For anyone who missed the introduction to this series, you can read it by clicking here. I also wanted to note at the outset that I will not be providing comprehensive summaries of each chapter, just my reflections on them as I go. If you’d like the full context for any of the topics I explore here, feel free to get yourself a copy of Lamb of the Free to read along with me.
I’m hardly the first to write about the nuances and difficulties of translation, but it really is amazing how thoroughly language and theological interpretation can intersect. For example, there is a serious argument to be made that the entire Western Christian understanding of Original Sin is essentially thanks to St. Augustine’s unfortunate reliance on a blatant mistranslation of Romans 5:12.1 In Douglas Campbell’s foreword to Lamb of the Free, he concurs with Andrew Rillera’s forthcoming thesis that Penal Substituionary Atonement (PSA) is not just interpratively misguided, but exegetically unfounded, and this is due in large part to language and translation.
For starters, “atonement” is simply too versatile a word for its own good. Rillera explains:
“In English, the word ‘atonement’ means too many things at once. And this is a result, in part, of how this word came into the English vocabulary. I have no inherent problems with this word, but because it can be used in both a sacrificial register (e.g., to translate the Hebrew word kipper) and in a non-sacrificial register (to convey anything that falls within the broad realm of “the saving significance of Jesus’s death”), these conceptually separate domains are often conflated. And this conflation results in some major misinterpretations of NT texts, which in turn have resulted in problematic theologies about the nature of salvation.”
And further:
“Following John Wycliffe’s Middle English translation of the Bible in the fourteenth century, which used phrases like ‘to one’ and ‘one-ment,’ William Tyndale in the sixteenth century first standardized ‘atone’ and ‘atonement’ (at-one-ment). It was first used as a translation of the Greek word katallassō, which means ‘reconciliation,’ in texts like 2 Cor 5:18–20 and Rom 5:10. Katallassō, ‘at-one-ment,’ ‘reconciliation.’ This all makes good sense. So far, so good. But Tyndale then used the noun ‘atonement,’ and the verb form ‘to atone,’ to translate the Hebrew root word k-p-r in the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy). But this already makes theological assumptions about the function of Israel’s sacrificial system that Hebrew Bible scholars almost unanimously have demonstrated to be misunderstandings, as will be developed in the next chapter. For a quick teaser: In the piel form, kipper means ‘remove’ most broadly, but when used in the sacrificial system it more specifically conveys the idea of ‘decontaminate’ or ‘purify’ or ‘purge’ (i.e., removing a contamination clinging to something). Hence, kipper does not mean “reconcile,” nor “save,” nor ‘forgive.’ Equally importantly, only holy objects within the sacred dwelling place, or later the temple, receive the ritual action of kipper. In other words, when kipper happens, what is decontaminated or purified is a holy object in the sanctuary, not people.'“
This is a helpful starting place, as so often advocates of PSA will simply repeat Biblical language as if it must mean what they commonly interpret it to mean, not realizing how much of that understanding relies on the English usage of translated words, rather than the contextual understanding of the underlying terminology.
Lamb of the Free’s introduction explains that the problem here is largely one of language. Conflation of terms leads to conflation of interpretive frameworks, and the key to resolving this is to reassess the pertinent concepts in their original context. One of the main misunderstandings in question is the nature of sacrifice in the Old Testament, namely, that OT animal sacrifice is substitutionary, when in fact, it is not.
All too often, as evidenced by Stackhouse above, when people are discussing the saving significance of Jesus’s death, false equivalencies are made in rapid succession: “saving” is assumed to mean “atoning,” and “atoning” is taken to mean “sacrifice,” and “sacrifice,” so it is thought, always has a kipper function and is then assumed to be equivalent to “forgiveness.” So everything about the salvific meaning of Jesus’s death gets reduced to and conflated with “an atoning, kipper, sacrifice.”
…This matters because many of the go-to NT texts assumed to be supporting something like “penal substitutionary atonement” (e.g., Rom 3:25; 8:3, Gal 3:13, 2 Cor 5:21) are demonstrably not about sacrificial atonement (nor are they about substitution). They are about the saving significance of Jesus’s death, but they utilize a completely different conceptual framework than sacrifice in general or kipper in particular to explain that saving significance.
