This Holy Saturday, between Good Friday and Easter, I was reflecting on the idea of Jesus as the slain Passover lamb.  The association is certainly Biblical, not only in the obvious context of Jesus’ death taking place on Passover, but also in the testimony of the Apostle Paul in 1:Cor. 5:7.  Paul doesn’t go into detail what he means about Jesus being the Passover lamb, but if we look carefully I think there are some helpful hints to be gleaned … hints that suggest Jesus’ shed blood means a great deal besides forgiveness of sins.

The Passover sacrifice is, of course, introduced in Exodus 12.  In this account, God instructs Moses to tell the people of Israel to slaughter a lamb and do two specific things with it:  mark their doorposts with its blood, and eat the flesh for dinner.  In stark contrast to the usual Christian narrative of sacrifices being for sin, I find it notable that the concept of sin does not appear in the entire tale from Exodus 11-13.  Both actions–the blood and the flesh–have a very specific purpose, and  neither is related to sin at all.

First, the Israelites were to mark their door frames with the lamb’s blood “as a sign.”  Those whose houses were so marked would not suffer the death of their firstborn, as happened to the rest of the households of Egypt.  It’s important to recognize that God didn’t “need” the label; some (though not all) previous plagues specifically spared the Israelites in Exodus 8:22 (flies), Exodus 9:24 (livestock died), Exodus 9:26 (hail), and Exodus 10:23 (darkness).  So the sign of the blood clearly was intended for the Israelites themselves, not so much for God and the angel of death.  Nevertheless, the sign was clearly one of identification.  The blood on the door marked a household not only as of the people of God, but people who had deliberately obeyed God’s command.  It was not the shedding of that blood–the sacrifice itself–that spared the Israelites from the death plague, but rather the application of that blood according to God’s instructions.  Might this be consistent with a God who prefers obedience to sacrifice (1 Sam. 15:22, Hosea 6:6)?

Second, the Israelites were to eat the roast flesh of the lamb.  No symbolism is given for this in the Exodus text, and in fact the only instructions are that it should be roasted not boiled, that it be eaten in haste and with unleavened bread, and that any leftovers be burned.  Without trying to extrapolate too much, I honestly wonder if this may not have been a highly pragmatic command for the simple reason that the people were about to travel on foot out into the desert, and they simply needed a good protein-and-carbohydrate meal to fortify them for the journey.  God’s commands can get downright practical at times.

We Christians pay too little attention to the Passover links to Jesus, I think.  Passover is the time when God called his people out of a foreign place, saving them from slavery, and in a very real way making them into “his people” in a way they had not previously been.  On the eve of their salvation, on the threshold of a new life as a newly-created  nation, God’s people were labeled by blood and strengthened by flesh of a sacrificed lamb.  Paul says something quite similar in Ephesians 2:13-14, where even we Gentiles have been “brought near by the blood of Christ,” and separate peoples have been made into one “in his flesh.”  Jesus told his disciples to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood at the Passover meal.  Just as God initiated a feast of remembrance on the eve of delivering the people of Israel, Jesus instituted a new meal of remembrance as he set in motion the new kingdom of his Body.  The body of Christ as well as the blood; the bread as well as the cup, is given to humans to unite and seal us as the people of God.  In his broken body and shed blood, we are marked as different, set apart from the death that rages around us, and ushered into a new kingdom.

There is much more in the Bible about the blood of Christ, and I don’t suggest for a moment that the Passover narrative is the whole story.  Still, it is one we should remember.  This “day of remembrance,” this “festival to the LORD,” is to remind us of our deliverance, our calling, our unification as the people of God.  Let us not forget.

My blogging friend Morgan Guyton recently published a post in which he took on Four cringe-worthy claims of popular penal-substitution theology.  I heartily commend the post to all, and I cringe right along with Morgan each of the points he highlighted.  Nevertheless I find myself pushing back in some regards, and pushing further in others.  My intent here is to interact directly with Morgan’s article, so I encourage the reader to begin by reading his post.

