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I have a small handful of theological books in my past that I look back on as turning points - books that spoke to me at my particular place and time, opened my eyes, and set my thinking about God in a new direction. The first of those is NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope; the second is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I’ll give it a week or two before I inscribe this in stone, but I’m inclined to think that Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of the Free is the next one. Let me try to explain.

In the Protestant church (at least), there has been much ink spilled over the years to systematize atonement theories, that is, to organize all the teaching about Jesus’ death and how it works to save us into some sort of coherent, synthesized framework. In the conservative evangelical world of my first 40 years as a Christian, the predominant, nay, the only acceptable atonement theory is penal substitutionary atonement, usually abbreviated PSA. PSA says that each of us, as a sinner, deserve God’s punishment, but that Jesus died in our place, taking that wrath upon himself. The children’s bibles usually summarize it as “Jesus died so I don’t have to”.

Rillera says that PSA fails to pay attention to how sacrifices worked in the Old Testament, and as such then horribly misreads the New Testament (particularly Paul and Hebrews). This may be the book that inspires me to go back to where I always get bogged down in the Bible In A Year reading plans, and do a close reading of Leviticus.

Rillera starts right off the bat in chapter 1 by making the assertion that

There is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah.

He notes that “for sins that called for capital punishment, of for the sinner to be “cut off”, there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation”, and that far from animal blood on the altar being a substitute for human blood, human blood actually defiled the altar rather than purifying it. Neither was that animal sacrifice about the animal suffering; to maltreat the animal “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God”, no longer being “without blemish”. Already you can see the distinctions being drawn between this close reading of Levitical sacrifices and the usual broad arguments made in favor of PSA.

Lamb of the Free takes 4 chapters - a full 150 pages - to review OT sacrifices. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. But I have a new understanding and appreciation for paying attention to those details now! Then in chapter 5 he turns the corner to talk about Jesus, and summarizes his arguments thusly:

(1) According to the Gospels, Jesus’s life and ministry operated entirely consistent with and within OT purity laws and concern for the sanctuary.
(2) Jesus was a source of contagious holiness that nullified the sources of the major ritual impurities as well as moral impurity.
(3) Thus, Jesus was not anti-purity and he was not rejecting the temple per se.
(4) Jesus’ appropriation of the prophetic critique of sacrifice fits entirely within the framework of the grave consequences of moral impurity. That is, like the prophets, Jesus is not critiquing sacrifice per se, but rather moral impurity, which will cause another exile and the destruction of the sanctuary.
(5) But, his followers will be able to experience the moral purification he offers.
(6)The only sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death that is attributed to Jesus himself occurs at the Lord’s Supper. At this meal Jesus combines two communal well-being sacrifices… to explain the importance of his death. However, the notion of kipper [atonement] is not used in any of these accounts…

There’s a lot there, and Rillera unpacks it through the second half of the book. (I was particularly enthusiastic at his point (2), as it dovetails neatly with Richard Beck’s Unclean, where Beck argues that Jesus’ holiness was of such a quality that indeed, sin didn’t stick to him, but rather his holiness “stuck to”, and purified, other people’s sin and sickness.) Rillera says that Jesus’ death conquered death because even death was transformed by Jesus’ touch, and that Jesus came and died not as a substitution but rather as a peace offering from God to humankind. (His unpacking of Romans 3:25-26 and the word hilastērion was particularly wonderful here.) Jesus’ suffering under sin and death was in solidarity with humankind, and uniquely served to ultimately purify humankind from death and sin. (Really, I’m trying to write a single blog post here and summarize a 300 page book. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re still interested, go buy the book and read it. If you want to read it but it’s too pricy for you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I’m serious.)

I’ll wrap this up with a beautiful paragraph from a chapter near the end titled “When Jesus’s Death is Not a Sacrifice”. In examining 1 Peter 2, Rillera says this:

First Peter says that Jesus dies as an “example so that you should follow his steps”. In short, Jesus’s death is a participatory reality; it is something we are called to follow and share in experientially ourselves. The logic is not: Jesus died so I don’t have to. It is: Jesus died (redeeming us from slavery and forming us into a kingdom of priests in 2:5, 9) so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him; the just for the unjust (3:18) and trusting in a God who judges justly (2:23; 4:19). This is what it means to “suffer…for being a ‘Christian’” (4:15-16). It does not particularly matter why a Christ-follower is suffering or being persecuted; it only matters that they bear the injustice of the world in a Christ-like, and therefore, a Servant-like manner.

There are a dozen other bits I’d love to share - maybe in another post soon. But for now, I’m thankful for Andrew Remington Rillera and his wonderful work in Lamb of the Free. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.