…Jesus’s death is a participatory phenomenon; it is something all are called to share in experientially. The logic is not: Jesus died so we don’t have to. Rather it is: Jesus died so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him, having full fellowship with his sufferings so that we might share in the likeness of his resurrection (e.g., Phil 3:10–11; Gal 2:20; 6:14; Rom 6:3–8; 1 Pet 2:21; Mark 8:34–35 with 10:38–29; 1 John 2:6; 3:16–18; etc.). In short, while Jesus did die for us, this does not mean that Jesus died instead of us. It means that he died ahead of and with us.
Another contention the introduction explores is the question of punitive vs retributive punishment. This is hardly limited to atonement; the nature of God’s punishment is tackled in every sphere of theology, from creation to eschatology. Should earthly woes be seen as God actively “punishing” us for breaking his laws, or are his laws merely what is best for us, and we suffer natural consequences for breaking them? In questions of Heaven, Hell, and the afterlife, are the torments of Hell retributive? Purgative? Proportionally inflicted by God as payback for earthly sins? Or merely the incompatibility of our corruption encountering the unvarnished experience of God’s presence? The answers to these questions aren’t for bonus points on a theology quiz; how we understand God’s punishment is a core aspect of how we understand God’s character, and how we understand God’s character determines how we seek to imitate it. A penal substitutionary view posits that forgiveness cannot actually be a gift given; it must be earned. As the classic metaphor goes, if I owe you $10 and cannot pay, but someone else steps in and gives you $10 to settle my debt, you cannot then say you have “forgiven” my debt, as the debt has been paid. Likewise, if God’s justice “owes” our sins an active retribution, such as inflicting suffering and death upon us, a punishment endured by Christ in our place, then we cannot really speak of God “forgiving” our sins. Our sins were not forgiven if the punishment was doled out.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The relevant point to make here is that none of the sacrifices in Leviticus appear to match this retributive model of punishment, nor do they represent “substitutionary” models of atonement. On the contrary, Rillera points out:
Whenever something calls for capital punishment, or for the sinner to be “cut off,” there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation (see esp. Num 15:30–31; 35:32–33). This already rules out the idea that the death of the sacrificial animal is substituting for the death of the offerer. If “substitutionary death” was the logic of animal sacrifice, then the one thing we could expect to be remedied by sacrifice would be capital offenses when the death of the offender is on the line. The fact that this is explicitly not the case means we need to rethink the OT sacrificial system and to analyze the NT’s sacrificial metaphors with this in mind.
But I think the most interesting thing in this first chapter is how Rillera elucidates the ancient conceptualization of sacrifice as found in Leviticus. Paradoxically, he explains how “sacrifice” and “death” are actually distinct and opposed concepts. Even though an animal is killed in a sacrifice, the ritual practice transforms the process into a presentation of life. Quoting at length:
Death qua “death” cannot be brought into sacred space without defiling it (see esp. Num 19; Exod 21:14; Ezek 9:7). As will be discussed more in the chapter 3, the sources of ritual impurity are all related to (non-sinful) conditions that convey “the forces of death,” as Jacob Milgrom phrased it. Not only can death itself not be brought into sacred space, but also nothing and no one associated with death via ritual impurity can be brought into sacred space (Lev 7:20–21; 21:1–6, 10–12; 22:3–9; Num 19:13, 20). Therefore, thinking that a sacrifice is conceptualized as a death (substitutionary or not)—the greatest and most potent source of ritual impurity—which is then brought into the direct presence of God fundamentally misunderstands the conceptual framework of Leviticus’s ritual ontology.