Morgan’s first objection is to the popular notion in Penal-Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) that God’s d cannot tolerate the presence of sin…that “God is allergic to sin” as he amusingly puts it.  He’s absolutely right that this claim is baloney (I’ve addressed this before in my post Did God really abandon Jesus on the cross?), and that Jesus’ becoming human in order to get close–even to befriend–sinners is prime evidence of this fact.  His further statement “It was not that Jesus couldn’t tolerate imperfection but rather that His perfection was intolerable” is,  I think, a reasonable characterization.  He then concludes “God is light; He doesn’t need the cross to protect Him from our darkness; we need the cross so we can survive entering into God’s light.”  I think he’s almost right…the cross was for us and not for God…but not so much so we could “survive” God:  only God’s love and graciousness are needed for that.  Rather, we “needed” the cross in part because it demonstrated the positively crazy lengths to which God would go to invite humanity into his presence.  Without that prodigal expression of sacrificial benevolence, we could not (or would not) trust the Father when he invites us into his presence.  Thus the “boldness” we are challenged to exercise in Heb. 4:14-16, is the appropriate response to the cross.

Morgan’s second point is to oppose the notion that God sees Jesus, not us, when he looks upon those who have been justified through Christ…”that the reason God gives us His “approval” is because He doesn’t see us when He looks at us but sees Jesus instead. That’s not approval; that’s deception.”  Morgan is absolutely right.  I’ve always found the notion that somehow Jesus was helping us pull the wool over his Father’s eyes to be frankly offensive.  I can’t say it better than Morgan himself concluded this section:  “God doesn’t need to see a Jesus mask over our faces to approve us; His unconditional prior approval of us is the reason He sent His Word made flesh to empower us for holy living through our incorporation into His body.”

The third issue Guyton takes on is the notion that “Since God is infinite, he is infinitely offended by our slightest sins.”  Morgan goes into the history of the “Satisfaction” theory of atonement, which suggests that the cross was necessary to satisfy God’s honor which had been sullied by the sins of his creation.  Here again, he makes the assertion that the sacrifice of Christ, to the extent it would satisfy God’s honor, was because *we* need to be sure of God’s satisfaction, not because God demanded it.  My objection to this is that the whole notion that God’s honor needs to be addressed through a sacrifice is itself not a Biblical concept as far as I can see–it certainly is not part of any description of sacrifice that I can recall in the Bible.  I have not read Anshelm myself, but Guyton makes no mention of Anshelm’s having appealed to Scripture for the rationale of satisfaction, nor does Morgan himself appeal to Scripture in correcting the doctrine.  I suggest that it ought to be ditched wholesale as an extrabiblical proposition.

The fourth “cringe-worthy” point Guyton refutes is the claim that God poured out his wrath on Jesus on the cross.  As he says partway through the section:  “I cannot find anywhere in scripture that makes the Father the primary agent behind the crucifixion of His Son.”  He’s right.  I’ve argued similarly when I refuted the notion that God had turned his back on Jesus on the cross.  Guyton correctly points out that Romans 1:18-31 tells us the evidence of God’s wrath is him handing people over to the very depravity they desire.  That’s just not what happened on the cross.  In fact, nothing I can find in Scripture suggests that Jesus was the recipient of God’s wrath in any form.  As Morgan states, “In any case, what happened on the cross is that God the Father did not prevent God the Son from being killed by the Jewish religious authorities. He let Him drink the cup of (His/our?) wrath which He came to Earth to drink. But this in no way means that the Father was the executioner of the Son for the sake of His own anger management. When we talk about the Father “pouring out His wrath” on His son, we make Him look like a drunken child abuser.”

