The popular Alpha programme of video introductions to Christianity is itself a reflection of the troubled history of the church.  As its designers intended, it provokes questions that need discussion – of where the church has been in the past and where it needs to go now. 

Ireland’s younger generations are tuned out! This was an all-Ireland lament in our first ‘go’ at synodality in 2021-22. Closely linked is the urgent call for adult faith formation in most diocesan reports. 

This initiative at least does not depend upon a decision of the autumn 2023 Vatican Synod of bishops.

Lacking as we still do a properly resourced native Irish Catholic programme for adult faith formation, some dioceses are experimenting with what is probably the best-known ‘Intro’ to Christianity internationally – the Anglican-sourced ‘Alpha’ programme.

Alpha is referenced in at least two Irish diocesan synodal reports (Cork and Ross / Waterford and Lismore). It is also well-praised by Canadian evangelist Fr James Mallon, whose Catholic makeover for Alpha – entitled ‘Divine Renovation’ – is also being looked at in some Irish dioceses.

Centred on weekly hospitality and then the viewing and discussion of well-produced videos, the eleven-week Alpha course needs a well-prepared team and a well-appointed meeting place.

However, Alpha’s video treatment of the question ‘Why did Jesus die?‘ raises a danger signal. Presenter Rev Nicky Gumbel assures us that Jesus dies ‘in our place’ – just as Fr Maximilian Kolbe died in place of another unfortunate inmate of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1941.¹

But if it was a Nazi prison commander who murdered the victims of Auschwitz, who, ultimately, decided that anyone must die that day in Jerusalem, on Calvary?

Does God need ‘Satisfaction’ for Sin?

Inevitably we are left with the possibility that God the Father sanctioned – and somehow required – the violence of the crucifixion. This suspicion originates in a medieval theology that remakes the intimate Father of Jesus as a distant medieval monarch who cannot let go of the necessity of divine retribution for sin.

While it is true that all sin, including our own, has consequences from which we need to be liberated, can anyone be fully transformed by news of a distant God who can restrain his punitory hand only if his own son can repay by his sufferings a debt to God that our own sufferings cannot satisfy?

All too easily this Alpha analogy could reinforce a fundamentalist take on the Jesus story – the attribution of a taste for violent retribution to God the father – even though Jesus himself rejects that slur in repeating the words attributed to God by the prophet Hosea: ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice’ (Matthew 9:13)

Jesus Renounced Power

Still to this day our Catholic leadership has not clearly acknowledged that from the beginning to the end the Gospels tell us that Jesus rejected the option of exercising a controlling power over others – and that, according to the same Gospel, it was with this son that the Father declared himself ‘well pleased’.

The Alpha presentation does not make the obvious case for Jesus’s acceptance of crucifixion as a rejection of the option of using force against his accusers – and therefore as a statement that for the Father also there was no option of imposing the Kingdom of God by force.

That human violence results also from sin, and that the punishment of Jesus was also therefore sinful, is left unsaid.  On the contrary the impression could be formed that the crucifixion was preordained and necessary as part of the divine plan.  That only the rejection of the Kingdom of God by the social and religious elite of Jesus’s society had made it inevitable is also unsaid.

Does it follow that if Jesus was willing to suffer the consequences of the sins of his accusers and judges then God the Father must have approved his crucifixion also?  No, but failure to say this explicitly leaves that inference open. That only Jesus’s accusers and judges were to blame, and that only the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, was analogous to the Nazi commander of Auschwitz, is left unsaid.

Was No-one Else Ever Crucified?

Inevitably this Alpha presentation treats this story of Jesus’s execution as an entirely separate and utterly unique event, even though the Kolbe story offered an entirely different option – to see Jesus as standing in solidarity with Fr Kolbe and with all of the innocent victims of history – the many, many scapegoats of arbitrary power.

As it was a Catholic French-American academic, René Girard who has most brilliantly argued this case – and there is now an international colloquium in agreement – there is now no excuse for Catholic adult education in Ireland to ignore this school of thought.

