Provided that the hypotheses advanced by Ara Norenzayan and Todd Tremlin possess even a modicum of validity—namely, that religious beliefs originated and persist as an evolutionary and cognitive adaptation in human history (Norenzayan, 2013; Tremlin, 2006)—Saint Augustine was profoundly correct when he declared that God dwells within every human person (Augustine, 397/2009). For if the concept of divinity is inscribed within the human genome, it is as real and ineluctable as the instinct for survival itself.
In light of this, William James’s defence of the rational justification for belief in the absence of conclusive evidence or absolute empirical warrant acquires considerable force (James, 1896). James contended that it is both legitimate and, in certain circumstances, desirable to opt for belief in a proposition even when the available evidence remains limited or ambiguous, inasmuch as the practical utility of a belief for individual and social life may confer upon it a genuine epistemic validity despite evidential uncertainty.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Nietzsche experienced dread before the void, perceiving—as did Ivan Karamazov—that with the death of God the ground of Christian morality collapses (Nietzsche, 1882/2001; Dostoevsky, 1880/2021). Christianity constitutes a foundational vision of being conceived as an integral whole; remove its central element—faith in God—and the entire edifice disintegrates. All religion is, in the final analysis, anthropology; annul the divine factor and humanity itself is dehumanised.
Against this background, and in the face of the undoubted success of Voltaire’s intellectual heirs in undermining the pillars of Christianity, the tensions between two contemporary positions become entirely comprehensible. On one side stand those who believe it possible to retreat into religious fundamentalism as though into an impregnable fortress; on the other, those who maintain that the meaning of Christianity must be reinterpreted in the light of modern knowledge and experience. Both stances are responses to the perceived threat of the terminal decline of the Church and the dissolution of the sacred into the profane; each carries its own distinctive risks.
To deconstruct the Gospel risks lapsing into a futile Gnosticism—a reinterpretation of an interpretation. Yet accepting the Scriptures literally courts the danger of severing them from present-day reality—not because they transcend historical situatedness, but precisely because they articulate a past situation. Integralism, however well-intentioned, may thus prove injurious if it accords infinite and eternal validity to narratives that are finite and transitory.
Contextualising the kerygma, by contrast, is meaningful only if it renders the central message of the Gospel more luminous to twenty-first-century humanity—if, like the restoration of a painting, the underlying image emerges with greater clarity once later accretions have been removed. For Christians, however, such a task cannot be undertaken without transcending the phenomenon itself, that is, without abandoning the mental boundary that reduces the figure of Jesus to the biographical portrait of a merely human exemplar of virtue—a Mediterranean Buddha, as it were.
Thomas Jefferson, following the German rationalists, famously produced an expurgated text of the life and moral teaching of Jesus, excising those New Testament accounts whose supernatural character offended the confines of a Cartesian conception of reason (Jefferson, 1820/1989). That conception had already displaced the Greek Logos with the Roman Ratio, shifting emphasis from word to number and privileging quantitative analysis over qualitative comprehension of reality—a shift whose consequences have proved baleful.
Just as Protestant iconoclasm diminished apprehension of the sacred by mistaking aesthetic austerity for pious ethics, so Jefferson, in leaping over literalism into the merely literary, deprived the Gospel of the signs and symbols that alone make the numinous expressible. It was for this reason that the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar inverted the order of Kant’s transcendentals (von Balthasar, 1982). Kant had begun with the Critique of Pure Reason (Truth), proceeded to the Critique of Practical Reason (Goodness), and concluded with the Critique of Judgment (Beauty). Von Balthasar turned Kant upside-down, insisting that without Beauty as the starting point the other transcendentals dissolve.
The same principle applies to the Gospel narratives, which were woven together by means of the derash method in order to legitimise the Good News through typological and prophetic correspondences with the Old Testament (Boyarin, 1990). Examples abound and have exerted a decisive influence upon the image of Jesus transmitted across the centuries.
In this connection von Balthasar went so far as to declare that the patristic tradition’s ever-evolving concept of the relation between the Old and New Testaments is one of consonantia—a concert of beauty, as Augustine expressed it; a symphony unfolding from figure to archetype (von Balthasar, 1982). The peculiarity of this symphony lies in its contrapuntal character: a tense dissonance between the first movement (the Old Testament) and the second (the New) that necessitated the dialectical syntheses of Nicaea, themselves deeply marked by the dualistic challenge of Marcionism (Ehrman, 2003).
