and compassion for life. You teach us the wisdom that is hidden in your gospel, so we might hunger and thirst for holiness, work tirelessly for peace in our lives, counted among those who seek purpose for blessedness which comes to us. We allow you to reign in our hearts. And this prayer is always in Christ our Lord and in the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen. It talks about the gift of sacrifice. God alone is the source of all good gifts. that extraordinary generosity is manifested above all in the sacrifice of Jesus, the only Son of God, and in his sacrificial gift then of the youth.

[01:10]

And both of these gifts, as sacrificial, are in need, I think, of revaluation in light of contemporary theologic. I'm going to set out for you this one. In a book that was published posthumously called The Unionists in the West, Edward Kilmartin, a Jesuit who died of cancer a couple of years ago, pointed out today he was instead many years at the Oriental Institute in Rome. spent most of his academic life really exploring sacramental theology and very specifically the Eucharist. He asserts in this book that what can be described as the modern average Catholic theology of Eucharistic sacrifice is in general a weak synthesis without a future.

[02:15]

Then he goes on In the average Catholic synthesis, the liturgical sacrificial act of Christ and that of the Church tends to be limited to the moment of the consecration of the gift by the Church, which is identified with the moment that the recitation of the words of Christ contains in the narrative of institution. In view of the fact that the members of the assembly are also the acting subjects of the Eucharistic prayer, this average Catholic theology of Eucharistic sacrifice logically implies then an effective interpretation of the relationship between the Christian assembly and the presiding minister. have noted in the newspapers that in the past year the Eucharistic prayer of Adi and Mari was recognized by the doctrinal congregation as legitimately viewed.

[03:32]

And in that particular text there is no, no text of institution. Very interesting. The commentators, especially Robert Taft, who had been at the Oriental Institute for many years, claimed, the best we can say is it's implicit in the text itself. There are other Eucharistic prayers we don't use today, which were without, basically, a text of institution. The Eastern Church, by the way, takes a very different approach to all this. It's the whole mass which is the form of the Eucharist, or at least the whole Eucharistic prayer, and not simply the text of incident. So, in concluding his assessment, Phil Martin notes that the average modern Catholic theology of the Eucharist displays only a weak integration of Trinitarian theology.

[04:34]

In other words, our Eucharistic theology tends to be almost exclusively Christelmonist. Most importantly, the theology of the role of the Holy Spirit needs to be thoroughly integrated, and the consequences then draw. In fact, he says, it is the lack of a systematic approach to the role of the Holy Spirit that lies at the base of the overall weak Western theology of the Eucharist. Now I would note here that the overall weakness of the theology of Eucharistic sacrifice is not confined to the Catholic West. It's characteristic of much of Western Christian theology in general, Protestant as well as Catholic. And one of the major difficulties in developing a satisfactory understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice today is the simple fact that the basic meaning of the term sacrifice is the subject of vociferous disagreement among scholars.

[05:50]

Not only has the historical division in Western Christianity between Protestants and Catholics been perpetuated by continuing disagreements about the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, but also systematic theologians and biblical scholars often disagree about the correct interpretations of the nature of the sacrifice of Christ himself and Christ's role in what we call atonement. Furthermore, the very notion of sacrifice is often rejected today in contemporary Western culture. Why? Because it is often looked upon by many people as the antithesis, self-fulfillment, success, and self-actualization. You know, for those of you who are a little older, the virtue of self-sacrifice was once highly esteemed.

[06:57]

As one commentator points out, like good manners, and loyalty, and team spirit, it seems to belong to a world long, long gone. What I want to do then this morning is look at God, as the sacrificing one and to approach then God's sacrifice as a gift. I will very briefly highlight some of the skepticism that the term arouses in the contemporary world. I will then explore its place in a theology of creation And the way this whole subject of sacrifice is related to contemporary science. Some theologians feel that because the notion of sacrifice has provided so much dissension and dispute, it ought to be abandoned.

[08:06]

I don't agree with that at all, because I think it is so richly embedded, certainly, in the Bible and in the Christian tradition. then we have to grapple with the issues rather than discard the term. Alright, a little bit then, first of all about the term sacrifice in our contemporary culture. It is the introduction to a book that I have found very helpful called The Power of Sacrifice. The Scottish Reformed theologian Iain Bradley, theory BLEY, speaks of the riddle of sacrifice. The concept was prominent in the teaching of Jesus and also the way in which his life and death have traditionally been interpreted in the teachings of Jesus and consequently by subsequent theologians.

