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From Outreach Judaism:
How can man expiate his sin without the shedding of blood? Missionaries claim that the blood sacrificial system is man's only conduit to atonement. They contend that there can be no forgiveness of sin without a blood sacrifice. Without a blood sacrifice man is lost in a state of hopelessness. To prove this point, the church insists that the Bible sets forth only blood atonement to expiate sin...
That sacrifice being in the Christian faith, the crucifixion.
It just occurred to me that the perception of Jesus' crucifixion as an animal sacrifice in which blood washes away sin is not something you run up against very often. In the Church services I occasionally get taken to, Christ is more usually thought of as giving his life, but the vital and visceral emphasis on blood if often quietly ignored - I suspect because the physicality of a warm, bleeding sacrifice tends to startle the bourgeois religious horses.
The raw heart of the Christian faith suddenly looks much more primal (primitive) when you think about it in this way. |
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