Solly is reading Chapter Three of The Eschatological Economy. Here is a snippet of his commentary:
‘It needs a reminder here that for Knight the idea that sacrifice means ‘making holy’ comes in part from the Latin roots of the English word ‘sacrifice’. It is necessary to see that this is also how the practice appears in scripture of course, supplemented by such insights of the practice that anthropologists can supply us with. Sacrifice is here presented not only as the work of the Israelite, but the work of God on the Israelite, of making him a son, of making him a person.
Knight returns to the modern sensitivities to the notion of vicarious and substitutionary action, as exemplified in Kant’s philosophy of religion, and how this encapsulates in nuce the economy of modernity’s understanding of individuality, and resistance to the idea of relationism. You cannot do something for me, in my place, A is A, and A is not not-A.
Given, Knight explains, modern theology’s appropriating this position, and the con-joined idea that we are already persons [though really only individuals] then that explains the difficulties found with the doctrine that we are God’s work, our becoming is basic, not our being. Existentialism expressed that garishness and angst of this position, of man no longer in relation with man, but isolated in spheres of completeness, yet knowing it was not really so. R R Reno Redemptive Change: Atonement and the Christian Cure of the Soul has also criticised modern thought for its inability to propound a doctrine of personal and moral change when it also holds to an idea of humanity that does not need change, each individual is complete in themself.’
Solly’s commentary is a model of clarity. I am beginning to wish he had intervened a bit earlier, when the book was still a-writing.
Here is more of Solly’s analysis of this Israel-and-Adam Christology.