Morgan concludes “Penal substitution is an important part of the rich mystery of the cross — just not in the oversimplified, canned version that has come to predominate our juvenilized evangelical church.”  I’m frankly confused by this, because he’s just made very good points that Jesus was not being punished (the penal part) by God, but also because (and Guyton doesn’t say this) I see no evidence in Scripture that what Jesus did was “in our place” either…that is, whatever Jesus was doing was not as a “substitute” for us.  The Biblical testimony is clear that Jesus died and was resurrected for our sakes.  I do not mean in any way to deny or diminish that fact.  But the evidence that his death was somehow in loco humanis just isn’t there.  Penal-substitution doesn’t need to be reclaimed from poor interpretation, it needs to be discarded entirely.

Which is why I still find Christus Victor a much better way to attempt wrapping our puny brains around Jesus’ death and resurrection…

I was asked a question, through email, recently about N.T Wright’s view of Justification. Since I wrote a long answer, I figured I would post it as well on our blog.

N.T Wright has a great book that I though was extremely useful called The Climax of the Covenant. In this book he outlines how Jesus and the cross were the climactic event of God’s covenant with Israel. The law was there simply to point out sin (the wrong) and provide insights on how to truly bear and steward the image of God. God’s covenant with Israel, in this perspective, is not that Israel as a people, nor the law, nor sacrifices, etc., were the answer or solution to sin, only that the answer and solution to sin would come through Israel. N.T. Wright’s analogy for this was that Israel is like the bomb squad whose job is to manage the bomb until the time is right then lay it at the foot of the cross. His point was more often than not Israel believed they were also to diffuse the bomb and this is not the case. So covenantal theology that understands the covenant and how Jesus fits as the story of Israel’s climax is a core point.

The second is a more holistic understanding of sin (the wrong). For this the law court metaphor works quite well and I think brings even deeper understanding than most evangelicals allow it to. To fully understand the law court analogy we have to have the judge (God), the defendant (humanity) and the plaintiff (satan) all present. For this an analogy from The Lion, The Which and the Wardrobe is helpful. I think C.S. Lewis was onto something with how he presented this scenario.

When Edmund, representing humanity, comes into the camp Aslan takes him and speaks with him. Aslan then comes out and announces that the matter with Edmund has been settled (between Aslan and Edmund), Aslan had forgiven him. All of this without a sacrifice and without a substitution (yet)… Then the White Witch enters and says not so fast Aslan there is a matter that needs to be settled according to the law, she (the law and satan) still had a claim against Edmund. As we all know Aslan takes his place thus dealing with the claim the White Witch (satan) had on Edmund (humanity) once and for all.

This view I think is a much more biblical presentation of penal substitutionary atonement. It is penal only in the sense of the matter of the law, and substitutionary in that Jesus took our place in the matter of satan’s claim on humanity thus setting us free once and for all. But it does not present an angry God or one where we are starting off on the wrong foot with and someone needs to take the punishment to fulfill God’s wrath. It is more about settling the matter with the one who brings the claim up because of the law.

So back to the courtroom setting. Because of the scenario above, the matter has been dealt with. Satan has accepted the substitution once and for all and released his claim thus acknowledging the matter has been resolved and he will not bring it up again. There is to be no re-trial.. Satan believed that the Son of God who is the only person who can threaten his Kingdom was going to be killed (and not raised again) and was a fair trade for all of humanity.

So Justification in light of all of this is simply God finding humanity to be in the right and of no wrong doing. N.T. Wright points out what is different from most evangelical views, including those like John Piper, which is that justification is not about imputed righteousness in that we somehow become or attain righteous attributes from God. It is simply only that we are found in the right and to be not guilty (even though we still are because we still sin) God does not even acknowledge it is there, it is gone, forever, not just covered, transferred, etc. There is no longer any claim against us because of Jesus because the accuser lost the right to accuse us any more in accepting the substitution.

This, I would contend, even when reading Paul’s covenantal theology and even his understanding of sin, law, courtroom, etc., that this view is the way Paul understood all the Jewish heritage, with the amazing act of the cross and now into the Kingdom where God is becoming King through Jesus (his words) because of the resurrection (Jesus’s coronation) of the Kingdom that is inaugurated but not yet consummated.

