May 13, 2012

Glynn Cardy

Easter 6     John 15:9-17

In explaining our Easter billboard I stated baldly that ‘Jesus did not die for our sins’. I deliberately challenged one of the bedrock premises of normative Christianity. A more polite approach, as liberal theologians have done for decades, is to point out that the New Testament has with it a number of atonement theologies and metaphors. [i]

What theory of atonement one accepts will largely shape, or be shaped by, how one understands God, humanity, and the mission of Jesus. Most atonement theories picture God as a judge, humanity as depraved, and Jesus’ mission as dying. The central idea to most of them is that Jesus, as a willingly substitute, takes on humanity’s depravity, is killed for it, and by an act of cosmic accounting humanity’s crimes/depravities are wiped clean by the God-Judge who presides over it all. However this understanding doesn’t sit comfortably with the dominant image of God in the New Testament as a loving father who exercises forgiveness rather than executes judgement. The Father, preeminently portrayed in the Prodigal Son, does not consider anyone beyond his embrace and inclusion.

I think there are many people who find problematic the idea that God is a being of any description – whether male or female, super or saintly. While purists might argue that God is bigger than any notion of being, most Christians continue to call God ‘he’, or ‘Father’, or ‘Lord’, or some other label we attach to humans. 

I prefer to think of God as a movement – as in music creating beauty and transcending the rational; or as energy – as in an unseen force of connection and enlightenment; or as love – known in reciprocal, life-giving, and justice-producing relationships. 

As for humanity, these atonement theories largely pictures us as depraved sinners, with ‘no health in us’ as the old prayerbook says. Yet this is not the only or predominant image in the Scriptures. The foundational theological statement about humanity is that we were made in the image of God. We were, and are, made beautiful and good, and no matter how far our actions, or others’ upon us, taint that beauty and goodness the fundamental truth is that we all reflect the mystery, holiness, and magnificence of God. This is why every life is sacred. This is why we oppose capital punishment and war, and why we support a number of human rights issues. Every child counts. Everyone matters.

The phrase ‘made in the image of God’ though begs the question of the similarity between humanity and God. I think the divine/human correspondence is more around relationality – namely participating in reciprocal, other and self affirming relationships marked by the justice/love known in Jesus. John 15:14 talks about us as friends, rather than servants or disciples, and affirms the way of justice/love as our mode, means and goal. I think a Trinitarian understanding invites us to consider God as a dynamic synergetic movement of self-giving love into which we are invited to participate and ‘abide’.

The mission of Jesus then is far bigger than dying. It is about living, teaching, and modeling a way of participating in this synergy of divine-human interchange. So making room for people on the margins of society is not just nice manners, or nice social policy, or nice politics. It’s about making room for the fullness of the movement of God that always transcends the hierarchical and exclusive barriers religions erect. 

The mission of Jesus invites us and enables us to draw close to that divine movement of borderless love. This is similar to what the Orthodox Church means when it talks about the life and death of Jesus engaging us, uniting us, with God rather than simply and simplistically suffering and dying for us. 

This is similar also to understanding the Feast of Ascension [this coming Thursday] as dissolving the theistic, up-down boundaries in which we limit our understandings of both God and humanity. If God is omnipresent why do we perpetuate the binary thinking which continues to separate God from us and us from God?

Jesus did not die for our sins. In the words of John Dominic Crossan: “Jesus died because of our sins, or from our sins, but that should never be misread as for our sins. In Jesus, the radicality of God became incarnate, and the normalcy of civilization's brutal violence (our sins, or better, Our Sin) executed him.” [ii]

As you know I’m a little wary of the ‘sin’ word because it has been captured, probably irrecoverably, by those who want sin reduced to solely individual faults and failings. Crossan helpfully talks about the word in the singular with a capital S in order to point to the forces of violence that seek to pull apart the relational reciprocity into which the movement of God is always inviting us. It is these forces of violence, manifested in the religious and political elites of Jesus’ day that he challenged and rebelled against, forces that partitioned off women, the sick, tax-collectors, Samaritans, and others, and excluded them from the loci of power. Similarly such forces of violence still operate today keeping the poor in poverty and the powerful in power unaccountable to the poor.

Marcus Borg calls these forces of violence ‘the domination system’. He too refutes the theories of atonement that posit God requiring the death of Jesus in order to offer forgiveness to humanity. It is never the will of God that an innocent person suffers and dies. 

Yet Borg points out that the ‘sacrifice for sin’ idea that emerged in the post-Easter Christian community can, at its best, be understood as a proclamation of radical grace – namely that God accepts us just as we are and the Christian life is not about trying to get right with God. God’s already taken care of that. Rather Christianity is about a way of transformation – following Jesus’ path of commitment and passion for the vision of God.

I like how Marcus offers a bridge to Christians of different perspectives. However the ‘sacrifice for sin’ theories have done much damage. People have been defined as failures. God has been defined as needing a blood sacrifice in order to forgive. The Jesus story has been captured by the elites, refashioned as non-political individual faith, and turned into an instrument for maintaining passivity in the face of injustice. Those theories have by and large not aided empowerment but aided oppression.

If most atonement theories picture God as a judge, humanity as depraved, and Jesus’ mission as dying, what alternative picture does Progressive Christianity offer? My understanding is that God is the dynamic movement of reciprocal self-giving Love; that humanity is made of, in, and for that Love; and that Jesus died, as he lived, to hold before us, invite us, and enable us into the transformative possibilities of that Love.

[i] St Paul was clear that the death of Jesus was the act of God that brought atonement. He was not so clear about ‘how’. He offered four metaphors: redress through sacrifice, ransom from captivity, redemption from slavery, and victory in warfare. Over the last two thousand years various theologies have emerged including Jesus appeasing God, Jesus making a payment to God, God paying off Satan, and Jesus as overcoming the grip of the Devil. All of which are appalling to theological progressives.

[ii] John Dominic Crossan God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007). P. 140-141 (emphasis in original)