Christianity claims to abolish sacrifice. This is its revolutionary move: God no longer demands sacrifice. The era of ritual killing is over. The new covenant replaces blood with spirit, flesh with faith, the altar with the heart.
Yet Christianity places at its absolute center the supreme sacrifice: the crucifixion of God incarnate. Not an end to sacrifice, but its ultimate form. Not the abolition of killing, but the transfiguration of killing into redemption.
This is not a minor logical tension. This is Christianity's fundamental paradox, unresolved and unresolvable.
Gigerenzer: "Christianity achieved the remarkable feat of abolishing sacrifice while centering itself entirely on sacrifice. The crucifixion is simultaneously the end of sacrifice and the final, ultimate, all-sufficient sacrifice. Both cannot be true, yet Christianity asserts both."1
One way Christianity resolves the paradox: sublimation. The crucifixion is reframed as not really about killing but about love, redemption, divine mystery.
The Reformation moved further in this direction: the emphasis shifted from the death to the meaning of the death. The physical crucifixion became the symbol for spiritual transformation. The killing receded; the interpretation advanced.
Eventually, this culminates in modern Christianity: the crucifixion is barely about killing anymore. It is about sacrifice in the metaphorical sense—self-giving, going the extra mile, the death of ego. Physical killing has been entirely spiritualized away.
But this spiritualization has costs. The sacrifice remains unmetabolized. Christianity still centers on killing (God's son, the ultimate victim), but it cannot consciously acknowledge this. It must constantly defend against the reality of what it is celebrating.
Gigerenzer: "The Reformation's spiritualization of sacrifice was a creative move, but it created a new problem: consciousness became unable to encounter the actual killing at Christianity's center. The crucifixion became invisible as killing."1
The medieval church, however, understood something more clearly: the Mass is literal sacrifice. The bread and wine become the actual body and blood. The priest performs a ritual killing. The victim is consumed. This is not metaphorical. This is the perpetuation of sacrifice in Christian form.
The Reformation found this horrifying—a regression to paganism! The new theology insisted: no, the Mass is memorial, is symbol, is spiritual encounter. Not literal killing.
But the medieval church had something the Reformation lost: a conscious container for the sacrificial need. The Mass acknowledged what was happening: the soul still requires killing. And the church provided a ritual form, a priesthood, a designated time and place.
The Reformation's spiritualization solved the logical paradox (how can we abolish sacrifice and center on it?) by denying the paradox existed. But it lost the conscious container. The sacrifice remained—now repressed, now without form, now erupting in modern violence.
Contemporary consciousness is therefore caught in the paradox Christianity created but never solved.
We are heirs to: (1) the rejection of sacrifice as barbaric, primitive, morally abhorrent; AND (2) the centering of our entire civilization on the image of sacrifice (Christ crucified), which we have thoroughly spiritualized to avoid acknowledging what it is.
The result: a civilization that cannot consciously acknowledge sacrifice yet cannot live without it. A civilization that has inherited the deepest ambivalence about violence, killing, necessity.
Gigerenzer: "Modern consciousness is shaped by an unresolved paradox that Christianity embedded in its center. We cannot acknowledge the sacrifice (that would be barbaric), but we cannot live without it (because the soul requires it). The result is repression, neurosis, and the eruption of violence in forms we cannot understand."1
This affects everything:
The paradox could, in principle, be resolved two ways:
Fully abolish sacrifice: Accept that it is morally and psychologically wrong, and develop consciousness structures that genuinely do not require it. (No civilization has achieved this.)
Fully acknowledge sacrifice: Stop pretending it is abolished, provide conscious ritual containers, develop priesthoods and forms that allow the soul's need for killing to manifest in controlled rather than pathological ways. (This would require abandoning modernity's ethical stance.)
Christianity does neither. It asserts both positions simultaneously and prevents consciousness from fully embracing either.
The consequence: Christianity's shadow is sacrifice itself. Everything Christianity consciously rejects (the killing, the blood, the physical manifestation) remains in the repressed unconscious, shaping behavior and institutions in ways Christianity cannot acknowledge or control.