I have just finished Lee C. Camp’s book Who Is My Enemy?   This is a book every American Christian should read–full stop.  It is also a book everyone who’s frustrated with the public political stance of American Christians should read.  And it’s also a book anyone wrestling with the questions of war and peace with regard to the church and/or teachings of Jesus Christ should read.  And it’s also … oh, forget it, just go buy and read the book already! (and no, I get no remuneration for this…I bought my copy on Amazon!)

Camp wrote this book out of a journey he undertook to attempt to see America through Muslim eyes, as well as to get to know Muslims first-hand, as he contemplated Americans’ fear of Islam in the post-9/11 world.  Along the way, he learned a lot about his own faith as well.

I have had conversations with more than one Evangelical Christian about Islam.  I’m sad to report that most of those discussions seem to get mired down in the notion that Islam is essentially a violent religion bent upon the destruction of any and all who do not convert to the Muslim religion and subject their nations to the Islamic “Shariah” law.  Most of those friends, frankly, discount my own personal experiences with any Muslim who might have ever treated me with anything like respect or even love…they are convinced that any such person was either deceiving me in order to eventually convert me, or else he wasn’t really a committed Muslim.  Maybe my faith is weak, but I don’t know how many of this particular subset of my friends would even hear Lee’s message.  But for the rest, I believe he’s drawn out some important insights.

Camp makes a compelling historical case that when Christians claim Islam is a violent religion, they’re suffering a serious case of collective amnesia regarding Christianity’s own history.  We all know that the “Christian” Europeans launched the Crusades during the medieval era; I did not know that not only Muslim history, but also written records from the crusaders themselves, document at least one instance of the crusaders actually boiling Muslim adults, roasting their children and eating them.  Camp recounts records from the crusaders’ own accounts as well as those of Arab historians, of whole towns slaughtered, mosques filled with people burned alive, and similar accounts of wanton slaughter that frankly horrified the Muslims who survived.

But then, in answer to the claim that Christians became more enlightened since the Middle Ages, Camp also relates the history of the colonial and early American slaughter of Native American people, including one event where hundreds of Indians were massacred over a period of weeks on the provocation of one settler being murdered.  In the 17th century, the Christian Puritans who came to America well-trained in Calvinist Christianity, stated following their wanton slaughter “Thus was God pleased to smite our enemies, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.”

He carries the tale to the twentieth century, and the U.S. invasion of the Philippines under Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, where civilians “stood along the side of the road, took off their hats, touched their foreheads with their hands.  ‘Buenos Dias, Senors’ (means good morning),’ and then the soldier boys proceeded to kill the residents and destroy the village.”  Even the most-justified (in American eyes) war in our history, World War II, had a dark side we rarely discuss:  the British and American firebombings of Hamburg and other German cities where the civilian residential areas were deliberately targeted in a strategy designed “to destroy the morale of the enemy civilian population, and in particular, of the industrial workers” (attributed by Camp to Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, British historians of the war).  The same rationale, it may be said, also was used in our firebombings and ultimately nuclear attacks on Japan, justified by many in the American Christian world.

All this is not–and Camp makes this clear–an attempt to justify Muslim violence by positing some sort of “moral equivalency…” a “sure, they’re bad, but so are we” argument. Camp is rather confronting those who claim that Christians are peaceful and Muslims are violent, with the harsh evidence of violence in our own ranks.  As he says:  “I intend no rationalizing or excusing or justifying on anyone’s part.  My concern instead is that we practice honest self-examination rather than the dishonest procedure of comparing an idealized form of our faith tradition with the messy historical record of Muslims.”