[09:12]

It can, however, promote divisions among Christians, and is often felt to be rebellious in many culturally sensitive men and women. Perhaps it's the emphasis on denial. That's what the term tends to conjure up, denial. is looked upon as conflicting then with the very positive and life-affirming message of Jesus that he hath come so we might have life and have it to the full and so many people it seems today who write about this issue have internalized a negative understanding of sacrifice because the word has traditionally emphasized costs rather than gain and loss rather than the enhancement of life.

[10:20]

Furthermore, they have tended to associate sacrifice simply with suffering rather than a positive form of self-giving and the free manifestation of love. What is the result of these complications then? Like death. Sacrifice has become, in certain areas, a taboo subject. Bradley says, it relates uncomfortably to the self-centered romanticized package of instant sexual gratification and conspicuous consumption which is presented to us daily as the essence of the good life. in popular magazines, television soap operas, and advertising slogans. He goes on and he says, our economy is ordered on the principle that any kind of sacrifice, say limitation, or surrender, or postponement, it shall be pleasure, is not just undesirable, but it's wrong.

[11:37]

It's built on credit. On the live now and pay later principle exemplify, he says, from the little plastic flexible friends who take the weighting of it they're wanting. His honesty has led them to the emergence of what has been described as the I want and what I want, I get generation. In certain areas of psychology also, than in certain aspects of New Age religion. I think you find the same similar approach. The stress in our world is often on self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-awareness. That all seems to be the very opposite of limitation, or surrender, or denial. That's part of stress in the term sacrifice. Also, this is important, some feminist theologians in particular are especially hostile toward the notion of sacrifice because they think it has been used to justify suffering, particularly the suffering of women caused by injustice, sexual and physical abuse, and oppression.

[13:07]

And as you know probably from church history, it is simply true that in the Christian tradition, some commentators, including statistic writers, way down to Thomas Aquinas, they have accorded women a very negative place. First of all as the cause of evil and suffering, and hence women are said to deserve suffering as a punishment and as a means of expiation. Furthermore, many people, and especially women, have been taught to suffer as Jesus did. Because they've been brought up in a Christian tradition, focused almost exclusively on the suffering Jesus, and have found in Him then a model for dilatation, which has induced them then to endure violence directed against them. You probably know in the past women were often exhorted to sacrifice their children for ministry in the church.

[14:15]

They were told to sacrifice their knee to the needs of their husbands and children even when these were manifested in violent or abusive form. Complicated background there we have to look at. So encouragingly There are some significant signs that self-sacrifice is still being acknowledged as an ideal. Despite of the contemporary preoccupation with self-fulfillment and self-centeredness, there does seem to be a hunger for signs of a real sacrificial spirit in the midst of our consumerism and our struggle for success. For example, Paul Gidez, an Englishman, says, it is those who have given themselves away in the most sancred manner who stand out in history as the most vital personalities.

[15:26]

Francis of Assisi, the Simone de and Mother Teresa of Belfast, Above all, this is the pattern of the cross and resurrection, which then gives us the courage to believe that to give oneself away in forgiveness is to become truly oneself. There's also the interesting phenomenon that Ian Bradley points out, and that's the remarkable success of the musical Les Miserables. which has been witnessed, by the way, by about 50 million people around the world. And if you've seen it, or perhaps looked at the VCR, you know, it's fascinating, because just like everything you're in, it's devoted to self-giving, not to self-service. So, this is background, then. On a theological level,

[16:29]

In the 1940s, there was some forking revisionist work on sacrifice above all done by French Catholic theologians, especially Eugene Masseur, who spoke to Christian sacrifice, linked sacrifice above all with order, and affirmed the life of self-sacrifice as the basic characteristic of human beings, vague in the image and likeness of God. And then, in the second half of the 20th century, there was an important revival of interest in the theology of sacrifice, especially in Great Britain and in continental Europe. Perhaps this interest, especially in the closing decades of the last century, sprang from a reaction against the dominant culture of consumption, materialism, and self-preoccupation.

