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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Paradox of Divine Sacrifice

How Christianity Turned a Tragedy into Theology

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Few doctrines in the history of religion are as paradoxical as the central claim of Christianity: that Jesus of Nazareth—proclaimed both fully human and fully divine—had to die a brutal death to redeem humanity from sin, and to save us from the wrath of the very God he was said to embody. Beneath its poetic language of sacrifice and salvation lies a deep logical and moral contradiction that has haunted Christian theology for two millennia.

God Against God

At the heart of the Christian message stands the idea that God sent his “only begotten Son” to die for the sins of humankind. Yet since this Son is also considered to be God himself, the drama becomes circular: God sacrifices himself to himself to appease himself. The divine judge demands satisfaction for human sin, but only he can pay the price, by suffering his own punishment.

This is not merely a paradox—it verges on theological absurdity. If God is omnipotent, he could forgive humanity without resorting to the grisly mechanism of torture and crucifixion. If divine justice demands a blood sacrifice, then it is not mercy but cosmic bookkeeping. And if Jesus' death “satisfied” God's wrath, then that wrath was not abolished but ritually appeased. The message, in effect, is that divine love required divine violence.

Early theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury (11th century) tried to systematize this idea: humanity had dishonored God through sin, and only an infinite being could restore that honor. The crucifixion, therefore, was a transaction of cosmic proportions—God paying God. But even Anselm's elegant Latin could not hide the moral incoherence of a deity who requires a human sacrifice—his own son's—to forgive his own creatures.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

René Girard later interpreted the crucifixion as the final revelation of humanity's scapegoating tendency: we project our guilt onto a victim to restore social order. Yet Christianity paradoxically enshrined the scapegoat mechanism it claimed to transcend. The Jews became the new scapegoat, eternally blamed for “killing God.”

This accusation, enshrined in the Gospels and repeated throughout Christian history, spawned centuries of anti-Jewish hatred, persecution, and pogroms. The theological irony could not be greater: the entire drama of salvation depends on Jesus' death—without it, there would be no redemption—yet those who supposedly caused that death were vilified. In effect, Christians cursed the very hands that made their salvation possible.

If the crucifixion was divinely ordained, then Judas, the Sanhedrin, and even Pontius Pilate were executing a preordained script. In that case, Judas was not a traitor but the necessary agent of salvation, the hinge on which history turned. Theologians have long wrestled with this uncomfortable logic. Without Judas' betrayal, there would have been no crucifixion, no resurrection, no redemption. If God's plan required betrayal, then the betrayer becomes an instrument of divine will.

Theological Irony as Foundation

The result is a theology built on a triple paradox:

• God sacrifices himself to himself to save humanity from himself.
• Humanity is saved by the crime it simultaneously condemns.
• The supposed villain (Judas, or “the Jews”) fulfills the divine plan yet bears eternal blame.

Christianity thus turned tragedy into necessity, and moral confusion into divine mystery. Its emotional power lies precisely in that drama—an innocent victim dying for the guilty—but its intellectual coherence collapses under scrutiny. The idea of substitutionary atonement, that “Christ died for our sins,” may satisfy a mythic need for catharsis, but it offends moral reason.

Would a just God demand human sacrifice to forgive his children? Would a loving God create beings so flawed they require their maker's own death to be reconciled? The story, stripped of its devotional glow, resembles not a revelation of perfect love but an ancient blood ritual recast in theological language.

Four Theological Responses to the Divine Paradox

The contradictions embedded in the Christian story of redemption have not gone unnoticed by theologians themselves. Across the centuries, four broad strategies have emerged to manage, reinterpret, or transcend the paradox—dogmatic, liberal, mystical, and integral.

1. Dogmatic Theology: Mystery Over Logic

Traditional dogmatic theology insists that faith, not reason, is the key to understanding divine mysteries. The Incarnation and the Atonement are held to be supra-rational truths—beyond human comprehension but revealed by God. The believer's duty is to accept, not analyze. The paradox of “God sacrificing himself to himself” is thus protected under the seal of mystery. When reason protests, orthodoxy replies with humility: “Who are we to question God's ways?”

This posture preserves the drama of salvation but at the cost of coherence. Dogmatic theology sacralizes contradiction and calls it profundity. Its emotional comfort lies in surrender, not understanding.

2. Liberal Theology: From Sacrifice to Symbol

Liberal theologians, from Schleiermacher to modern progressives, reframe the crucifixion as metaphor rather than metaphysics. Jesus did not literally absorb God's wrath, they argue, but exemplified divine love through his willingness to suffer for truth and justice. Salvation becomes moral inspiration rather than cosmic transaction.

This approach rescues Christianity from primitive notions of blood atonement, but it also dissolves the supernatural drama that gave the story its original power. The cross becomes a symbol of moral courage rather than a hinge of history. For traditional believers, this “demythologized” Christianity feels like a faith emptied of its miracle.

3. Mystical Theology: The Drama Within

Mystical theology internalizes the entire passion narrative. The crucifixion becomes an allegory for the soul's death and rebirth in God. Jesus represents the divine self hidden in every human being, dying to the ego to awaken into unity. In this reading, God does not sacrifice himself to himself but awakens himself within us.

This inward turn resolves the logical contradictions by reinterpreting them psychologically. Yet it also blurs the historical core of Christianity into timeless symbolism. The event in Jerusalem becomes a mirror for inner transformation, not a literal atonement.

4. Integral Theology: Transcend and Include

Integral thinkers, drawing on Ken Wilber and Teilhard de Chardin, attempt to synthesize all prior approaches. They see the crucifixion as a multidimensional event—historical, symbolic, psychological, and evolutionary. On one level, it is mythic sacrifice; on another, an archetype of ego-death; on yet another, a cosmic moment in the unfolding of Spirit.

But this integration often reintroduces the very problem it seeks to transcend. When the paradox is explained as “Spirit sacrificing itself for the sake of evolution,” we are back to God playing both executioner and victim—only now on a universal scale. Integral theology universalizes the contradiction rather than dissolving it.

Toward a Post-Theological Understanding

Seen historically, the crucifixion myth expresses a deep human truth—not about divine wrath, but about the way guilt, violence, and redemption intertwine in our psychology. It dramatizes our longing for innocence regained through sacrifice. But once that symbolic layer is understood, the literal belief in a self-crucifying deity becomes unnecessary, even regressive.

If there is to be “salvation” in a modern sense, it lies not in vicarious suffering but in moral awakening—recognizing that forgiveness, compassion, and justice do not require blood. The true resurrection would then be the rebirth of conscience from within humanity itself, not from a grave in Jerusalem.

The real scandal of Christianity is not the cross, but the claim that this ancient execution was cosmically required. It turned a man's tragic death into divine accounting, and made those who carried out the drama into eternal villains. Perhaps the time has come to see Judas, and even the Jews, not as enemies of God, but as the unwitting agents through whom myth revealed its own moral contradiction.