As already noted, the evangelists employed derash—an interpretive mode that moves beyond the plain sense of the text, deploying allegorical, symbolic, and homiletic techniques to draw out lessons pertinent to spiritual and moral life in the light of contemporary historical reality (Boyarin, 1990). Paul’s Christology and soteriology are rooted in the ancient Law; almost every argument is buttressed by scriptural warrant, drawing chiefly upon rabbinic and apocalyptic traditions as the background to his midrashic exegesis (Hays, 1989). Enriched by an allegorical hermeneutic shaped by Hellenistic philosophical discourse in the Decapolis, Paul thereby elaborated his theological corpus.
The New Testament thus presents itself as both the culmination and the fulfilment of the Old, yet in introducing new values and principles it necessarily referred back to the elder covenant in order to render them intelligible and acceptable. To this end the evangelists laboured—employing the derash method with generous freedom—to reconcile fulfilment with renewal, setting New Testament antitypes in deliberate tension and contrast with Old Testament types that prefigured messianic or theological realities, even at the risk of effecting a definitive rupture with the ancient Law, as Marcion ultimately sought (Ehrman, 2003).
This Christianisation of Israel’s great traditions manifests itself structurally in the major discourses of the Gospels. Those discourses are saturated with Old Testament metaphors, motifs, and symbols calculated to elicit a conditioned response in their first readers. After two millennia, detached from their original cultural matrix, many of these narratives have lost their force or become distorted. Yet a modest effort of re-contextualisation readily reveals the electrifying impact they once possessed.
Consider one central allegory in the Passion narratives: the Paschal Lamb. Paul first identified Jesus with this figure (1 Cor 5:7–8: “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed”; 1 Cor 15:4: “he died for our sins according to the Scriptures”), thereby evoking the ritual of Yom Kippur described in Leviticus 23 and related texts. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest selected two unblemished animals—a lamb and a goat. The sins of the congregation were transferred to the scapegoat, which was then led into the wilderness bearing them away; the lamb was sacrificed, its blood collected and carried into the divine presence, then poured out upon the mercy seat so that the purified people might enter God’s presence.
Some biblical scholars detect in the figure of Barabbas (Aramaic: “son of the father”) a symbolic scapegoat, released while the true Lamb is slain (Maclean, 2007). Numerous subtexts in the Passion narrative derive from these rites and would have profoundly shocked contemporaneous Jewish readers. At the Last Supper the identification of bread and wine with Christ’s body and about-to-be-shed blood flagrantly contravened the ancient prohibition against consuming blood (Gen 9:4–6), blood being the very seat of life.
Again, in John 19:31–37 the Romans find it unnecessary to break Jesus’s legs, for he has already died after drinking vinegar from a sponge fastened to a branch of hyssop—the plant used in the Passover rite to sprinkle blood upon the doorposts. Immediately thereafter a soldier pierces his side and blood and water flow forth, recalling the Temple drainage system by which blood and cleansing water were flushed into the Kidron valley after the atonement ritual, and evoking the unique moment when the High Priest, having emerged from behind the veil, pronounced the divine Name.
According to Matthew 27:50–51, at the moment of Jesus’s death the Temple veil was torn in two from top to bottom—perhaps signifying that with the sacrifice of God’s firstborn the veil had become superfluous: direct access to the Saviour was now open through Eucharist and prayer.
These, then, are readings and re-readings that must begin from the end, for it is in the end that the beginning is disclosed. It lies in the theandric tension resolved when the horror of the cross is transfigured into splendour as Jesus embraces renunciation and self-emptying; it lies in the descent into Hades that reveals the plenitude of the work of salvation; it lies in the regenerative power of the resurrection. The catharsis wrought by these three acts issues in a new understanding of God, a metanoia, and a fresh sense of the divine presence.
To grasp the death of Christ more adequately we must attend to the crucial distinction between Being and reality. As an event within substantive reality, death is simply the cessation of an organism’s vital activity. Yet the fundamental significance of Christ’s death resides not in substantive reality but in his substantive Being—in his I AM, in the essence of who he is and what he accomplishes through his existence. For the substantive Being of Christ, death signifies incorporation into humanity, so that his resurrection may be understood as the impressing of Christianity upon every individual who is converted.
Ultimately, the radical message of the Passion is that self-sacrifice is preferable to the renunciation of love, and that we discover meaning in our own existence by imparting meaning to the life of another. In being negated upon the cross, Jesus negated negation itself, affirming the triumph of love over death through a negative dialectic that is the very seed of Christianity—a seed that does not seek to evade suffering but to follow the path of the good, even should that path lead to the cross.
