May 30, 2007
The Third Fundamental:
The Substitutionary Death of Jesus on the Cross Alone Brings Salvation: Part One
It is hard in our generation to put into a single sentence the substance of the Third Fundamental that traditional Christians, at the beginning of the 20th century, said was essential to the Christian faith. Officially, it is referred to as "The doctrine of the substitutionary atonement through God's grace and human faith." Those words communicate almost nothing today. From generation to generation its meaning has been carried for Protestant Christians in the popular mantra, "Jesus died for my sins," while in Catholic Christianity it finds expression in talk about "the sacrifice of the mass" or in references to the cleansing power of Jesus being received sacramentally. These expressions employ the language of what the church has typically called: "the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement."
Over the next three weeks in this column, I intend to examine this familiar Christian idea that I regard today as a completely bankrupt way of understanding the Christian faith. In my opinion these atonement ideas have succeeded primarily in turning God into a child-abusing heavenly parent. They have also turned Jesus into being the ultimate, perhaps even the masochistic, victim of a sadistic father God. Furthermore when literalized, these ideas have turned ordinary Christians into people burdened by the weight of guilt that at best is immobilizing and at worst serves to create a religious justification for their own abuse of others. It had been primarily responsible, I believe, for the levels of anger that have infected Christian history, finding expression in the burning of heretics, anti-Semitism, religious wars, religious persecution, the Crusades and in the rampant homophobia that embraces so much of the Christian Church today. All of this arises out of that strange definition of humanity as so irreparably evil, that Jesus had to die to rescue us from our hopeless state. People who define themselves as evil, as chronic victims almost inevitably respond to the pain of that definition by victimizing others. These attitudes still infect Christian liturgy, expressing themselves in our hymns and prayers. Their constant recitation in typical church services feed the anger of fundamentalists who like to portray the ones not responsive to their message as bound for an eternity of suffering, while at the same time encouraging the rejection of all things religious by those caught up in the rising tide of secular humanism. Having made these grave charges let me now put content into this analysis.
Very early in Christian history, the idea developed that the death of Jesus must have had some ultimate significance. His crucifixion could not have been purposeless. It had to have been a pre-ordained act. As early as the mid fifties CE, in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul sought to give expression to this idea when he wrote "Jesus died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." That is the earliest attempt we have to ascribe purpose to the cross. Those words, however, reveal a number of presuppositions that drive us deeply into the Jewish experience.
Paul is implying first that human life is by definition both fallen and evil, and second, that Jesus' death addresses that reality. Paul is here giving expression to an idea that lies deep in the mythology and history of the Jewish people. Mythology's primary purpose is to explain reality. In this instance the reality crying out to be explained was the presence of evil in God's good world. No one can deny the presence of evil. Human beings kill, steal, rape and abuse one another. Human beings go to war and torture their enemies. Even religion is used by human beings to justify the enormous evil that we do to those who question religious tenets. Human beings seem threatened by those who are different and act toward the different ones with dehumanizing hostility. Our victims have included people of different races, different religions, people who are mentally and physically impaired, albino people, left handed people and homosexual people. Evil is easy to document. Its source, however, is a subject of much debate.
Evil was easier to explain in dualistic cultures where life was viewed as a battle between good and evil, God and Satan, the spiritual and material, than it was in those cultures that believed that God was both one and holy. Dualistic cultures postulated two deities, one good and one evil. This split divided human life as well with our souls belonging to one deity and our bodies belonging to the other. Religious life in these societies was understood as a struggle between the good deity and the evil one. Devotees were taught to mortify their fleshly desires so that their souls could be united with God. Evil was thus the product of a demonic creator.
In the Jewish tradition, however, the oneness of God could never be compromised by a competing deity. "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one God, you shall have no other Gods," is the heart of Judaism. Jews could thus never attribute evil to this one God so their explanation for the presence of evil had to find a different focus. The Hebrew people, therefore, created a myth to explain both the origins of life and its subsequent distortion with evil and placed that myth at the beginning of their sacred story. The tale of Adam, Eve, the serpent and the Garden of Eden is obviously not history. Like all myths it was designed to offer answers to questions that bothered the people, like how did the animals get created, why do people have to struggle against the elements to scratch a living from the soil, why do women experience pain in childbirth, why does a snake crawl on its belly and why is there evil in this world?
The one God of the Jews could only create a perfect world, they proclaimed, and so this story opened with a description of the world's perfection. God made it all out of nothing and pronounced it both good and finished. That is the message which opens the Book of Genesis.
There is, however, a second creation story in Genesis 2, written perhaps as much as 400 years earlier, that purports to show how God's good creation was destroyed by an act of disobedience. According to this story, God perceived that the human creature was lonely and so proceeded to fill the world with living things in a loving but somewhat unsuccessful attempt to find a proper companion for Adam. The great variety of animals came into being, it suggests, when God kept trying to make a creature that would satisfy the human desire for company. Adam, we are told, observed the wonder of God's ability to make so many variations among these creatures. Just look at the variety of tails alone. They were long, short, curly, bobbed, smooth, hairy and bushy. On the elephant the tail actually looked like it had been attached to both ends of the animal. However, in the midst of this almost infinite number of kinds of creatures, none was found that could alleviate Adam's loneliness. So the story says that God put Adam to sleep, removed one of his ribs and created a human-like, if not quite fully human, "junior" partner for the lordly male. She would become his helpmeet, serve his every need and be his intimate companion. As he named all the animals to demonstrate his superiority so Adam now named the submissive woman, "Eve."
It was Eve, the story then explains, who was the agent through which evil entered God's perfect world. The woman, defined as not as wise or as human as the man, displayed her weakness by succumbing to the serpent's temptation to become as wise as God by disobeying God's only rule. She ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The result of this sin was that her eyes were opened and she became aware of both shame and guilt. She quickly incorporated Adam into her act of disobedience and emblazoned the word "temptress" on to her forehead and the foreheads of all women ever since. God's perfection had been destroyed by this weak link in the chain of being. Imperfect people cannot inhabit the perfection of Eden so they were banished. Human life from that day to this, proclaims this myth of our origin, has been defined as fallen and sinful, our created perfection gone forever. Human destiny was to live "east of Eden."
Given that cause for the break in the relationship with the holy God, the Jews assumed that healing could come only from God's side. Having been banished from God's presence in the Garden of Eden, human beings could never reenter it. Having separated themselves from God, nothing that they could do could overcome that separation. Human life had to be rescued by God from its self-imposed bondage to sin. Unable to save ourselves we now required a divine savior.
Biblical anthropology thus began with a focus on human life as fallen and identified that fall as the source of all evil. It was from that alienation, they argued that all evil flowed. The Jews did not wallow in sin as the later Christians would do incessantly, but they did look to God for salvation and in their liturgy they developed something called the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, to keep this dream of divine rescue alive. The image of atonement associated with Yom Kippur then informed the mind of a first century man named Paul of Tarsus who compared Jesus in his death to the sacrificed lamb of Yom Kippur when he wrote: "He died for our sins." The view of Jesus as the substitutionary atonement starts here. Before it had run its course, it would create a religion of guilt and fear, reward and punishment, and even open the doors to a sadomasochistic understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God...
Thoughts??? Warm regards, Roger