Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Prefatory note
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- 11 The conscious and the unconscious sacrifice: Kierkegaard on art, suffering and religion
- 12 Pearse's sacrifice: Christ and Cuchulain crucified and risen in the Easter Rising, 1916
- 13 The concept of sacrifice in Anglican social ethics
- 14 Eucharistic sacrifice: the problem of how to use a liturgical metaphor, with special reference to Simone Weil
- PART IV
- Index of biblical and ancient references
- Index of persons
13 - The concept of sacrifice in Anglican social ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Prefatory note
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- 11 The conscious and the unconscious sacrifice: Kierkegaard on art, suffering and religion
- 12 Pearse's sacrifice: Christ and Cuchulain crucified and risen in the Easter Rising, 1916
- 13 The concept of sacrifice in Anglican social ethics
- 14 Eucharistic sacrifice: the problem of how to use a liturgical metaphor, with special reference to Simone Weil
- PART IV
- Index of biblical and ancient references
- Index of persons
Summary
In the tradition of Anglican social ethics which harks back to F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and J. M. Ludlow the concept of sacrifice has had a considerable vogue. In his teaching about the Divine Order Maurice himself opposed every kind of individualism in the name of the true law of creation, which was the law of sacrifice and love. It was this outlook which lay behind the producers’ cooperatives founded by the small brotherhood Maurice led (Christensen 1962, 23-6). Half a century later Bishop Westcott claimed that in the steady march of progress towards an ideal the labours of men became fruitful through sacrifice (Westcott 1901, 395). In Scott Holland's estimation no one who insisted on the centrality of the cross could help believing that human life is realized not through egoistic self-assertion but through altruistic self-sacrifice. The language of sacrifice was taken up by non-conformists too. When Philip Snowden wrote The Christ that is to Be, designed to convert Christians to socialism, he said that Christ's law of sacrifice, love and cooperation was the foundation of all the great ethical religions of the world, and he looked forward to a political Christianity and an earthly paradise won through sacrifice (Snowden 1905). The same high moral tone runs through the speeches and writings both of the halfsecularized leaders of the emerging Labour Movement, like Keir Hardie, and of out-and-out secularists such as George Odger. They exemplify what Beatrice Webb called ‘the transference of the emotion of self-sacrificing service from God to man’ (Webb 1926,112). Common to Christian thinkers in this tradition was the desire to slay the dragon of Individualism’.
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- Information
- Sacrifice and RedemptionDurham Essays in Theology, pp. 235 - 246Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991