Children did not consent to being sacrificed to Molech. Their death was forced upon them, and had they been knowledgeable of their fate, they would almost certainly have refused to die. By contrast, Jesus was not a helpless victim thrown into the fiery hands of Molech against his will. He willingly went to the cross because he had full knowledge of his identity, his mission, and the importance of his work. Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10:11), and again, “I lay down My life so that I may take it again” (John 10:17). 

In an age of political correctness, Christianity is a prime offender. It’s not only Scripture’s sexual ethics that get canceled. Even bedrock creeds like Christ’s crucifixion are on the chopping block. Many professing Christians are uncomfortable with God killing his Son as the penalty for our crimes. They see this as child sacrifice. From their perspective, it’s impossible for such a doctrine to be consistent with God’s character when it’s so clear that God abhors the killing of innocent children.
Part of the temptation to shy away from historic Christian teaching stems from a disturbing new trend of “deconstructing” faith. What practitioners claim they’re doing is jettisoning Christian doctrines that have been tainted by time and tradition and therefore shouldn’t be believed today. In other words, they believe they are merely reforming their faith, a process, they would say, Martin Luther practiced with the Reformation or Jesus practiced with the Pharisees.
In reality, “deconstruction” is a broad term that is difficult to nail down. You’ll get different definitions depending on who you talk to. In my observation, it is the process of pulling apart aspects of the Christian faith that are undesirable and aligning one’s doctrines with culture or one’s own personal beliefs. By contrast, the biblical (and healthier) approach is to correct mistaken theology by conforming it to what Scripture teaches. The key difference between the two approaches is the standard used to determine theology: it’s either Scripture or it’s something else (e.g., society and self).
Given that the historic understanding of the atonement has fallen out of favor with some deconstructionists, let’s consider three reasons why characterizing it as child sacrifice is inappropriate.
First, Christ was not a child. In ancient Israel, children were sacrificed to cult deities like Molech. Those sacrificed, however, were babies or infants. Although Jesus is given the title of Son of God, he was not a small child. Scripture tells us he was an adult, crucified while in his early 30s.
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By hiding, Jesus, who is the Light, publicly dramatizes the truths John succinctly captures in the prologue: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not apprehend it” and “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:5, 11). Herein is his prophetic pronouncement of impending judgment. John seizes the occasion to present a narrator’s soliloquy to explain Jesus’s symbolic hiding as the appropriate climax to his public signs and teaching that have provoked such widespread unbelief among his own people. Indeed, Jesus performed his many signs in plain sight of his fellow Jews. John explains that they saw his signs, yet they did not believe, as Isaiah prophesied.

In part one, we saw that John 1:5 harkens back to the Light’s penetration into the darkness on creation’s first day. In this verse, John succinctly condenses and anticipates a dominating theme in the Gospel’s plotline. Light versus darkness (e.g., John 8:12; 11:10; 12:34, 46) invokes a cluster of imageries: day–night (e.g., John 9:4) and sight–blindness (9:1–40), all present in Isaiah’s prophecies to which John’s prologue alludes (Isa. 9:2; 42;6–7; and 60:1–3). The Evangelist masterfully compresses profound theological claims concerning the commanded Light on the first day of creation. He foreshadows the arrival of the True Light—the Messiah—in the Last Days, the Light that shines and cannot be extinguished. Consider, then, how this one verse in the prologue condenses the storyline of John’s Gospel even more densely than 1:9–11.[1]
With luminary imagery harking back to Genesis 1:3, the Evangelist subtly but unmistakably speaks of the Word’s advent (John 1:5). He shrewdly prepares attentive hearers and readers for the much more explicit announcement of the Word’s incarnation in John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”
Modern English Bibles translate 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome [katalambanō] it” (emphasis mine). As one reads and studies the Greek text of John’s Gospel, one sees that on occasions, John uses words with two meanings, intending both. The KJV’s “comprehended it not” hints at this, but the ASV’s “apprehended it not” effectively captures John’s intended dual sense of katalambanō. The darkness neither understood the light nor overpowered the light.[2] Thus, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not apprehend it.” A minor expansion on this assists in showing how the plotline of John’s Gospel is compressed in 1:5—“As day emerged from night when the Word spoke Light into darkness in the beginning, so the darkness did not apprehend the True Light, the Word incarnate.”
Twice, Jesus explicitly presents himself as “the Light of the world”: once publicly at the Festival of Tabernacles (John 8:12), and again privately to his disciples while still in Jerusalem following the festival (just before he gave light to the blind man when he gave him sight in John 9:5). During Israel’s festival commemorating the Lord’s covenant mercies in the wilderness with water from the rock and the protecting pillar of fire at night, Jesus presents himself as greater than the rock, the one who quenches true thirst and banishes darkness (John 7:37–38; 8:12; cf. 1 Cor. 10:4). Similarly, with the lighting ceremony, Jesus boldly announces that he displaces the ball of fire in the sky, “I am the Light of the world. The one who follows me will not walk in the darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Belief acknowledges that Jesus is the one who gushed water and provided protection day and night. Later, Jesus privately repeats this bold claim while still in Jerusalem, when he and his disciples come upon a man living in darkness from birth, for he was born blind. About to perform an uncommon miracle, Jesus prepared the Twelve by announcing, “We must accomplish the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. When I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:4–5). Yes, the sun that lights the world is but a created imitation of the original— the True Light shining in darkness.
Clustered imagery in two prominent passages develops John’s light-darkness motif, echoing John 1:9, “the True Light was coming into the world,” and John 1:5, “the darkness did not apprehend it.” In both, Jesus ascribes to Light a titular function as in the Gospel’s prologue; Jesus is the Light. The initial passage, John 3:19–21, echoes the phrasing of John 1:9 as it announces,
Now, this is the judgment: the Light has come into the world, and humans loved the darkness instead of the light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who practices evil hates the Light and does not come to the Light, lest his deeds be exposed. But the one who does what is true comes to the light that it may be obvious that his deeds have been brought about by God. (emphasis added)
Jesus, “the Light of the world,” divides, prompting evildoers to retreat into darkness and doers of good to embrace him, the Light, testifying that what they do “has been done through God” (John 3:19–21).
In chapter 12, the culmination of the light-darkness theme (John 12:35–36, 46) coincides with the climaxing of three other core themes with their own supporting images:

