hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) (03/11/85)
A few days ago, I mentioned that I had seen two questions from non-Christians that I thought deserved a reply. I then replied to only one. Here is the second. The question: "What sense does it make to say that Christ gave himself for us? How could God need a payment for accepting us?" I'm sorry if this message is going to sound somewhat like a sales pitch for Christianity. For better or worse, it is not possible to explain what I mean by saying Jesus saves me without giving a fairly complete account of what it means to be a Christian. This shouldn't be a great shock, since being a Christian largely means being saved by Christ. A lot of religious language is metaphorical or symbolic. There is nothing wrong with this. It often says a lot concisely. However it is also easy to get misled. There were certain early Christians who took seriously the idea that Christ's death was a payment. However in my opinion no one ever came up with a convincing identification of who it was that had to be paid off or why. While this language is still used in the liturgy, I don't think you will find many Christians who seriously maintain that Christ died to pay off God, or the Devil, or anyone else. In general, Christians maintain that the problems between us and God come from our side. We keep trying to live lives independent of, and in the final analysis, contrary to God. The result is inevitably that we set up "idols" in our lives. What I mean by this is that we center our lives on some value that is less valuable than God. This can be anything from our jobs or money to more subtle idols such as the church or the Bible. (Unfortunately, even intrinsically holy things can become idols when we use them to take the place that God should have.) This ends up warping the way we live to the point that we are not able to hear or to respond to God. Nothing that Christians say will make any sense unless you understand this basic diagnosis. Now what does Christ have to do with all of this? Because we are unable to get ourselves out of the situation we are in, God sent Christ to lead us out. Initially you can think of Jesus' life as being an example given by God for us to follow. But there is more to it than that. When a Christian meditates on the life of Jesus as presented in the Bible, I believe that Christ is spiritually present, and is speaking to us through the Scripture. (In a previous message I tried to explain what I mean when I say that God is speaking to us.) Christians often use the term "discipleship" to describe the relationship between a Christian and Christ. This is a deep personal relationship, in which Christs' influence is allowed to permeate the Christian's entire life. In this context, Jesus' death is important because it helps qualify him to be our spiritual guide. Because we are depending upon him to lead us out of our situation of alienation from God, it is important that he went through this himself and came out whole. One Christian view is that Jesus' words on the cross, "My God, my God, why did you abandon me?", indicate that he had so identified with our situation that he temporarily experienced the same alienation from God that we did. This is not the only idea of the significance of Jesus' death. But they all have Jesus suffering the results of human alienation from God. I think it is important to remember that Christians consider his death to have been followed by his resurrection. While we may think of our sins as having been the cause of Jesus' death, and dying with him on the cross, I think this is highly symbolic language, and is going to require a lot of unpacking to make sense to a non-Christian. For purposes of this discussion, it is primarily Jesus' victory in the resurrection that God wants us to share. I am always suspicious of discussions that focus mainly on Jesus death. There is another aspect to this situation. I had contemplated including here a discussion of a somewhat mystical world view, in which guilt is a quasi-physical force that has to find a victim, and in which people can take on others' fear or suffering and carry it for them. However there is no way I can do this subject justice in this message. (I recommend Charles Williams' novel, "Descent into Hell", as the best portrayal of this world view.) It is clear that the traditional Christian terminology comes from such a world view. We say that Christ died for us, that he bore the guilt for our sins. The question is whether we can make any sense out of this statement in the context of our discussion so far. I believe that we can. In a relationship between people, it is very difficult to make a serious wrong simply vanish. While the people may forgive each other, the action is still there between them. The consequences do not necessarily fall on the person whose fault it was. It is the same in the relationship between us and God. We have broken that relationship. The result is alienation between us and God. As Christ attempts to lead us back to God, that alienation is still present. God may forgive us, but we are still not entirely gracious about coming back to him. The Christian idea is that God will arrange things so that as much of the burden of this alienation falls on him as is possible. Indeed if we allow it, it will all fall on him. Quite frankly, I think we have to reject the idea that when the man Jesus was dying in the cross, he was thinking individually of every one of the billions of people who God intended to save through him. This would require Jesus to have more than a conventional brain. Hence the idea is heretical. What Jesus did do is accept God's will for him, which resulted in his being crucified. He did so knowing that his life and death would be used by God to save all of mankind. It seems perfectly reasonable to call such as action "dying for us". To go further will require a careful look at Christology, which is the relationship between the man Jesus, the Trinity, and that somewhat ambiguous Christian term, Christ. I am not prepared to tackle that today.
fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann) (03/13/85)
In article <topaz.925> hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) writes: >[...] >A lot of religious language is metaphorical or symbolic. There is nothing >wrong with this. It often says a lot concisely. However it is also easy to >get misled. There were certain early Christians who took seriously the idea >that Christ's death was a payment. However in my opinion no one ever came >up with a convincing identification of who it was that had to be paid off or >why. While this language is still used in the liturgy, I don't think you >will find many Christians who seriously maintain that Christ died to pay off >God, or the Devil, or anyone else. Doesn't this contradict the fundamentalists' viewpoint that the Bible must be taken literally? >Quite frankly, I think we have to reject the idea that when the man Jesus >was dying in the cross, he was thinking individually of every one of the >billions of people who God intended to save through him. This would require >Jesus to have more than a conventional brain. Hence the idea is heretical. Sounds reasonable to me. However, I think most Christians do indeed assume that Jesus had more than a conventional brain. I assume you are speaking for one of the more liberal denominations. Frank Silbermann University of North Carolina