[17:33]

Another interesting point, I think, is that ecological concerns, as well as the issues of economic and social justice, Prominent cultural anthropologists then to promote sacrificial lifestyles, especially among the wealthy people of the world. And this is where biblical and the Christian scholars come in. They have retrieved the importance of self-sacrifice in the New Testament period and also in the early church. Likewise, the ecumenical movement contributed importantly to a rehabilitation of the concept of sacrifice by encouraging honest dialogue between Catholics and Protestants in the area specifically of Eucharistic theology. And the centrality then of the Eucharist as a sacrificial meal in both the New Testament and the pre-reformation tradition of the Church.

[18:41]

You know, up until the time of the Second Vatican Council, we regularly described the Eucharist simply as a sacrifice. Then there tended to be the tendency, after the Second Vatican Council, simply to describe the Eucharist as a veal. Till Martin and others emphasize that the Eucharist is above all a sacrificial meal. Bring the two things together. As sacrifice is dominant, the sacrifice will manifest itself in the context of the meal. Talk about that a little bit later. All right, what I want to do now is to move on and talk about sacrifice and creation. Have any questions before I go on? No. What was Kilmartin's book? It's... He did... Unfortunately, he didn't finish it. Robert Bailey was the editor of the thing.

[19:44]

And it's published by the press. I must confess, I had to spend hours on it. Because what happens in the book... Because he didn't have the point of it. You lose the forest for the trees. It's so detailed. This is the uterus in the Western tradition. It doesn't pay much attention to Eastern religions, mainly the West. I just had a comment. If I remember the anathema of Hado and Mari when it came, I'll defend it. I don't think the media has so defended it correctly. There's no institution, per se, that the, as one pointed out, the words of consecration aren't in there, but they're like in a narrative form. Well, they aren't in a narrative form, they are existed. Robert Taft did the basic commentary on the document, and it's presumed that he also wrote the document that went to the consecration for the doctrine of the faith. And then he did an article for me in Worship, which I'll call him. And so it's very clear, it's not explicit.

[20:47]

There is a historical survey of Jesus' activity, but you do not find an actual text of the institution as we find in all the other Eucharistic prayers that we do. Right, not in that form. I mean, I read it myself. His words are in there. Well, I don't think they'll have an explicit... Well, then, I think it's a contradiction. If they're in there, they should be explicit. Well, I didn't bring the text with me, but maybe you'd find more benign to me than the text. Anyway. This cross-party revolution, by the way, especially among other Berlin dicastries, you know, about the legitimacy of moving in this direction, because, as I mentioned before, the text of institutions is so important. you know, for most residers in the Western tradition. Not so in the Eastern. The style of celebration tends to be very, very different. And so the assembly is involved in their anaphora throughout the whole text, with acclamations built in effectively into the text.

[21:55]

All right, let's move on then to sacrifice and creation. Certainly I think one of the most positive developments springing from a re-used theology of sacrifice has been what I would call the construction of a fresh natural theology based on the power of sacrifice as the engine that drives all life in the universe as well as the principle at work in the heart of the Godhead. God being first of all and most of all the sacrificing one. Now you know Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. And today the majority of biologists still commended for its general accuracy

[23:01]

But they have yet, as you know, their more recent knowledge of genetics. But most scientists do not doubt that life on this planet has in fact evolved along the lines that Darwin laid out almost a century and a half ago. There is no doubt that an updated evolutionary interpretation of life of language, of behavior, morality, and even religion have lately been gaining unprecedented attention by natural scientists, by philosophers, by linguists, by ethicists, by social scientists, and even more recently, by the medical community. It's true that a theology that's obsessed with the good order and divine design of the universe is really quite ill-prepared to cope with the theory of evolution.

[24:12]

And such a theology leads to confront the hard question that John Pott, a teacher at Georgetown, and has written extensively about this relationship between sacrifice and pacifism, suffering God, and theology generally, has raised a number of hard questions. He says, what if the cosmos is not just an order, but a still unfinished labor of creation. In other words, what he's asking, what if creation is an ongoing experience on the part of God? He goes on, he says, suppose we look very carefully, the undeniable evidence we have today that the universe is still coming into being. I suppose also that God is less concerned with imposing a plan or design on this process than with providing a vision for the universe that allows it somehow, because of free will, to participate in its own creation.

