In his book A Religion Against Itself Robert Jenson makes the case that the Christianity is an anti-religious religion and that the Bible is an anti-religious religious text. At first this seems to fit nicely with our cliched (and mostly wrong) ways of speaking negatively about religion (think vapid statements like: “It’s not religion, it’s relationship). But that isn’t what Jenson is up to. He isn’t out to rid Christianity of liturgy and ritual.

So, what does he mean by religion?

Jenson defines religion something like this: Religion is a way to guarantee the outcome of your life. Religion is using God as a tool to secure your own dreams and desires for your future.

It works like this: If I obey, if I give my tithes, if I sacrifice, then I will put God in my debt and he will give me what I desire. Religion in this sense is a quid pro quo with God. We scratch God’s back so that he will scratch ours.

But, according to Jenson, this is precisely what the Bible is arguing against on every page.

The very beginning of the Bible is an audacious piece of religion-debunking. We lift just one verse from the long polemic which is Genesis 1: “And God made the two great lights... he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” What is the point of this? Ancient man found his greatest single religious assurance—later, his greatest religious anxiety—in the sight of the wheeling heavenly beings. There were his gods, visibly enclosing him, knowable and predictable in their visibility and eternal in the mathematics of their behavior. The words of the cynical old priest who wrote our passage were a deliberate impiety: “Gods nothing! Energy sources that God hung up there!” From here to Galileo is a matter of details.

What is the gospel in this? Quite simply: “You do not need to fear and worship the world in which God has put you, or any part of it. Subdue it, have dominion over it enjoy it!” The first chapter of the Bible is like the last, where we read: “And when I heard and saw [these things], I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me; but he said to me, ‘You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you...Worship God.’”

In between, the message is the same. Christ was crucified for blasphemy. Paul, who understood the crucifixion better than most, spent most of his literary energy in anti-religious polemic. For example, he wrote to the believers at Galatia: “You observe days, and months, and seasons, and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain.” What was the matter with days and months and seasons and years? Surely we can, also in our life of faith, not do without a calendar? But the Galatians “observed” the calendar, i.e., they watched it, expecting something from it. What could be expected from a calendar? Eternity—for the great feasts and fasts of a religious calendar return each year with the same content. Every great festival cancels time, for each year despite all that has happened we end where we began.

What is the gospel in Paul’s polemic? “You do not need to cling to the past, to the way things have always been. If something utterly new should happen, something which broke the sheltering wheel of the returning seasons and festivals. you need not fear. You may take the risk of the future. For the risk of the future has been made by Jesus Christ to be the kind of risk which love brings.”

Religion comforts and sustains us by abolishing the radical newness and unpredictability of the future, by suspending the future into an eternal present. There is, trusts religion, something already there that guarantees the future, guarantees that something good will come of me. Because this something is already there it is knowable, and because it is knowable I can experience the guarantee of my future which it gives. To be already present and knowable, it must be given in the past—in the “once-upon-a-time” of mythical stories about how things are in eternity, or in the “I fast twice in the week” record of accomplishments at which legalistic religion looks back. Religion is the rule of the past. The security it gives is that all will be again as it was, the security of return to the womb, of peace in death. This religious security is exactly what the gospel seeks to free us from…

The anti-religious polemic of the Bible is, therefore, polemic in principle… The gods are attacked for the sake of God.

Is then the faith of the Bible after all about a god and therefore itself a sort of religion? To be sure—but it is a religion opposed to religion. Faith as we see it in Scripture is religion at odds with itself, a religion polemic against its own character as a religion.

If Jenson is right that the consistent theme of the Bible is an anti-religious polemic, then we should expect to find it in the psalms. Unsurprisingly, I think we find an attack on the religious act par excellence: sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the great religious act because it is literally a quid pro quo. In sacrifice we give the gods food to eat, we fill up their bellies, and in return they protect us from disaster. They help us win in battle. They make it so that our harvest is good and that our children are strong and healthy.

But the witness of the Bible from A to Z is that this God does not want sacrifice. The psalms repeatedly make this point:

* Psalm 40:6 “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.”

* Psalm 50:9—13 “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”

* Psalm 51:16—17 “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

The phrase of Hosea 6:6 (which Jesus takes up in Matthew’s Gospel) is a good summary: “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”

Of course we know that Scripture can also use the word “sacrifice” in a positive sense—in the merciful sense. But what does a merciful sacrifice look like?

Hebrews 10 takes up Psalm 40 and argues that what God wants is not sacrifice, but obedience. But not any kind of obedience. He wants the obedience that the Son of God gives to the Father. In other words, he wants free obedience. He doesn’t want the obedience of a slave. That would be obedience as sacrifice. The slave offers the master his obedience and in return the master provides shelter and food for the slave. God is not a master. He does not want to dominate us—which is precisely why he does not want sacrifice. The obedience God wants is the free obedience of a son—of the Son.

The only sacrifice that is pleasing and acceptable to God is the sacrifice of Jesus. If we are to offer God anything, it can only be Jesus.

But what does it mean to offer God the sacrifice of Jesus? Isn’t Jesus God’s gift to us? For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Jesus is what God gives to the world because he loves it. What would it mean for us to offer Jesus back to God?

To offer God his Son back to him is to begin to love the world the way he loves it. It is to have the obedience of the Son become your obedience by the power of the Spirit. It is to have the Son’s life and your life become one life. What God wants is for the life of his Son to become your life and flow out of your life. When that is the case, your obedience becomes the obedience of the Son.

The sacrifice God is pleased with is Jesus. And Jesus is the one who serves others. In other words, don’t feed God with your sacrifices and your obedience, feed your hungry neighbors through the mercy of Christ.

Hebrews 13:15—16 couldn’t be clearer: “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

To offer God the sacrifice of Jesus is to love the world around you. To love it with God’s own love. To have the life of Jesus pouring forth from your belly, rivers of living water.

The gospel frees us from religious sacrifices so that we can live from grace and in gratitude.

I’ll leave you with the freedom of the gospel according to Jenson:

The gospel is permission, granting of freedom, to love. The believer is, simply, one who knows that he does not need to worry about himself because God will take care of that, and who therefore has all the time and energy unused to worry about other people.

Diagram: The question is does the sacrifice precede God’s word that “You are accepted” or does the sacrifice follow God’s word? If it precedes it, then it is religious sacrifice. It is trying to control the future and dictate outcomes. It is a quid pro quo. It is a slave’s obedience. But if the sacrifice follows God’s word, then it is the free obedience of the Son. It is mercy. It is a free gift that is freely received and freely returned.

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