Blood Sacrifice

[xenologer]

Upon reading the afterword to Letter to a Christian Nation I got to thinking about blood sacrifice. It's not necessary for you to read this link, and I'm not even necessarily wanting a discussion about the link; I'm just giving context.

Here's where my head is right now, though. In the days when Judaism and Christianity were having their major cultural foundations laid, the people depicted in the Scriptures in question were certainly a product of their times. Those people had certain expectations about how exchanges with supernatural beings worked. There was an unquestioned assumption about the rightful place of blood sacrifice that we really don't tend to have today. The assumption was that blood was a (literal or symbolic) manifestation of life itself, and that giving this to a divine figure would please it.

From this widespread assumption seems to spring everything from Abel's sheep to Abraham's son to Jesus himself. Without the assumption that blood sacrifice and offerings of live creatures is pleasing to a deity, the whole system falls apart. It seems to me that part of the reason why the "Jesus Christ died for your sins" narrative falls flat for a lot of people is that a lot of people just don't understand anymore why there was anything about that in "the rules" to begin with. They don't even understand why YHWH wants blood, let alone how big a deal it was that his own son was offered up. The "why" of it is lost because we aren't supposed to give blood to our gods anymore. Aside: if you think blood sacrifice is still considered part of polite religious worship, consider how afraid people are of Santeria for doing what Jewish and Christian scriptures clearly state gods want us to do.

For me personally, this means that while the "God spilled the blood of his only-begotten son to pay the blood debt humanity owed for their sins" narrative had broad resonance at the time (because basically every culture shared the assumption that a sin was a debt owed to the gods which could be repaid in blood), it has no meaning or place in societies where blood sacrifice is considered something that "savages" (word used with full scare quotes because I'm an anthropologist and can't say "savages" unironically anymore) do. If Christianity is dying, it is because the most central assumption that makes the whole thing work just doesn't have any relevance anymore.

Now, I'm anticipating somebody with a Christian background saying, "Well, the crucifixion was such a badass sacrifice that it ended the time of blood sacrifice, and nobody ever need repay YHWH in blood again." I think this is dodging the issue. The issue is that your potential converts probably don't understand why there ever needed to be a sacrifice in the first place, because they weren't raised to believe that blood sacrifice is Just What People Do. These people need to be convinced first that blood sacrifice is a natural and desirable thing, and I don't think Christians can make that case. Please feel free to prove me wrong if I'm underestimating you.

If the rule is that divine powers can be propitiated with blood, whose rule is that? Did YHWH make that rule, or is it a rule totally external to YHWH by which YHWH is bound? Seems most likely to me that it's the latter. It's a rule external to YHWH by which YHWH is bound because that's how humans thought they had to be interacting with gods. YHWH is a god. Therefore we have to interact with it by giving it blood. If we really seriously screw up big time or just really want to say "I love you" in a big way, we have to give YHWH particularly awesome blood.

For ancient people this was a serious "well duh" sort of a thing, but lots of people don't think like this anymore. Even the idea that someone else can rightly pay for the sins of another is considered unjust and barbaric by lots and lots of people. For Christianity to remain relevant, then the practice of valuing blood sacrifice has to be explained, justified, and thereby preserved for your religion to even be intelligible to modern people. Can you?

Comments

[the_future_modernes]

Funny how that works. The Aztecs have a reputation for being particularly brutal because of their blood sacrifices, when Christianity and Judaism grew out of a similar mindset. Oh my god my history books need to be burnt.

[silveradept]

I think they can. But they do it disingenuously. In their practice, no, there's no need for blood sacrifices because of [REASON X], but Those People, that Other, who might very well be kissing cousins from a more objective standpoint, They Still Use Blood Magic. From the Santeria article and the Satanic Panic idea, once it became fashionable to not do blood sacrifice, it naturally followed that an easy way of tarring your opponent was to say they continued with the practice.

A nice extension of that idea, for Christians, is that while there's blood sacrifice in the past, it's what the Jews, who reject the sacrifice of Jesus, did (blood libel and all that). That's where you get Christians being able to say that Christians don't need to do blood sacrifice any more.

