New Science of Sacrifice

Grotius and Edwards on sacrifice

We say the Enlightenment ushered in a secular age. It is equally true to say that the Enlightenment created religion. The “new science” of religion and “secularization” were two steps in the same dance: By constructing a restrictive concept of “religious life,” the Enlightenment freed the rest of everything from religious tyranny.

During the Middle Ages, “religion” named a “dynamic of the heart,” while the plural “religions” referred to the orders within the Catholic church. Medieval Christians did recognize two classes of religion, and labeled them “true” and “false,” “legitimate” and “idolatrous.”¹ The Enlightenment, by contrast, focused attention on systems of practices reducible to propositions that could be dispassionately compared to one another.² Enlightened theories of religion were, ironically, equipped with weapons forged during the Reformation. Protestant polemics were hardly dispassionate, but the Reformers focused on ritual aspects of Christianity (the altar of Mass v. the communion table), and their assault on Catholicism was a thoroughly “comparative” enterprise.³ Hobbes gave Calvin’s claim that the heart is a “manufactory” of idols a slight twist in order to construct an argument that blurred the distinction between idolatry and true worship: If we’re all idolaters, who’s to say what’s idolatry and what’s not?⁴ Protestant attacks on the Catholic priesthood and Eucharistic sacrifice gave the Enlightenment its specific targets for later assaults; Protestant artillery was turned against Protestants. Discoveries from the new world provided another impetus to comparative religion studies, were exploited for partisan purposes, by Protestants trying to show continuities between Catholicism and pagan idolatry, by Catholics who found in the new science confirmation that their rites were universally human.

Many responded to the early shifts in the notion of “religion” by trying to incorporate the new discoveries into a biblically-based historical framework. Beginning in the 1660s, the English educator and theologian Theophilus Gale wrote a four-volume work, The Court of the Gentiles, which argued that ancient pagan religion was a parody of Hebraic religion. The name “Apollo” was derived from Phoenician, but “his chief Attributes, Offices, Temple, Sacrifices, & Oracles were all originally, by I know not what Satanic allusion and delusion, borrowed from the Attributes, Temple, Sacrifices, and Oracles of the true God, worshiped at Jerusalem.”⁵ Sacrifices were instituted by God prior to the Mosaic period, and these were distorted by “satanic imitations.”⁶

Nearly a century later, Samuel Shuckford’s The Sacred and Profane History of the World, connected repeated Gale’s arguments. Sacrifice originated with God Himself, who “appointed the skins of beasts for clothing to our first parents, which could not be obtained without killing them.” Reason would encourage “reasonable service,” but hardly the slaughter of beasts: “how is it possible that they should go into such notions of God, as to make it seem proper for them to offer sacrifices, in order to make atonement for their sins?” Sacrifice was either a faithful or distorted practice of a rite instituted by God to prepare the way for blood redemption of Christ.⁷ Even in the distortions of false religions, there was a praeparatio evangelii.⁸

Persistent as this tradition was,⁹ it was not without competitors, and over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scholars reassembled the evidence in a way that marginalized biblical history.¹⁰ Deists like John Toland and Matthew Tindal used the new science to relativize the particular claims of Christianity: If sacrifice was universal, what made Hebrew sacrifice unique? Following suggestions by Hobbes and Vico, Enlightenment writers proposed psychological theories of religion that traced the phenomenon of sacrifice to the anxieties and fears of early humans. In The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of all the Peoples of the World (1723-1737), Jean Frederic Bernard collected travel reports and research about religion, while Bernard Picart (whose name was the only one on the original cover) provided the engravings. Though superficially a neutral compilation of travel reports and research on world religions, Bernard and Picart’s book promoted a particular view of religion. Bernard organized his material on Judaism to highlight the complications of rabbinic tradition and the proliferation of festivals and ceremonies. He included an appendix on the sect of the Karaites, which relied on the Old Testament only and rejected rabbinic accretions. For Bernard, the Karaites were the primitivist heroes of Judaism, holding to the original form of monotheism. The decadent mainstream of Judaism became a model for religions in general, always in danger of slipping into externalism.¹¹ The book’s larger aim was to enable the new science to wriggle free of theological constraints as it wriggled free of the plotting of biblical history. It worked so well that a recent study calls it “the book that changed Europe.”

Comparative religious studies, focused on sacrifice and priesthood, proved to be a highly successful feature of Enlightenment critiques of established Christianity. Christian thinkers offered their responses, and in the following pages I examine two of these, from Hugo Grotius and Jonathan Edwards. Both were well aware of the “new science,” and both followed earlier writers by incorporating the history of religion into the framework of biblical history. Following hints from ancient texts and the church fathers, Grotius argued that Moses was more ancient than any of the Greek or Roman writers and that the Greeks knew they had received their letters and language from barbarians, “which letters . . . have no other order, and name, and likewise ancient shape, than the Syriac or the Hebrew.” Through the Greeks, Hebraic learning passed to other nations, so that “the most ancient Attic laws, whence even the Roman laws were subsequently taken, derive their origin from the laws of Moses.”¹² The rituals of pagans, Grotius admitted, were full of “cruelty” and “obscenity,”¹³ but he had no doubt that the practice of sacrifice originated with Cain and Abel and was confirmed by Noah. If the pagans distorted a God-initiated rite, that did not rob it of its divine origin.

Edwards read Grotius, Gale, and Shuckford with admiration.¹⁴ Grotius taught him that the Greeks taught a version of the creation story of Genesis 1,¹⁵ and from both Gale and Grotius he drew the conclusion that “heathen philosophers” were inspired by God and received some truth from revelation.¹⁶ Both taught Edwards that the pagans had a notion of inner purity that anticipated the teachings of Jesus, and from Shuckford he borrowed the notion that the gods migrated from the ancient near east through Egypt to Greece and Rome. Edwards could thus concludes that “Many things in the state of the ancient Greeks and Romans” formed types of Christ.¹⁷ A Roman emperor’s triumphus involved the sacrifice of a white bull, pointing to ascension of Christ following His bloody death. Sacrifice was a tradition handed from the earliest humans. The devil distorted God’s institution, but God turned it to good. As Gerald McDermott explains, “God outwitted the devil, Edwards suggested, by using diabolically deceptive religion to teach what is true.”¹⁸ When the cross was finally proclaimed to the nations, the nations had already undergone a long tutelage in sacrifice.

Beyond this common ground, the two diverged, in part because of their historical circumstances and in part because of the differences in their training and theological interests. Of the two, Edwards offered the more thorough-going response to the new science and cut a path for future theological development. It was a path that has, unfortunately, never been paved.