According to Debora Shuger’s rich and provocative description, Grotius sets out to give a “demythologized” account of the sacrifice of Christ. He tries to show that penal substitution is rooted in acknowledge legal practices and rules, deriving especially from Roman public law.

Toward the end of his treatise, though, Grotius slips into a re-mythologized atonement theory when, in the final section, he places the crucifixion in the context of the near-universal archaic pracice of human sacrifice. In the end, instead of using Roman law as a universally valid theoretical framework, Grotius uses it “as evidence for an archaic code.” That is, “the Atonement becomes historically intelligible insofar as one grasps that the New Testament presupposes a cultural milieu where penal substitution was in fact normal legal practice. Ancient customs and codes thus explicate theology because they supply documentary evidence for the moral logic of premodern societies and not becuase they state universally valid principles.”

The irony of this shift in argument is significant. Not only does he slip back into “mythology,” but Grotius’ treatise on the atonement is a polemic against the ethical-rational critique of traditional atonement theology mounted by Socinius. By appealing to archaic practice, Grotius intends to deconstruct Socinian modernism, but in the way he finally uses the evidence of ancient sacrifice, he inadvertently defends the lines between modern and archaic that he set out in part to undermine.

But the implications of Grotius’ arguments go deeper. Shuger suggests that Grotius in the end moves the defense of Christianity back into its archaic past: “The Crucifixion occurred within a sacrifice episteme and presupposes the validity of blood expiation. Christianity is an archaic religion.” In contrast to other Renaissance writers on the atonement who rarely mention blood, “In Grotius . . . blood sacrifice penetrates the realms of grace. He is less interested in the probably rationality of premodern peoples than in the presence of an archaic and savage mythos at the center of Christian doctrine.”

That explanation doesn’t work. After all, Grotius is not advocating a restoration of the sacrificial regimes that he catalogues. He may be intrigued by sacrifice; he does not appear to be repelled by it. But he doesn’t urge its restoration. Christianity in his hands remains resolutely post-archaic. At the same time, the logic of the cross as Grotius presents it is an archaic logic. The possibility he opens is not that Christianity is an archaic religion, but rather that Christianity - centered in the cross - must be defended through a sacrificial logic that no longer pertains, and one that no longer pertains precisely because of the cross.

The possibility Grotius’ argument opens is this: “Why the God-Man?” cannot be answered in terms of post-crucifixion practices or categories or institutions, but only in terms of pre-crucifixion ones. If this is the case, Girard has a viable atonement theory (though not one I endorse in toto ); non-violent atonement theories are, by contrast, not viable. If this is the case, too, atonement theology demands an imaginative reconstruction of the archaic context in which it alone makes sense. If this is the case, then that might explain the difficulties that the church has had in reaching a consensus about the mechanism of atonement.

And that raises a question, which is truly a question and not a claim: Has traditional Christian atonement theory met this demand for imaginative reconstruction, or has it attempted to justify the cross with a logic that only pertains after the cross?