[25:28]

The idea of God then, he says, becomes not only compatible with evolution, and it also logically anticipates something like the kind of life world that Darwinian theology sets before us. Well, the traditional view of creation transmitted through Judaism to Christianity is certainly being questioned by various Christian theologians and they are essentially influenced by strong contemporary movements such as papypacianism, which God suffered, and also process theology, and they employ images of God as the crucified one, who as the divine risk-taker, in fact, suffers along with humanity.

[26:31]

Now I will deal with happy cut scenes. They speak in terms of God's own brokenness. God's vulnerability. And that you creation then as a continuous open-ended process involving God exposed to the world rather than as a distant being who created the world once and for all and then left the world to its own resources. Once and for all, God gave birth to the universe and then said, go on your own. Bradley has remarked, it is indeed much more possible now for Christians to conceive of creation as a continuous sacrificial act on the part of God, which involves costly love, self-limitation, and surrender.

[27:34]

All these lines, highly respected biblical theologians, make much of the theme of chaos in creation. Due above all to the pioneering work of Herman who in a very seminal work, Creation and Chaos, that was published in 1895, described the opening chapters of Genesis then, above all in terms of chaos. Traditional Jewish and Christian theologians have described God as creating the world out of nothing. Today, however, many scholars interpret the Genesis accounts as processing where my order and form are fashioned gradually out of chaos. And it's pointed out that in this then they're in line with Justin the Murderer, the Greek apologist, who in the second century maintained that God created all things out of formless matter, out of chaos.

[28:45]

Bradley has pointed out that many scientists have recently become interested, then, in chaology, the study of the apparent random disorder which seems to characterize matter. So physicists, mathematicians, astronomers stress, then, the instability and the unpredictability inherent in the created world. Chaos, they emphasize, appears to be present as the context for order and harmony, just as it set out in the foundation for creation in the Genesis account. They also pointed out that the Bible seems to affirm the very close link between creation and redemption. if God's creative activity involves a continuing process of redemption or salvation for the forces of disorder and chaos in the world.

[29:57]

As a matter of fact, the psalmists and the prophets portray God not as a divine magician creating something out of nothing, but rather as one who is constantly at work in order to sustain order and purpose in the world and to fashion form out of formlessness. The theologists described then God's own activity as one of sacrifice, understood not at all in terms of the cultic offering of victims, but rather as self-giving and in a sense, self-limiting. In its linguistic roots, the word sacrifice comes from the two Latin words, sacra and fature, meaning to do or to make something holy.

[31:00]

As Sir John Hodge suggests along those lines, to give it this which might then give witness to God in an evolutionary context. The quotation. The first is the startling, bewildering, and often suppressed image of God as humble, self-giving, fully relational, suffering life. The second is the image of God who invites rather than forces the world to realize its own possibilities of being. He says this is not the God of frozen design. The one who disturbs the status quo for the sake of a richer future. This is the image of God as power of the future. That would be Canterbury. is the God who Rahner in his later writings began to call the absolute future.

[32:08]

What Teilhard de Jardin had in mind when he referred to the universe as resting organically on the future as its sole support. In other words, upon a God who is less Alpha and more Omega. He says it's the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. It's the Pauline God of the new creation. Paul Fides, whom I mentioned, tries to give expression to the sacrificial understanding of God in creation. This way he says creation involves God in cost, involves God in pain from the very beginning. God is always sustaining this creation, keeping it from falling into nothing.

[33:15]

And in creation God gives freedom to something over against himself, He limits himself by the freedom of others, his creatures, and becomes, in a sense, he says, vulnerable to their decisions. Now, if we affirm that creation does represent a sacrificial disposition on the part of God, then the biblical theme of the one who brings order and chaos is of special significance. And certainly we know nothing valuable, nothing ordered or well structured is created in fact without considerable effort and cost as I think every creative artist knows quite well. So there is a contemporary effort then to retrieve a natural theology which makes room for God

[34:22]

seen not as a demonic watchmaker or a deterministic law enforcer, but as one who works in order to bring order out of chaos, who struggles to bring life out of death. And this is theology. natural theology is strongly supported by a number of key, modern, capable scientists who are also important theologians. Notable among them would be John Copenhagen, a very distinguished physicist from Cambridge, from Hofstra, who also then was trained as an Episcopal priest. In this country, Brian is claiming Paul Davies, Robert Jasko, Hunter Peacock. To these folks, high life, by the way, they do not look upon their work as finished products.