This then is where Camp’s work becomes more theological.  Though not a proponent of Augustine’s criteria for “Just War,” he calls to mind a significant part of Augustine’s teaching that I most emphatically have not heard taught in American churches.  Augustine promoted several criteria for Jus ad Bellum, justice in deciding to go to war (this comes from pp.71-72 of the paperback edition of the book).  These are the well-known criteria that

• War is declared by a legitimate governing authority
• War must be engaged for just cause, such as self-defense, defense of innocents, restoration of order;
• War must be undertaken for right objective intentions…peace and justice as opposed to territory or resources;
• War must also be undertaken with right subjective intentions…justice and mercy not hatred and vengeance.

There is also the notion of due process in war:

• It must be undertaken as a true last resort after other options have been exhausted;
• The enemy must always be allowed to sue for peace on the grounds for which the war was started; the demand of an unconditional surrender is ipso facto unjust;
• The cause must be winnable
• Force must be proportional to the cause and the harm being prevented (this of course runs counter to the “Powell Doctrine”)
• Treaties & international law must be respected;
• Enemy combatants must be treated justly if captured.

But interestingly, Augustine also provided some other guidelines for Jus in bello, the just conduct of the war:

• Immunity of the innocent; noncombatants must not be targeted;
• Weapons must discriminate between the innocent and the combatant (this is often taken to state that land mines, which are completely agnostic to their targets, are unjust);
• Methods must be only what is necessary to achieve the objective;
• Human dignity must be respected; torture, slander, rape, poisoning of wells, are forbidden, and keeping truces and giving quarter are required.

The point that Camp makes in all this is that American Christians tend to claim Augustine’s “Just War” mantle in determining that the decision to wage war is just (although even there, our voice is rarely heard in a critical manner), but then Augustine’s further guidance is left entirely by the wayside in the pursuit of a war once engaged.  Here, the history Camp has recounted in previous chapters comes back to devastating effect, as time after time, the American position has been to win the war at all costs because we have adjudged the cause to be just, but with little regard to the justice of the means.  “This is not merely an argument about pacifism.”  Camp writes.  “This is about the fact that the church ignores JWT [Just War Theory] too.  This is about the move toward ‘total war,” in which we are told we must wage merciless war on behalf of the good news of democracy and free-market economies and political liberalism so we might be free to worship the Lord who in Jesus taught us to love our enemies.” (p. 96)

But here, then, is where Camp gets to the meat of his discovery.  The Christian theory of Just War is far more similar to the teachings of Mohammad in the Qur’an, than it is to the teachings of Jesus in the Bible. Islam also has a rich “Just War” tradition in both scripture and history…although certainly it has been violated in history just as the Christian tradition has.  But nobody who has read the texts can argue that Mohammad did not condone warfare in some form, while that argument is quite compelling not only for Jesus himself, but for at least the first two hundred years of Christianity.

Camp unpacks an association I thought I had seen before, but had yet to put into words, when he actually associates Christian warmaking as a logical extension of the Christian doctrine of penal-substitutionary atonement.  He explains it through the eyes of a Muslim theologian with whom he met (and this is Camp’s explanation, not that theologians exact words):  “The Christian myth gets to ‘redemption’ through a crucifixion, a violent, abusive act; ‘justice’ demands such punishment; and redemption requires the shedding of blood in exchange for the sins and hostilities committed.  This myth…ironically depicts the cross in such a fashion that it becomes easily co-opted by Crusaders of any and all sorts.”  (p. 114)

He then takes a clear-eyed look at the Muslim denial that Jesus ever died.  Camp is no synchretist.  His chapter “Good Friday” is absolutely clear in the centrality of Jesus’ death and resurrection to Christian doctrine and practice.  But he shows the truth of the cross as the counter-worldly way in which God chose to deal with evil…not by killing those infected by evil but by dying to give them life…so that resorting to the violent way of the world is actually to deny the way of the very Lord we claim to serve.  “Thus, we come to this ironic observation, that while the Muslim may deny the historical fact of the crucified Jesus, we Christians have often denied the ethical relevance of the crucified Jesus.”  And later, “…when the crucified Jesus becomes yet one more ‘doctrine’ merely to be believed, stripped of its narrative force, stripped of its ethical significance for the disciple of that Jesus…when the cross becomes an emblem, or the Scriptures that testify to this Jesus become the morale booster to go off and kill the enemy whom Jesus commanded us to love, then the Christian has denied the crucified Jesus every bit as much as the Muslim has, but less honorably so.”

