Abstract
This is an ambitious, expansive, and thorough study of the notion of sacrificial love and its place in Christian understanding of redemption, by Alse Eikrem, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Norway. As the subtitle notes, sacrificial love has become a controversial notion with a range of critiques: feminist, liberationist, Girardian, Enlightenment, postmodern and so on. In response E. provides a truly systematic account, drawing on an impressive range of sources, largely Lutheran (German and Norwegian) and Anglophone authors, to analyze with almost scholastic precision and subtle distinctions, just what he means and does not mean in terms of notions of sacrifice. For example, at one stage he draws distinctions between “absolute and relative victimization, self-limitation, self-sacrifice, self-destruction, self-annihilation and self-giving” (57). Overall the degree of control of meaning towards its systematic goal is most impressive, though even a determined reader might balk at the number of distinctions the author draws in spelling out his argument.
In his own terms, E. seeks to address three related questions: “(1) Can God’s action in Jesus be coherently reconstructed as an expression of sacrificial love? (2) Are the human responses to God required for the divine–human relationship to be fulfilled an expression of sacrificial love? (3) Should we recommend sacrificial love as an ethical ideal guiding morality of human beings who recognize themselves as living within the relational spaces generated by the divine life?” (2). To achieve this E. reviews existing theologies of sacrifice from the early Church Fathers to more contemporary authors, analyzing and critiquing the various approaches (chaps. 2‒3). E. then turns his attention to the problem of violence in general and in the problematic notion of “sacred violence” which seems to lie at the heart of many soteriological approaches that implicate God as the agent of Jesus’s death on the cross (chaps. 4‒5).
E. finds a way forward in the discussion through a “Trinitarian logic of self-giving,” largely inspired by authors such as Jürgen Moltmann and social trinitarianism, with some engagement with the process ideas of Whitehead. This includes discussion of the field of interpersonal relations, mutuality, and the nature of freedom and self-limitation. The range of authors invoked in this discussion is truly impressive: Hegel looms large, Derrida, Nietzsche, post-Christian feminist Daphne Hampson, Cynthia Crysdale, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eberhard Jüngel, Miroslav Volf, John Milbank, countless lesser-known German and Norwegian theologians, and a range of authors in the literature around trauma, violence, and forgiveness. All these are engaged to provide an answer to the three questions posed in the opening chapter. The final chapter provides a tour de force summary of E.’s conclusions of his study.
A hermeneutic clue to the strength of this work is found in the opening acknowledgment. There E. dedicates his work to three women, Rita Nakashima, Rebecca Ann Parker, and Susan Brison, who have written together and individually of their experiences of psychological and physical trauma. E.’s work honors their writings with his careful and detailed analysis of the dynamics of victimization, forgiveness, and healing. This provides a theology well grounded in human experience and is the real strength of the book. Through all his distinctions and nuances these experiences shine through the theological systematics as a lodestone.
There are some methodological issues I would raise, not as critiques but as points for further dialogue and elaboration. In his introduction E. eschews metaphorical and symbolic approaches as “failed semantic experiments, both pragmatically and theoretically” (6). It would be interesting to bring this into dialogue with the work of Robert Doran who argues that soteriological meaning is a permanently elemental component that demands an “explanatory symbolics” to express its full significance, which could perhaps highlight a more liturgical approach to soteriology. Second, how does the study bear up if one does not buy into the currently dominant paradigm of social trinitarianism? Personally I find the approach unconvincing, and thought that most of the positive gains presented by E. could be detached with relative ease from that framework. Third, a systematic approach to soteriological questions must address the question not just of sin, but also of the issue of original sin and all its complexities. For example, Aquinas argues that the saving effect of Jesus’s death has more to do with original sin than personal sin (ST 3, q. 1, a. 4). Yet E. offers no extended treatment of this issue. Again I think these would easily be raised and included in his treatment.
This is a serious and scholarly treatment of a difficult and indeed controversial topic in theology. The footnoting is extensive and detailed. The bibliography is over 30 pages. This book should become a standard point of reference for anyone interested in questions of soteriology.