[35:27]

What I think is so important for us today is to learn to have a few self-doubts. Thomas Aquinas used to often remark, you know, every time I'd come up with an answer, It's simply the occasion for another question. And if you go through all this complicated material, you certainly come to the conclusion at the end, I have to learn to live with ambiguity. Freud, you know, used to say that the measure of a person's maturity is his or her ability to live with ambiguity. It's this broad area which is being quite responsibly explored. but with unfinished answers. So these physicists, astrophysicists and biologists and so forth, they find, above all, the centrality of the sacrificial principle and the dependence of life at every level on surrender, self-limitation, and death.

[36:39]

It's a prelude to new life. They point out that this occurs, for example, on the macro scale of evolution, with its dependence and destruction of entire species, and on the micro level of the individual cell. where an eternal cycle of death and renewal is absolutely necessary for healthy growth and development. Their basic point is that for every organism that dies, a new one is born. Life then on all levels is really dependent on death. An important component then of this realization is the phenomenon known as programmed cell death, in which the healthy growth and development of all living creatures depends on cells constantly dying and then being reborn.

[37:57]

The bottom line here is very important I think. Death then is not really the opposite of life. has always upheld you to new life. Just as death paves the way for new life in nature, so also in Christian theology, death is the port of entry to resurrection. As Brandy has pointed out, this pattern of life coming out of and through death in the physical universe seems to parallel the saving and freeing power of the shedding of blood in the sacrificial rituals of primal religions and also the mysterious shedding of blood and the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and its consequent resurrection as well as the centrality of the pastoral mystery then in the lives of all of us as Christians.

[39:08]

Christian theology, modernist physics, chemistry and biology are not then in fact in opposition to one another. questions about this. Are you getting a feel for it? I know this is complex material. What is up, Peter? Last summer at the Junior Institute at St. John's, we were told to be cautious about processed theology. Yes, I would be cautious too. Why? Basically because there is no metaphysics. And yet, if you read contemporary deconstructionists, for example, like John and Marianne, He says what other metaphysicians, contemporary metaphysicians, have done is basically trying to capture God in supreme being. So Jean-Luc Marion, who is probably one of the most significant Roman Catholic theologians of today, teaches at the University of Chicago, where Sylvester Cooke records place.

[40:12]

He says all we really know about God is the manifestation of God as a loving one. Not to tie in with what these other people are saying, God as a self-giving God. So, we put aside the idea of explanation of each and every sense of our God? No, no. We would look upon creation as a manifestation of God's love. I don't mean to be perfect. No, no, no, no. You see, you look upon creation as God's extension beyond His transcendent. becomes imminent and there again you have the two politicians of the word and the spirit in creation itself, in the humanity of Jesus, in the church and hopefully in us. The analogy of the dying off of cells as the precursor to new life, that is, life and death in person rather, how do you reconcile that with the personal Christian life and death?

[41:23]

How do you reconcile it? Seems like an insufficient analogy. As I mentioned, all of these are in the realm of analogy. I think what we always learn every time we talk about God we are talking analogical. We're always in the realm of metaphor but we keep exploring metaphors and symbols and rituals to give us at least some insight into God's love for us. And if you see the body-soul, not as dichotomy, but as a united whole, and eventually somehow of a spurious combination of the body that's very eventually reunited with the soul in terms of resurrection. It's not resuscitation though. As Paul points out, resurrection is about all the spiritualization of the body.

[42:26]

And whether you want to go so far as to describe that in terms of the transformation of material independency, I'm not sure I would be willing to go that far. Mr. C. Whitefield, one joke. I've got a cool article in the Universe App. Mr. Epstein. All you want to know here, don't get lost in the details. They're the future, the absolute future, that's what they're preoccupied with. In other words, they're preoccupied with their initiated eschatology. Not fully realized, or not simply in the future, but the resurrection, the transformation, the resurrection, in fact, is beginning to happen now. It's always God's initiative. As you'll see, I am not terribly comfortable with happy textings with a suffering God.