The Muslim denies with his words,

because of what the Qur’an says;

the Christian denies with his deeds,

despite what the Bible says.

Camp’s concluding paragraphs are powerful.  “Wherever we Christians come out upon the question of ‘pacifism’ or ‘just war,’ we all will need immense courage to speak up and speak out:  against nationalism and militarism, against fearmongering and hatred of enemies, against praying for ‘our troops’ instead of praying for peace….[We need] to stop counting the United States, for all the many things about this country we may savor and know to be genuinely good, as the savior of the world, for the world already has a Savior…”

“Freedom is the gift of God and is enabled by cross and resurrection, not by the United States’ Constitution, or Declaration of Independence, or well-intentioned and honorable soldiers.  It is Jesus who gives us freedom…”

I hope I’ve whetted your appetite.  This is an important book!

Today is Good Friday, the day we honor the supreme sacrifice Jesus Christ made when he went to his execution on the cross.   While I have argued before that Christians tend to spend too much energy and emotion on Jesus’ death and too little on his resurrection, it is still right and good that we soberly and gratefully acknowledge the suffering Jesus voluntarily accepted on our behalf.

There is, however, an element of the typical story of Jesus’ death that needs to be re-examined.  According to popular accounts—particularly fueled by the penal-substitutionary-atonement crowd—the stain of all our sin, heaped upon Jesus at his sacrificial death, was so horrible that holy God the Father, who in his holiness cannot look on sin, turned his back on his dying son.  This, they say, is why Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as told in Matt. 27:46 and Mark 15:34.

Trouble is, they’re likely wrong.

First of all, the Bible doesn’t teach that God can’t look at sin.  Preachers do, but the Bible doesn’t.  God clearly looks on sinful people all the time, or he couldn’t see Earth at all.  Secondly, Jesus is crying out in extreme suffering…he probably felt forsaken at that point (who wouldn’t?).  But nowhere does scripture teach that God actually did forsake Jesus, just that he cried out in desperation while suffering a tortuous death.

Most compellingly, however, Jesus was probably quoting the beginning of Psalm 22, bits of which are associated with Jesus by the gospel writers on numerous occasions.  Take a look, for example, at Ps. 22:16-18, which John the Evangelist clearly associates with Jesus (see John 19:24 and John 19:36-37).  Whether Jesus was in fact tying this psalm to himself in a prophetic sense, or whether he was turning to a hymn of comfort in his affliction, we cannot know, although we do know that Psalm 22 ends with these words (vv. 28-31):

For kingship belongs to the Lord,
and he rules over the nations.
All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
even the one who could not keep himself alive.
Posterity shall serve him;
it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
that he has done it.

Not a bad declaration of the coming victory, for one who appears to be in the throes of defeat by the very powers who will yet be forced to acknowledge his rule!

But God saw it.  He’s not in the habit of turning his back on anybody!

And don’t forget, in the words of the inimitable Tony Campolo, “it’s Friday, but Sunday’s a-comin’!”

In recognition of holy week, I’m going to resurrect a piece I wrote five years ago at Easter, after I saw the film The Passion of the Christ.  Released in 2006, the film itself is clearly not news; however, as recently as this month I’ve heard fellow Christians speaking positively—almost reverently—of the film and its portrayal of Jesus’ suffering.  Notwithstanding the excellent work on Jesus’ resurrection by N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope – 2008), that subset of the church that I’ve seen still seems to be firmly in the grips of an affliction we might term hyperchristemia—an excess of Christ’s blood (or, more accurately, an obsessive focus on his blood).

