Sharing death

Matthias Grebe’s Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit is an impressive piece of work. Grebe is as much at home in Barth and Barthian scholarship as in Leviticus and Old Testament scholarship, and the driving question of his book has to do with dogmatic logic that connects election and atonement (hence, he spends some time working through classic Reformed questions about the extent of the atonement). Theological interpretation of the Bible, in dialog with Barth, is an overarching concern as is pneumatology, as the title suggests.

From this rich weave of themes, I want to pick out one very narrow point, Grebe’s interpretation of the hand-laying rite of the sacrificial procedure in Leviticus. As he argues, this is not a transferral of guilt or sin, but rather a “symbolic offering up . . . of the person’s life through the shedding of the animal’s blood. The animal’s death becomes the sinner’s own death . . . taken over by the sacrificial animal in substitution. Finally, through the blood-rite the nephes is dedicated and incorporated into the holy. Thus, the cultic atonement is a surrender, an animal’s life is a ‘substitution that includes the one bringing the sacrifice.’ The sacrifice of the animal and the blood ritual should be seen as a holy rite in which the animal is not punished for the guilty, but brought into the sanctuary ‘where it comes into contact with what is holy.’ It is not merely a death and a removal of sin that accomplishes the atonement but an inclusive Stellvertretung and the commitment of life to what is holy – this ‘ritual brings Israel into contact with God’” (76; the quotations are from Hartmut Gese, “The Atonement”). Later, again quoting Gese, Grebe argues that atonement is “a coming to God through death” (196).

This is almost right. It is certainly the case that the sacrificial procedure provides a way for the worshiper to come to God, through the mediation of the sacrificed animal, with which he identifies. This has clear typological implications: As the sacrifice “carries” the worshiper to God, so Christ takes the believer who is united to Him through death to new life.

But that “through death” needs to be given adequate emphasis. After all, there are ways to devote life to God without dying – ascetics have done it for millennia. But under the conditions of Torah, under the conditions of the Old Covenant, any approach to God involved death. And that, it seems, has to carry some punitive connotations, even if they are indirect and distant, like the stationing of cherubim at the doorway of Eden.