[43:28]

I'll get to that. I was just thinking that if you start theologizing the concept that God is the creator of all, And from that you say, well, an artist, you know, analogizing again, leaves his print on everything that he creates. And when you start talking about God creating heaven and earth, you reverse that and say earth and heaven are one leads to together through a process. And if you think of even the cell matter and everything else, if you see that there is a divine plan marking all of what God has created, which is everything, then you can see and even bring it down to that micro-level of biology and see that a dead cell is replaced by a new life, and so on. But if you just try to explain it on the level of science, then it ceases to be anything to do with God.

[44:33]

It begins to be our understanding of trying to grapple with the minutiae of part of what God has created. I often say to people, well, how do you square creationism with evolution? And I'll say, well, if you can think about it, tell me something that man has created. Man manipulates what God has created. And that's what we do when trying to understand God. We manipulate all of what is there for us to understand, including our minds, to grapple with and to try to understand God. And if you have that understanding, then all of the stretches are valuable and not harmful and not heretical unless you state them as absolutes. I suspect, though, artists would be very nervous about that term manipulation. Yeah, well, but they are manipulators. Just like engineers, I talked to a group of engineers, gave them a prayer, and I said, you know, here we are today, you know, a group of engineers, you know, hundreds of them in this room, and I said,

[45:40]

we imagine ourselves as creating these bridges and these other edifices and these objects. And I'd like to pause for a moment and we will say a prayer to the Creator of the things that we've been doing. I'm going to get the term, though, it's negative. I would be reluctant if I were addressing a group of artists who are beginning to use a term like that. What else? The next one. I'm going to talk briefly then about sacrifice in the Bible. The word sacrifice is both a verb and a noun. It appears about 213 times in the Bible. It's also quite prominent in most Eucharistic liturgies and it frequently occurs in the hymn texts who played an important role in our Christian faith formation. The term is frequently used to refer to the human prayer of praise and thanksgiving that is offered to God.

[46:48]

Nonetheless, throughout history sacrifice has had a rather uncomfortable place in the Christian tradition. Jesus himself continues the prophetic criticism of culting sacrifices that were offered in the place of social justice and charity. So then when Matthew's Gospel treats its place, quotes the prophet Joel, go, learn what this means. I desired mercy, not sacrifice, says the Lord. Likewise, in Hebrews, it repudiates the meaning of the Old Covenant, which was expressed in terms of the blood of goats and calves. The New Covenant rejected animal sacrifices, looking upon all the prescribed Old Testament sacrifices as a shadow of good things yet to come in Jesus Christ.

[47:54]

A main purpose though of the ritual sacrifices was to offer thanks and praise to God and many of the offerings of the first fruits in the Old Testament fell into that category because they were celebrated as a confirmation of God's covenant with the people and God's desire then to share his gifts with others. But we know, especially from reading the Proverbs, that not every kind of sacrifice was pleasing to God. The emphasis then tended gradually to shift away from the habitual slaughter of animals towards the inner sacrifice of the broken and contrite part and the moral qualities of obedience, repentance, and self-offering.

[49:03]

In the New Testament then, there is very little about sacrifice in the exclusively cultic sense of the term. quite probably because the early Christians associated with both Judaism and paganism. However, there is much sacrificial language derived from Israelite cult in connection with the life, the passion, and the death of Jesus. However, much of this language especially in the Pauline Corpus, considers sacrifice as a spiritualized event, a Christologized sense comes forth. In other words, the emphasis is on interiority and the spiritualization of sacrifice stressed by the prophets.

[50:12]

That is to a large extent confirmed and then continued in the New Testament, especially in Jesus' own teaching. His emphasis certainly was on the cost of discipleship, manifested in a life of selflessness, even self-abandonment. There is no doubt, though, that the New Testament writers kicked out the Old Testament ideas about the power of blood sacrifices, and then what do they do? They apply them to the death of Jesus. For example, Jesus is portrayed as the Passover lamb, ritually slaughtered to avert catastrophe and to deliver the Israelites from danger. Likewise, the death of Jesus is interpreted in terms of the ceremonies carried out on the Day of Atonement.