“glory”–“glorified” (John 1:14; 2:11; 5:44; 7:18; 8:50, 54; 9:24; 11:40; 12:41, 43),
“my hour” (John 2:4; 4:21, 23; 5:25, 28; 7:30; 8:20; 12:23, 27), and
“lifted up” (John 3:14; 8:24; 12:32, 34).[3]

Chapter 12 is the structural and theological hinge on which the entire Fourth Gospel turns. Here, John reflectively summarizes the escalating conflict between Jesus and his religious opponents in Jerusalem, the zealous guardians of Israel’s traditions and Temple, throughout chapters 2–11, the “Book of Signs.” This conflict intensifies when Jesus’s giving sight to a blind man on a Sabbath day blinds those who claim to see.[4] The blind rulers threaten to banish all who believe in Jesus from the synagogue (John 9:22). Jesus, after he raised Lazarus from the dead, returns to Bethany, where he is anointed for his own burial (John 12:1–8). Drawing a large crowd, the tension intensifies such that the chief priests conspire to put Lazarus to death in addition to Jesus (John 12:10). With hostilities peaking against him, Jesus carries out his final public prophetic act, fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, an act even his disciples did not comprehend (John 12:12–19) but which increases the Pharisees’ ire and jealousy over his popularity (John 12:19).
Likewise, in chapter 12, John’s account anticipates and foreshadows chapters 13–20. When Philip and Andrew tell their teacher about Greeks who want to see Jesus, he explicitly announces, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23).
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One of the finest expressions of Romanticism today is Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Goldfinch. Published in 2013 to critical acclaim and commercial success, it is a classic Bildungsroman in which a teenage boy, grief-stricken by the death of his mother, follows his emotions into a series of increasingly unwise decisions, complex relationships, and the criminal underworld. At the same time, it is the tale of a piece of art: a small Dutch painting of a chained goldfinch, the theft and concealment of which drive much of the plot. The book is full of quintessentially Romantic themes: childhood innocence, pity, the sublime, unrequited love, introspection, solitude, intense emotions, drug addiction, and self-discovery.

Nobody can agree on exactly what Romanticism is. Pinning it down is like nailing jelly to a wall; there have been literally thousands of definitions suggested, and many are either so narrow that they exclude important figures or so broad as to be virtually meaningless. The etymology of the word is convoluted. We move from Rome to the vernacular Roman language to popular Romance languages more generally to popular writings more generally (“romances”) to the roman or novel to the identification of poetry that is romantische (“romantic”) as opposed to klassische (“classical”) and only then to a movement called “Romanticism,” by which time the first generation of Romantics had already died. And none of this quite explains why we also use the word “romantic” to describe the mystery of love—although it is a delightful coincidence that Amor is Roma spelled backward.
The term is nebulous by design. Friedrich Schlegel, credited with coining it in something like its modern sense, wrote to his brother in 1793: “I cannot send you my explanation of the word ‘romantic’ because it would be 125 sheets long.”1 When Isaiah Berlin delivered the Mellon Lectures on Romanticism—which he viewed as “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred,”2 and “a gigantic and radical transformation, after which nothing was ever the same”3—he began by saying that although people might expect him to define the term or at least explain what he meant by it, “I do not propose to walk into that particular trap.”4 He then demonstrated what a hopeless tangle it was by quoting a wide range of thoroughly irreconcilable definitions, drawn from many of the movement’s key thinkers, before offering an (admittedly brilliant) eight-hundred-word summary of his own.5
If describing Romanticism takes Isaiah Berlin eight hundred words, it is clearly foolhardy to try and outline it in just eight. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, here it goes:
1. Inwardness. All that is most important in life, from personal feelings to artistic creativity, comes from inside a person rather than outside. Introspection is good, and authenticity matters more than compliance with expectations. In Hegel’s oft-cited definition, Romanticism is about “absolute inwardness.”6
2. Infinity. There is a longing for the indescribable and inexplicable over the delineated and defined, whether in nature, art, architecture, or (especially) music. “Art is for us none other than the mystic ladder from earth to heaven,” wrote Liszt, “from the finite to the infinite, from mankind to God.”7
3. Imagination. Only by allowing one’s ideas to run free, unconstrained by schools, rules, or reason, is genuine creativity possible. This is why death, sex, dreams, and nightmares are such important sources of inspiration; it is why Blake desired “to cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering, to take off his filthy garments and clothe him with imagination.”8
4. Individuality. What counts is the specific rather than the universal. “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met,” declared Rousseau on the opening page of his Confessions. “I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”9
5. Inspiration. Great artists began to be viewed as geniuses: inspired and inspiring figures who broke rules, transformed art, lived differently, and became iconic. The obvious example is the cult-like admiration of Beethoven, for his behavior and image as much as his music; it was of a completely different order to the admiration of the equally gifted Mozart just a generation before.10
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