That Jesus, and the Father, were thereby exposing the pattern  of victimisation in every era, by power structures as such,  must not be left unexplored.  We must not be left with a contrary possibility: that the first person of the Trinity needed a prestigious sacrificial victim. The use of a passage from Isaiah on the ‘suffering servant’ in the Alpha programme ignores the strong possibility that the author(s) of the book of Isaiah had themselves witnessed similar scapegoating events in their own time.

A Rejection of Religious Coercion

To absolve the Father of Jesus from any hint of complicity in the Crucifixion the church now needs to see that Jesus self-sacrifice on Calvary – vindicated by the Father in Jesus’s Resurrection – was a final rejection of the option of religious coercion – and utterly non-violent.  Blood was shed, violently, at the crucifixion,  but not by the Trinity.  The sacrifice that is rejected by the Father is the sacrifice of the life of another. The acceptable sacrifice is the merciful and non-violent offering of oneself.

Jesus, and the Father, validated Hosea by finally removing the distinction between mercy and sacrifice. They also starkly revealed the process by which political elites in all eras seek to maintain their ascendancy in a crisis: by ‘fitting up’ the nearest likely scapegoat. African American theologians see this clearly by recognising in the cross of Christ the ‘lynching tree’ on which so many of their own people died, in the decades after 1865.²

The Scandal of Christian Imperialism

As can be starkly seen in the events that led to the visit by Pope Francis to the first nations of Canada in July  2022,  the Catholic Church’s long marriage of convenience with the state after 312 made it tragically complicit in the many injustices of Christendom.  The medieval theology of the cross completely veiled the obvious similarity of the crucifixion of Jesus to the many other historical instances of scapegoating of the weak to buttress the power of a political establishment – including, for examples, the burning of ‘heretics’ and the vicious pogroms against Jews in the era of the ‘Black Death’ (1348).

That the Kingdom of God is a kingdom of intimate warmth, freedom and peace was clear to the earliest Christians.  That understanding was obscured for many centuries by the Emperor Constantine’s self-interested claim in 312 that the Christian God had urged him to conquer under the sign of the cross. Learning from the justified disempowerment of Christian clergy in our own time there is every reason now to interpret that claim as politically motivated, and to interpret the Gospel and the Creed as proof of the Trinity’s intent to lead humanity, eventually, to a world without violence.

Only in this way can the violence attributed to God by some Old Testament texts, and implied also by a deficient medieval theology – and left open to interpretation in the Alpha course – be properly understood. It reflects the imperfect understanding of authors who could not discern what Jesus himself revealed. We humans learn the limitations of violence only via our mistakes. Those reached a crescendo – sanctioned often by state-linked Christian clergies – in the 20th century. We are preserved from mutually assured destruction now only by the grace of God.

An effective Irish course in adult faith formation needs to add this historical dimension to its understanding of Christian sacrifice and atonement, to meet the predictable objections of a western culture scandalised by Christian imperialism and violence. We surely cannot move forward if we do not fully own up to all of the mistakes of Christendom – including the mistake of attributing even a hint of imperialism or bloodlust – or punitory need or dissatisfaction – to the first person of the Trinity.

Vatican II as a Precursor of the Repudiation of Christian Imperialism and Imperial Theology

“The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.” (Dignitatis Humanae 1, Vatican II, 1965)

This clear statement in the Vatican II document on religious freedom is an implicit repudiation of any use of force to forward the Kingdom of God – for which all Christians pray in the words of Jesus himself.  As Jesus is also ‘the truth’ it is therefore in itself an explanation of Jesus’s acceptance of crucifixion.  We should not believe that God the Father has ever needed satisfaction in the form of the sufferings of anyone else in order to forgive us.  Jesus shares the sufferings we ourselves bear – or inflict upon others. (Matthew 25: 31-46)  So does God our Father.

Sean O’Conaill
(August 26th, 2022)

1. To be fair to Alpha, a member of its online team has assured me that the purpose of the videos is to provoke conversation, and that the issues I have raised here could validly be raised also at an Alpha discussion of ‘Why Did Jesus Die?’ I am therefore quite ready to participate in an Alpha course – as the issue of Christian fundamentalism also needs to be discussed if that tendency is to be clearly rejected.
2. See e.g. The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone, Orbis Books, 2011