By The Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

In some circles theology has a poor reputation. It is associated with empty theorising, and regarded as abstract and irrelevant. Not a few politicians when cornered in public argument have remarked that such and such a view is ‘just theology’. Indeed, there is a famous one-liner, supposedly emanating from an Oxford undergraduate, that ‘theology is the process of bewildering oneself methodically’.

Needless to say, I do not hold that view. There can be poor theology as there can be poor literature or poor science, but theology is far from being abstract or irrelevant. On the contrary, the view we have of God and the world, and our place within it, has very definitive consequences — for better or worse.

One striking example is supplied by the recent controversy about animal sacrifice in the Roman Catholic Church in South Africa. Apparently Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of Bloemfontein has called for animal sacrifice to be incorporated into the Roman Catholic Church’s official liturgy. The move is part of a continuing attempt at the ‘inculturation’ of indigenous practices into the Church.

‘Animal sacrifice has a special place in the scheme of things and is celebrated in almost all African families,’ argues Archbishop Tlhagale. ‘We have kept it out of the Church of God for too long. It is time we welcome it openly into the Christian family of the living and the dead’ (The Sunday Telegraph, February 27, 2000).

Indeed, there are reports that the practice has already become ‘inculturated.’ Recently a video recording was made of a Roman mass near Pretoria where the priest blessed chickens and goats that were subsequently sacrificed outside the church. Archbishop Tlhgale proposes that the blood of sacrificed animals be brought to the altar as a gift offering.

The motivation behind this movement is easily discerned. We all now cringe at how early Christian missionaries in preaching the Gospel all too readily assumed the superiority of European cultural practice. For myself I have no difficulty in principle with ‘inculturation’ if that means the utilisation of, say, traditional African music or dance in church liturgy. Neither would I have difficulty in supporting the reading of good spiritual but non-Christian literature in church if that helped an appreciation of the Gospel. The Church should rightly use those gifts of the Spirit already present and reflected in African life and culture.

But animal sacrifice is something different. The historical significance of such sacrifice cannot of course be denied, but that’s precisely the point: its historical significance. What could possibly be its significance now that the supreme sacrifice has been made? It is not for nothing that the early Church, which grew out of Judaism, repudiated — in this one regard — its heritage.

There are no recorded examples of Jesus or his disciples sacrificing animals. The theological point is nowhere better expressed that in Hebrews.

Christ’s ‘priesthood is a greater and more perfect one … the blood of his sacrifice is his own blood, not the blood of goats and bulls; and thus he has entered the sanctuary once and for all and secured an eternal deliverance’ (9:11-13, NEB).

Now I know there are some theologians, like Richard Baukham, who maintain that Jesus, in accordance with Jewish tradition, did sacrifice animals. But the argument is unconvincing if only because it largely rests on an appeal to silence. Why, we might ask, did the early Church effectively abolish a practice if it was personally endorsed by our Lord? I, for one, have long held that the cleansing of the Temple constituted a frontal attack on the Jewish sacrificial system. After all, what were they selling in the Temple? The answer is certainly not postcards and souvenirs.

But whatever we may conjecture about Jesus and his relations with the Temple, we need to be clear that to continue the system of animal sacrifice is to perpetuate the Old Covenant and to reject the New. The issue is not about ‘inculturation’ which broadly (with some reservations) we might welcome. It is about — in traditional terms — the full and explicit recognition of the one true, unique and unrepeatable sacrifice which alone is efficacious for the sins of the world.

Animal sacrifice is literally a step backwards into a pre-Christian age. At best, it reflects a well-meaning, but misconceived, attempt to adapt the Gospel to a prevailing culture. At worst it signals a fantastic failure to understand atonement theology: Christ is the one true Lamb who saves the lambs!

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Revised version of an article which first appeared in The Church of England Newspaper, August 18, 2000.