Conversation on the Christian View of Sacrifice, the World & Eternity

(The following is part of a conversation with a friend wherein I try to answer his objections to my earlier post as to the place of self-sacrifice in Christianity.) [1]

We are going to talk about two seemingly separate strands within Christian thought. On the one hand there is the strand that underwrites or encourages a kind of sacred awareness of the present. You know, "consider the lilies", and all that jazz. A lot of people these days make this kind of insight into the entirety of their spirituality (they also seem to prefer to find their source material in the East, though I think the reason for that has much more to do with faddishness – it takes one to know one - than with what the tradition actually makes available) but most would have at least a sentimental appreciation of that kind of teaching whatever their background.

Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, is not one of these. He finds this type of advice to be positively immoral. I take it that this criticism stems from the perspective that the line of thought represented would lead to a type of resignation toward life, a lack of ambition or direction or maybe motivation to make things better for oneself and one's fellows here and now. This would be basically the old Marxist criticism that religion has the effect of getting people to not notice and attempt to better their circumstances. (This is not a bad criticism in itself, in that this is how religion, including Christianity, is in fact used by cultures and many, if not all of the powers that be. But this is not to say that since a tool can be misused we should discount its intended function.)

On the other hand, there are obvious, deeply held reasons for Christians to care about the shape of their lives. The best expression of this other strand of thought was probably made best by one of those mean old nasty Church fathers that people are so fond of lambasting, St. Irenaeus who said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. What this means to me is that God delights in what we delight in, and is joyful at what we are made joyful by. But note that like for the human parent in regards to their child, it does not mean that whatever gives us pleasure for the moment gives him pleasure. More about how this comes about below, but basically if the Christian anthropology is right, that we are creatures first and foremost, then, while this knocks us out of the running to be gods – all our own little centers of universes - it gives us a very elevated position vis a vis random bits of purposeless matter. If we are creatures, then we are created for a purpose, and if we have a purpose, we should find it and live it full force.

While I would grant a lot of ground to criticisms made of the failure of Christians in general to live this rightly, I would still want to argue that, for the Christian at least, there will be times where the search for self-fulfillment commonly understood or the call to follow one's bliss will have to be denied. It is incoherent to imagine a Christianity that does not call for genuine sacrifice.

But the beauty of the Gospel is that precisely insofar as we follow through on the sacrifices we are called to make we will find ourselves more than fulfilled. Everyone knows the appropriate verses here: to lose is to find, to be last is to be first, so on and so forth. This is somewhat paradoxical but not that hard to grasp really. At bottom this just means that we are to deny a certain shallow self-fulfillment in the name of a greater, truer one. Everyone has basic experiences of this: to earn the satisfaction of finishing a marathon, one has to do a lot of painful training and preparation.

So it is not really a matter of pitting fulfillment of the self against sacrificing the self for others. Christian teaching rejects the idea that satisfying human needs is a zero-sum game. The truth is that we are actually not in competition with one another for happiness. To serve the Other really is to serve God, not in some loosey-goosey metaphorical sense but actually, factually to do something for God – "whatever you do for the least of these…" It's obvious that if anything in the Christian story is true, then this would mean finding our true meaning in life. If God is God, and created the world and us, then doing what we were made to do would be nothing if not the most glorious, blissful, joy-filled life possible. The problem is, it doesn't always feel this way. (Obviously, as I write this and try to act based upon it, I rarely if ever feel fulfilled making whatever daily sacrifices I'm called to perform.) So instead of trying to shave the corners off the square peg of our selves to fit into the round whole we were made for, we go around creating our own square holes to fit ourselves into. But the fit is never quite right.

And this dynamic of winning by losing goes to another objection that is often made against Christianity, by others and even by myself at times. It can be alleged that Christian teaching is just advocating a kind of delayed egotism. Indeed, sadly, sometimes individual Christians absolutely are guilty of reducing Christianity in this way. They would make the Christian life and the expectation for the afterlife a mere transaction where the person trades some unpleasant business here and now in order to reap the great payoff by and by. (The unpleasant business here and now can fall into the traditional category of 'works,' but faith itself, when taken to be a kind of unpleasant epistemological state to have to be borne for the time-being, fulfills the same role.)

This mistaken tendency is related to another that would have the incarnation of God in Jesus as a kind of mysterious disguise used to trick the fair-weather friends and attract only the true believers. This version would make Jesus' ascension and glorification as a kind of pulling-off-of-the-mask 'gotcha' moment where the enemies of God realize their mistake, weeping and gnashing their teeth while the disciples happily exclaim "Ha, I knew it all along!"

But this cannot be right. Christians believe that in Jesus, precisely through his earthly life, emptied of glory, full of suffering, destined for death, God himself is most fully revealed. The incarnation is not something to get past to see God (except insofar as we need to get past our mistaken expectations of who God should be) it is the very picture where God has most clearly shown what he is like. God is with us, in pain, in suffering, in life and in death. Christ's resurrection, ascension and glorification is God's ultimate seal of approval on creaturely, physical embodiment and the kind of self-giving, self-emptying way of being in the world that Jesus exemplified. It is not rewarded with an altogether different kind of life, it is shown to be the kind of life that imitates God himself and participates in his plan. Ultimately to live the kind of life Jesus lived, to the extent we are able, though it seems to be swimming against the stream of culture or human nature or whatever, is really to be going in line with how God intended things, to be going 'with the grain of the universe.'

Therefore Christian teaching is not that selflessness is a temporary state of affairs, a test to pass in order to be rewarded with an ultimate self-centered paradise. The Christian faith teaches that selflessness is ultimately how we were made to be (even the doctrine of the Trinity shows this: not even God exists for himself alone, but always in self-giving for an-Other.) And thus this is how we are destined to be if we are ever to be what might be called joyful but is better named blessed.

{…Kevin, wiping sweat from his brow, steps down from the pulpit…}



1. A good deal of credit for this conversation - the opportunity to wrestle with things, not the longwindedness with which I do it - goes to my interlocutor who will here go unnamed.