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1. Why would God send Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, dying for the sins of the world, instead of just destroying sin or perhaps offering grace and forgiveness to the very ones created by God? Why does an all-powerful being need a mediator anyway?
Chris Haw
Who is�
Chris Haw
I apparently grind my teeth at night, perhaps
in anticipation of my eternal destiny.
A. I have found it important for my mind to get the âsacrificial lambâ idea back into working shape by, for example, considering how Jesus also died from the sins of the world. A terrible steamroller of mob violence, groupthink, and sacred violence struck down Jesusâas it struck down many others. A multitude of our sins, not God, killed Jesus. What is hopeful, however, is how he did not squirm under the temptations to violate love (even toward his enemy) and reduce himself to the level of his torturers and accusers. This fortuitous and righteous display of love is not tangential to his missionâfor God is love. This witness is salvific not only because it is a good example to live byâwhich it isâbut also because it is now part of the human story. Humanity has a chanceâfor at least one of its members lived in truth.
As to a âmediatorâ this seems (at least) like a confusion of words: Forgiveness needs mediation like a sentence needs words. When I forgive you for stealing my couch, I need the mediation of an action or a word to make my forgiveness realâor else it is mere sentiment in my mind. But to go even further beyond a mediated forgiveness, and enter into truth and reconciliation, you are going to need to also return my couch! Is that not how the metaphor of the âWord of God made fleshâ works? We need at least one human not only to receive Godâs mercyâwhich has been latent in the universe since before it beganâbut also to return Godâs couch, so to speak; Jesus, the tradition seems to say, is the human to have done so.
And for what it is worth, the âsending his sonâ verse should not be understood as God killing someone. (Did Godâs denunciation of human sacrifice not begin with the binding of Isaac?) No, We killed Godâs Son, and it was sinful and unjust; Jesusâ freely accepting his (pseudolegal) mob scapegoating does not legitimize it but instead attempts to overcome it with love. Thus John 3:16â21 should be understood constructively as God sending us righteousness incarnateâthe way of true love in visible expressionânot a great person to torture and satiate a bloodlust.
Lee C. Camp
Who is�
Lee C. Camp
I like playing the upright bass.
A. There is a long and complex tradition of varying interpretations of the meaning of the death of Jesus. The early church primarily thought of the death of Jesus as a victory over the powers of sin and death. Sin was not understood merely as the willful act of breaking Godâs rules, but as a power that enslaved and corrupted Godâs good creation. Personified in Satan, that power was always pulling humans down to the grave, punishment, and wrath. In Jesus, God overcame the rebellious powers through suffering love.
In the medieval era, another trajectory became predominant in the West. Anselm of Canterbury argued that a God-man was necessitated because of the great gravity of sin: Sin dishonored God, and humankind had to make some reparation, some satisfaction for sin. Humankind was unable to make such a repayment, and thus Jesus became the substitute, restoring the honor due to God through his obedience unto death. By the sixteenth century, John Calvin focused on punishment: Because of the immensity of humankindâs sin, Godâs wrath demanded punishment. Jesus became the substitute punishment.
Peter Abelard, a contemporary with Anselm, argued that it was neither reparation nor punishment that God demanded, but repentance. Thus the loving example of Jesus effects a change in the heart of humankind, bringing about such repentance.
There has been renewed attention to this doctrine in the last number of decades: Numerous interpreters are assessing the variety in the Christian tradition not as mutually exclusive and competing interpretations but as metaphorsâeach having its own particular strengths and weaknessesâthat give us different glimpses of the profound historical fact of a crucified Messiah.
Jarrod McKenna
Who is�
Jarrod McKenna
I think ĆœiĆŸek is right in insisting trivial âinteresting factsâ
about the author function as a form of propaganda to show
we are âbalanced,â that is, âheâs not just a crazy activist
he also likes Scrabble and long walks on the beach.â
A. Ever read Leviticus 16? Odd text. Yet French anthropologist RenĂ© Girard reminds us that, despite how primitive Leviticus 16 might seem to us, every culture creates âscapegoats.â
Scapegoats are those we blame to keep us in the dark to what has shaped us, namely, the systems that demand victims. Nero put early Christians to the stake. Europe burnt powerful women as witches. Magisterial reformers drowned the Anabaptists. Colonizers deliberately infected indigenous peoples with smallpox. Nazis took millions of Jews to the gas chambers. Jim Crow America lynched black America. The Australian government imprisons âboat peopleâ seeking refuge. A Christian school fires a teacher because of her sexual orientation despite her passion for Jesus. To maintain their place in the âcool group,â kids universally seek out and identify âgeeks.â Guantanamo tortures innocents, fearing they are terrorists. All this is done to keep us âsafe,â to maintain âorder,â to protect âus,â and restore âpeace.â In the face of this reality, our reality, âtotal depravityâ seems optimistic.