Gigerenzer vs. Christian Apologetics (Aquinas, Augustine, Modern Theology) — Paradox as Mystery: Christian theology has long grappled with this paradox, often resolving it by appealing to "mystery"—the paradox is beyond human reason, we must accept both in faith. Gigerenzer's argument is that this resolution prevents Christianity from consciously confronting what it has done: it abolished sacrifice formally while preserving it functionally. Apologists treat the paradox as a mystery to be accepted. Gigerenzer treats it as an unresolved psychological/spiritual catastrophe requiring explicit acknowledgment. Both systems recognize something deep is at stake. But apologetics defends the paradox; Gigerenzer exposes it as damaging repression.
Gigerenzer vs. Girard (on Christianity) — Resolution vs. Hidden Victory: Girard argues Christianity is unique in revealing and transcending the scapegoat mechanism. By making the innocent victim's innocence explicit (Christ as innocent lamb), Christianity undermines the mechanism's effectiveness. It moves society toward acknowledging violence rather than mystifying it. Gigerenzer would agree Christianity revealed something. But he would argue the revelation occurred only theologically—in doctrine and spiritualization. Practically, Christianity maintained sacrifice (the eucharist, the cross at civilization's center) while denying it consciously. So the revelation did not actually resolve the mechanism. It only made it invisible. Girard is more optimistic that Christianity can move civilization beyond scapegoating; Gigerenzer is skeptical that consciousness can move beyond the paradox Christianity embedded.
Gigerenzer vs. Jung (on the Self and Christ) — Symbol vs. Actuality: Jung saw Christ as a symbol of the Self—wholeness, the transcendence of ego-conflict, integration of opposites. This Jungian reading spiritualizes the crucifixion, treating it as a symbol for psychological transformation. Gigerenzer would say this is precisely the defense—the spiritualization that prevents consciousness from confronting the actual killing at Christianity's center. Jung's reading is psychologically rich but it participates in the very evasion that Gigerenzer diagnoses. Both systems take Christ seriously. But Jung uses Christ as a key to psychological development; Gigerenzer uses Christ as evidence of Christianity's repressed center.
This paradox cannot be understood through theology alone. Theology can describe the logical tension. But it cannot explain how this tension manifests across entire civilizations, how it shapes behavior, how it generates the particular neuroses modernity exhibits.
Psychology explains the manifestation: the paradox creates a split consciousness. Consciously, we reject sacrifice. Unconsciously, we require it. The eruptions of violence, the entertainment industries built on vicarious killing, the wars that we wage while proclaiming peace—all are manifestations of this split.
History shows the progression: from medieval Christianity's relatively conscious container (the Mass as actual sacrifice) through Reformation spiritualization (sacrifice as metaphor) to modernity (sacrifice utterly repressed and denied).
Together: the theological paradox explains WHY modernity is neurotic about violence in a way that neither ancient nor medieval consciousness was. We have inherited Christianity's unresolved paradox and are living its consequences.
The handshake: Understanding modern violence, modern neurosis, modern ethical confusion requires recognizing that Christianity embedded a paradox in Western civilization's core and then prevented consciousness from resolving it. The psychological manifestation reveals what theology obscures.
If Gigerenzer is right, then Christianity is not the source of peace and transcendence it claims to be. Christianity is the source of modernity's particular neurosis about violence. Christianity is what prevents consciousness from either genuinely abolishing sacrifice or genuinely acknowledging it.
This means the entire project of Christian peace, Christian love, Christian rejection of violence—all operate on repressed ground. All are asserted against a reality (sacrifice, necessity, killing) that Christianity itself placed at its center and then declared abolished.
If Christianity's paradox is unresolved, what would it take for consciousness to resolve it? Must modernity either fully abolish sacrifice (requiring new consciousness structures) or fully acknowledge it (requiring honesty about what we have inherited)?
Gigerenzer traces the paradox from medieval consciousness (mass as literal sacrifice) through Reformation (spiritualization) to modernity (complete denial). Is this progression inevitable? Can consciousness move backward toward the medieval solution, or only forward toward fuller denial?
If Christ's crucifixion is Christianity's way of having sacrifice while denying it, what are modernity's equivalent structures? Where are we sacrificing (literally or symbolically) while claiming we have abolished sacrifice?