…In brief, according to Leviticus, although in “deed” an animal literally dies, in “word” via the whole ritual process (how the animal dies, where it dies, what happens to its body and blood afterwards, etc.) the death of the animal is reconceptualized and reconfigured so that what just took place was a not-killing, but a “sacrifice.” And the “sacrifice” itself will take on different meaning and significance depending on the function of the particular sacrifice being offered. So a “sacrifice” is further construed either as a “sacred gift” or, when used for kipper, into a “ritual detergent” for decontaminating sancta (sacred objects/places). But the validity of either of these purposes depends upon the sacrifice being transfigured into something completely separate from anything having to do with the concept of “death.” In short, Lev 17 makes it clear that “sacrifice” functions within a ritual ontology wholly distinct from the realm of “death.”
…Granted, this at first seems paradoxical and counterintuitive. This is why it is helpful to understand the transformative power of rituals—because it allows us to see the ethical motivation behind the instructions in Lev 17. As Smith argues, “one major function of ritual” is specifically to deal with seeming “hypocrisy” or “contradiction.” Smith goes on to explain: [R]itual represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables (i.e., the accidents) of ordinary life have been displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful. Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.
…Leviticus has an analogous yet different way of handling the tension between “the way things are” with “the way things ought to be” within its distinctive conceptual framework of reality. In Leviticus’s “controlled environment” of sacrifice the “tension to way things are” (an animal is being killed) with “the way things ought to be” (humans living in harmony with and not killing animals for food, per Gen 1:29; 2:16; 3:18–19) is dissolved because the cultic ritual makes it possible to reorient the whole process around accessing “life.” That is, the rituals make it so that the event of sacrifice is not at all about death but rather is a presentation of life (Lev 17:11, 14).
…Therefore, it is not even proper to call sacrifice a “ritual death” because the ritual depends on it not actually being comprehended as a death, which would bring impurity into the dwelling place. Sacrifice is rather a way to access “life” and avoid all associations with “death.” Sacrifice is a process by which to transform the mundane into a sacred gift. “Death” has no intelligibility in this ritual framework of perceiving the truth of the matter. Meaning, the presence or absence of these ritual actions determines the “truth” of what happened; it might be a homicide,2 or it might be a sacrifice. What the “truth” is all depends on the ritual factors discussed above.
Viewing dead animal parts as “a presentation of life” seems a little bit more than counterintuitive. But I couldn’t help but note, when consulting relevant passages in Leviticus, that the text does seem to insist on exactly that understanding:
“If anyone of the house of Israel or of the aliens who reside among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut that person off from the people. 11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar, for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement.”
“As life,” it is the blood that makes the atonement. Not “through death.” As life. God only knows how many times I read that without ever making such a connection.3
The other most fascinating revelation I found in this chapter is the conceptualization of what makes something clean or unclean. We Christians often make the mistake of associating “unclean” with “sinful” as opposed to “ritually impure,” but even once we make that distinction, what makes someone “ritually impure” can feel rather arbitrary and, to a modern reader, silly. Why, for example, do natural processes like seminal fluids or a woman’s period render a person ritually impure? Rillera facinatingly suggests:
I do not think ritual impurity is reducible to “death” or “mortality” per se. I discuss the purity framework further in chapter 3,4 but here I just note that those aspects of ritual impurity more obviously relating to death (corpse impurity in Num 19 and scale disease in Lev 13–14, which makes one’s skin look like a rotting corpse, Num 12:12) can be subsumed under a broader understanding of human finitude (human beings both begin and end) in contrast to God’s infiniteness (God not only does not procreate, but did not have a beginning and will not have an ending)…This better explains why sex and childbirth also convey ritual impurity (Lev 12, 15), not so much because they are associated with “death” or “mortality,” but rather more because they are associated with human finite beginnings. This view is found in Jub. 3:8–14, which highlights Adam and Eve’s presumed initial impurity since they need to remain outside of the holy garden of Eden (vv. 9–14), for the same proscribed days of impurity in Lev 12 (cf. Luke 2:22)
I find this so brilliant, and furthermore, it serves as a wonderful corrective to judgmental impulses we might otherwise bring to these sections of the Law. Like many readers of the Bible, I find much of the law codes and genealogies to be rather boring, and as such, I spend very little time in books like Leviticus or the opening chapters of 1 Chronicles. But I also bear the unconscious bias of a modern man, who looks back upon ancient animal sacrifice, even amongst sacred scripture, as kind of archaic and barbaric. The substitutionary view of sacrifice, in fact, encourages this dismissive haughtiness, as the brutal simplicity of “I must die so I kill an animal instead” feels like a conclusion less sophisticated people might come to.