The gospel is not that some deity takes out its rage on an innocent victim so he doesnât have to take it out on all of us eternally. This is a diabolical lie dressed up in Christian drag that reverses the gospel, making it the same old bad news, while concealing that Jesus is victorious over it. God doesnât need blood. God doesnât need a mediator. We do!
In Jesus, God knowingly becomes the scapegoat, as âthe Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the worldâ (John 1:29). The lamb of God is NOT offered to God by humanity but is God offered to us to enable a new humanity. God is reconciling the world to Godself through Christ by knowingly becoming our victim, exposing this idolatrous system that promises order, safety, peace, and protection in exchange for victims. In the resurrection, we are all confronted with the grace of our Creator in the forgiving victim who sends the Holy Spirit to shape a new world where no more blood needs to be shed.
Christian Piatt
A. The two-dollar phrase for the concept raised in this question is âsubstitutionary atonementâ or âblood atonement.â The idea that the sacrifice of a living creature was required to appease God for oneâs sins has been around for a lot longer than Christianity has. Mentions of animal sacrifice can be found throughout the Old Testament, and Abrahamâs faith is even tested when heâs asked to sacrifice his own son.
This value of sacrifice as part of oneâs faith was also common in the Roman culture, in which the types of sacrifices usually were specific to the characteristics of the gods being worshipped. So a god of the harvest would require an offering of produce, and so on. Some pre-Christian cultures, such as those from Carthage, even practiced human sacrifice, though the Romans generally condemned it.
In the fourth century C.E., Gregory of Nyssa proposed that Jesusâ death was an act of liberation, freeing humanity from enslavement to Satan. Seven hundred years later, Anselm developed what was then known as the âsatisfactionâ concept, which is closest to what we think of now as atonement theology. Jesus, being both human and perfectly divine, was the only sacrifice that could appease the offense to God by human sin. This idea pointed to Romans and Galatians as support for this interpretation.
Around the same time, a theologian named Peter Abelard proposed that it actually was Jesusâ response of pureâsome might emphasize nonviolentâlove in the face of violence, hatred, and death that was transformative in the human psyche, reorienting us toward a theology of sacrificial love over justice or atonement. Walter Wink has gone a step further and claimed that atonement theology is a corruption of the gospel, focusing on an act of violence rather than the values of peaceful humility and compassion lived and taught by Christ.
Pablo A. Jiménez
Who is�
Pablo A. Jiménez
I am a Latin percussionist.
A. Metaphors, metaphors; religious language is poetic. Given that God is âOther,â we can hardly understand who God is. Therefore, we use metaphorical language in order to convey our ideas about God. This language is always contextual. This means that we usually compare God to things we know, particularly to creation. In theology, this is called the analogia entis, a Latin phrase, which means the âanalogy of being.â
Therefore, it should not surprise us that ancient religious language is based on metaphors. The question addresses three common metaphors. The first is an agricultural one, in which Jesus is compared to a lamb that is sacrificed for the benefit of the community. The second is a legal metaphor that compares the sinner with people condemned to death for their crimes. The third is a political image, which describes Jesus as the mediator between the people and God, the powerful King.
Every generation has the responsibility of rethinking the faith, searching for new and more effective metaphors to describe the relationship between God and humanity. However, before tossing out the old metaphors, we need to understand their meaning. In a way, theology is a dialogue across generations, time, and space. Before developing our own theological language, we must try to understand what other generations said about God, Jesus, and other common theological themes.
Amy Reeder Worley
Who is�
Amy Reeder Worley
I am from Mount Sterling, Kentucky, the home of Mt.
Sterling Court Days, a festival where a person can
buy a gun, ammo, tube socks, black market CDs, and
corndogs, all within one mile of the courthouse.
A. The idea that Jesus died as the âsacrificial lamb of Godâ is called âsubstitutionary atonement,â which is a fancy way of saying that Jesus was crucified as a sacrifice to pay the âsin debtâ of humanity. Although for many Christians atonement is essential to Christianity, it wasnât articulated fully until a thousand years after Jesusâ death in a treatise by Anselm of Canterbury. Regrettably, many people are unaware of a body of biblical scholarship skeptical of subst...