I get the feeling that you've answered most of this in the post, and I'm not comprehending how, so this is what my argument consists of - Christians keep the idea of blood sacrifice alive not as a necessity for explaining their own religious practice, but as a way of delineating all the Others who are different and inferior to than their own perfected practice.

What *is* christianity, then?

[polydad]

My question's in the title; since christianity as practiced in 21st century America has more or less nothing to do with its historical roots, what is it and how and why does it continue to exist?

I have to admit to an ulterior motive; I'd be delighted to redirect any energy currently going towards it into more societally useful endeavors.

best,

Joel. Who followed you over here from LJ.

[knitminder]

I first started questioning my faith with the question of sacrifice. It seemed illogical. When I seriously entertained that first question, that first doubt, I was flooded with more.

[cleverthylacine]

No offence, but if you haven't learned anything about the Talmud and you only know what Christians say about 'the old testament' you really haven't the first idea what Jewish scripture is about. (Which is true of Sam Harris as well as 99.9% of people who think they know what Judaism is about based on what's been codified in the Christian Bible. I'm really not picking on you personally.)

The Talmud and the dialogues between rabbis which continue today are the way that Judaism evolves and changes over time as our understanding of the world changes and improves and our understanding of G-d therefore also improves. Only a very small sect within Judaism - Kairites - operate on only the scriptures that were codified as such at the time the Nicaean Council was deciding how much and what it wanted to appropriate from our culture and religion in the process of picking and choosing what it wanted from the various Christian mystery cults so that Constantine could have his unified Christian religion to serve as a tool of intellectual conquest and colonisation.

There are people in the world who think that the literal arrival of Moshiach is imminent and must result in a literal rebuilding of the Temple and a return to the practise of (animal) blood sacrifice.

But I don't think there are a lot of those people.

[a-tergo-lupi.livejournal.com]

And that's why it's now so abusive. You first have to convince people that they are so bad and so worthless that they should be killed. It didn't use to be this way. We've changed.

[mumbly-joe.livejournal.com]

Please feel free to prove me wrong if I'm underestimating you.

I always understood the crucification as an overt callback to Abraham and Isaac, and Abraham and Isaac as really only incidentally about the blood sacrifice elements: Abraham isn't just being asked to spill blood, or to just sacrifice the life of his child, even, but his sole heir and one last shot at the legacy that God had promised him (he is very old at this point, even by Biblical lifespan-dilation standards). It always read more to me like a test in Abraham's faith in God's ability and faithfulness to keep his end of that bargain than anything particularly significant about the symbology of blood, per se. God, quite frankly, comes across as jerking Abraham around about his offspring great deal throughout his life leading up to this, and giving Abraham every reason to balk at this demand. Tying back to the animal sacrifices themselves, this is an element you're missing above: the faithful were asked not simply to spill blood, but make a sacrifice in terms of their own well-being in the process. The sacrifice Abraham was asked to make is pretty plain, and even the animal sacrifices were supposed to be the best cuts of the best livestock; it was never simply about the symbology of the blood, but about symbolically and literally deferring some of your personal well-being and prosperity to a higher power. Circumcision has a similar basis, although the sacrifice at heart there is considerably more symbolic than with animal offerings.

As to your other point, about where the rules come from, and why God is bound by them, there's a pretty simple answer: whatever other significance Christians heaped on the crucification after the story was constructed, it was primarily a call back to Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, and specifically meant to be framed as a fulfillment of the terms of that covenant. The rules were God's, yes, but they were also Abraham's and his decedents', just as the conditions of any agreement between two people proceeds from, and binds each of them jointly. For God to change the conditions after the fact would have amounted to reneging on that entire promise, and further would have rendered Abraham's display of faith in God's faithfulness to that promise both unjustified and hollow. The notion is that God plays by the same rules that Abraham had to not because He particularly has to, but because He agreed to in advance, and His other promises to The People were premised on that agreement.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Of course, no blood sacrifice was made by the people. Jesus was not offered to God; he was executed as a heretic.

If you look at it as Jesus offering *himself* to God, seems to me it's a lot of navel gazing on the part of the Deity and that nothing the people did enters into it.