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Brückner's remark, therefore, that sacrificial worship had become in the time of Christ " without importance" for Jewish theology reacts injuriously upon his main contention in the passage where it occurs — namely that it was without importance for Paul.
It has become almost a fashion to speak minimizingly of Paul's employment of the category of sacrifice in his explanation of Christ's work, and it is interesting to observe how hard Nemesis treads on the heels of the attempt to do so. Brückner's instance affords a very good example. What he wishes to do is to lower the importance of the conception of sacrifice in Paul's system of thought concerning the work of Christ. He seeks to do this by suggesting that the sacrificial language served with Paul little further purpose than to express the notion of substitution.
"The idea of a sacrifice," he remarks, "came into consideration for Paul only as an illustration of a conception: the thing which he intended lies in the theory of substitution" — a substitution which, he proceeds to show, includes in it the idea of " a substitutive punishment."