog/do-calvinists-really-believe-in-salvation-by-faith-alone. Published March 14, 2012. Accessed November 7, 2019. ↩
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