Yet here we are presented with philosophical profundity. Far from the simple appeasement of a local deity with some farm meat (as animal sacrifice is so often portrayed), we find in Leviticus an intense understanding of the vastness of God, a view that sees him so highly that his infinite presence cannot abide finitude. Or perhaps more accurately, the finite is at risk in the presence of the infinite, and thus measures are taken to make one “clean” in the presence of God. There is so much more I could digress on here, but as Rillera promises to return to the concept in chapter three, I will reserve my thoughts until then as well.
Let me conclude with a brief note about systematizing the atonement. I’m unsure whether my (or Rillera's) pushback against PSA will end with advocating for replacing it with something as doctrinally precise. Rather, I suspect the conclusion will help us with what we should not say, rather than comprehensively listing all that we should. Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, in a lecture titled “Why the Cross?” repeatedly insists that the Orthodox faith preserves the ambiguity of the tradition. “The function of dogma,” he states, “is to eliminate heresy; never to clarify mysteries.” This is a function of Eastern Orthodoxy I’ve always admired in contrast to Rome’s apparent attempt to explicate every little detail of everything.5 And I think it’s ultimately the correct approach here, and honestly, for most theology. Early Christian writings, including our New Testament, are theologically bountiful but not doctrinally precise. I fear that much of modern systematic theology sacrifices the richness accessible only through ambiguity in the service of comfortable precision. Our attempts to be too exact about what the atonement was or means can narrow the focus beyond what the text actually says.
That being said, the text does say some things, and does not say other things. And it would appear that limiting our interpretive scope to the more exegetically defensible readings of the Levitical sacrificial system may eliminate some readings, such as overly-simplified scapegoat analogies or, of course, colloquial renditions of PSA, but when we are willing to set aside these inherited assumptions, we are left with something so much richer, fuller, and worth exploring.
Rillera also explains how Leviticus equates the non-sacrificial slaughter of an animal with murder: “According to Leviticus, killing a domesticated animal is morally equivalent to murdering a human being. That is the basic ethical claim here. Failure to comprehend the significance of Leviticus’s ritual reconfiguration of these seemingly “mundane” events, which to the untrained eye makes ritual sacrifice look like a plain and simple “death,” has led to interpretations and Christian theologies that are not only exegetically inaccurate, but, as pointed out in the introduction, can be downright dangerous…Killing a domesticated animal for a meal or trying to offer one at another altar in any other place than at the entrance to the dwelling place is not a “sacrifice” but a “murder” (17:3–5, 8–9; cf. Deut 12:11–14, 17–18). It is not that Lev 17:3–5 conceptualizes “sacrifice” as “the right/acceptable way to commit a murder.” Or, as Ina Willi-Plein expresses, sacrifice “is no act of violence, no expiatory killing,” but “[r]ather, it is a presentation of life.” Leviticus 17 makes an ontological distinction between “sacrifice” and “killing/death” by means of the reconceptualization made possible by the power of ritual.”
Though in fairness, I’ll confess that Leviticus has not exactly been a go-to text for my daily scripture reading.
And I will return to this concept once I reach chapter 3.
I’ll often frame it that, broadly speaking, the Christian East seeks to be poets while the Christian West seeks to be mathematicians. Despite being a product of the West and our affinity with Catholicism (by Protestant standards at least), I actually think we Anglicans (and unless I’m mistaken, Rillera is a fellow Anglican) lean more East in that regard, as at least my experience of Anglicanism has demonstrated a willingness to hold varying viewpoints in tension and leave the guardrails only at the borders of outright heresy (in most cases). Then again, heresy is a ludicrously subjective term, and many of our practices qualify depending on who you ask, but I digress.