[51:15]

The purpose then of the various New Testament texts that we have, especially in full, seems to be to situate Jesus' life, death, and resurrection within the general context of Jewish worship patterns and will establish clearly the fact that his single self-offering has achieved what thousands of burnt offerings failed to do and he effectively atoned for the sins of the world. May one unity again. The following writings while echoing a theme which many scholars find also in the Joanine writings, provide the most complex, yet I think illuminating, treatment of sacrifice in the New Testament, especially in support of God as a sacrificing God. In his reflection, for example, on the Lance Tucker, Paul stresses Jesus' sacrificial action in shedding his blood and breaking his body for the disciples.

[52:32]

Self-giving, in other words. In writing about Jesus as a sacrifice for sin, however, Paul is very careful to assert that the initiative is with God and that God is the author of sacrifice. And it's very key implications for our discussions of this picture with Protestants. We are not the ones who offer the perfect sacrifice. It's because Jesus shares his spirit with us and we become one with his one sacrifice. So in the Pauline writings There is no hint if God or Christ is being sacrificed by humans so that humans might be restored to life. The emphasis is rather on God's activity, on God's self-giving, God's self-emptying in the Son, who was in the form of God

[53:45]

Yet he laid no claim to equality with God, but made himself nothing, assuming the form of a slave, bearing the human likeness, sharing the human lot. He humbled himself and was obedient, even to the point of death, death on a cross. Now this text of Philippians, by the way, which is really forms the foundation for our canonic Christology. It sets out the life and death of Jesus as an auxiliary cause of atonement in the etymological sense of bringing about the end of it. As Jesus descended to the bottom of the celestial scale, and into the depths of human suffering, he then obviously stands as a strong challenge to our human aspirations toward mobility and success in worldly terms.

[54:49]

That self-giving characterized the whole life and ministry of Jesus then. It continues. He continues to suffer in us the sufferings of Christ abound in us. It's the gift of the Spirit that makes it possible for us in turn then to be self-giving, to abandon one's inner life. So the dispositions which prevail within the life of the Trinity, Trinitarian life, is one of mutual self-giving among the three persons. humanitarian theologians today do not emphasize so much the unity of God. They're much more interested in the interpersonal relationships of the three persons. The cross on Calvary then certainly is supremely important as a manifestation of the sacrificial dispositions which are eternally present

[56:02]

in the Godhead. And those dispositions then were perfectly realized in the humanity of Jesus as he revealed that it's the very nature of God to give, to be a forgiving God. Those dispositions then must be realized in the Church, which is the Body of Christ in our time and our place. So, as the Supreme High Priest, Christ continues to offer himself to the Father in heaven in the same way as the Father offers himself to the Son. And through the power of the Spirit, We disciples of Christ are called then to follow the path of serenity, of self-giving, exemplified by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

[57:07]

The fullness of God's revelation has taken place in the humanity of Jesus, but it's still in the process of being realized in us, in the Church. What I'm saying here is that the way of God is the way of sacrifice. Our way to God and to each other is the way of self-sacrifice. Consequently, salvation comes to us by partaking in the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit comes to us through the sacraments, with faith, through sacrificial living, day in and day out. Now certainly, efforts to explain these complex and sometimes conflicting Biblical teachings have, as you know, led to bitter divisions among Christians, especially concerning the nature of Jesus' sacrifice.

[58:22]

Evangelicals and fundamentalists have often stretched the substitutionary character and the once for all efficacy of Jesus' death on the cross, while others see it primarily as exemplary and revelatory of what God is truly like. Hence, they see God's sacrifice in the world as an ongoing process. Of course, the major division in Western Christianity was inaugurated by the Reformation, and the Protestant understanding, especially of the Eucharist, has sacrificed. Roman Catholics have traditionally stressed the objective character of Christ's sacrifice in the Eucharist, whereas most Protestants tend to focus on remembering the all-sufficient work of Jesus on the cross. There is, by the way, fortunately, increasing agreement about the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist among Venetian Catholics and Protestant theologians.

[59:35]

All right, we'll take a break now, and when I come back, I want to deal with the whole question of Patriotism.

[59:42]

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