Passion aroused no small amount of controversy when it was released.  No shock there; the figure of Jesus Christ seems rarely to inspire indifference.  I remain troubled, however, by precisely which subjects became the lightening rods of the controversy—and perhaps even more disturbed by those that did not.  I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose.  Public controversies rarely center around key issues, and this one was no different.  A consideration of the person and history of Jesus should definitely arouse passions, but not—I submit—primarily because of his so-called “Passion.”

I object to the content of the Passion movie, but not for the usual reasons.  Not because of the graphic brutality, though the sadistic orgy of Jesus’ flogging is certainly disturbing.  Nor do I consider the arguments over Mel’s perceived anti-Semitism, or the degree of historicity of his portrayal, to be issues of more than peripheral concern.  I object, rather, to the very notion that Jesus’ suffering and death comprise the central story at all.  I object to the line on some of the Passion posters:  “He lived to die.”  The message of the Christian gospel is nothing of the sort.  It is Jesus’ resurrection, not his death, which claims that central focus.

Though the film was neither unique nor original in this regard, Passion’s central message is that Jesus’ intense physical suffering and barbaric death comprise the ultimate climax of His life and redemptive work.  The film opens with a quote from Isaiah 53:  “He was wounded for our transgressions. . .by His stripes we are healed.”  The remaining two-plus hours appear to me primarily to demonstrate just how many brutal stripes were required to effect that healing.  Even the symbolic portrayal of Satan recognizing defeat comes at the very moment of Jesus’ death.  This doctrine, while common in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, is fundamentally at odds with the Scriptural portrayal of our redemption.

I heard a great feature this morning on NPR’s show “Morning Edition,” in which the brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens were interviewed.  Christopher, as most of you likely know, is a world-famous atheist (I would describe him as an anti-theist fundamentalist) who rails against those who hold to faith, and who wrote the bestseller “God is Not Great.”  What I did not know is that his brother Peter is an Anglican Christian, and their arguments for and against belief have been somewhat public as well.  Now Christopher is dying of cancer, so people are coming out of the woodwork to pray for him (good) and to “witness” to him (mostly bad, I’m guessing) before he cashes in.

I was struck by a statement Christopher made in the interview:

“Under no persuasion could I be made to believe that a human sacrifice several thousand years ago vicariously redeems me from sin,” he says. “Nothing could persuade me that that was true — or moral, by the way. It’s white noise to me.” 

Wow.  This sounds like exactly the frustration I expressed after reading Robert Heinlein’s book Job: A Comedy of Justice.  As I described in my essay on the book,  I’m bothered that, having come to the conclusion that the classic doctrine of penal-substitutionary atonement is unbiblical, I keep on encountering evidence that people have been driven from faith in Jesus, at least in part, because they can’t accept PSA.  It angers me that what I firmly believe to be bad theology, is being force-fed to people with such vigor that it’s all they can see of Jesus.

Jesus himself had some pretty harsh things to say about those whose false teaching drives people from true faith.  We as believers need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.  I said it last week, and I’ll repeat it today:  how can anyone be blamed for rejecting Jesus if we’ve never introduced them to anything but a bad caricature of him?

Over the past few days I read Robert A. Heinlein’s 1984 book Job: A Comedy of Justice.  For those who enjoy mind-bending adventures with an eternal twist, I recommend it as a fun story.  Be forewarned: if you only enjoy fiction that comports with your theology and cosmology,  and you consider yourself an orthodox Christian, this book is probably not for you.  But if you can stomach a book in which the character of Satan describes his brother Yahweh as a jerk (and given the narrative context, the reader will find himself agreeing with Satan), and if sexuality that is R-rated in content though only PG in description doesn’t put you off, then you may well find Job a fun read.

But what I wanted to highlight with this post was the way in which Heinlein’s book illustrates the damage that Christians have done–and, I’m sorry to say, continue to do–to the cause of Christ.  I don’t know anything about Heinlein’s own faith or philosophy, but I can tell you that he did his homework for this book.  The main character, Alexander Hergensheimer, starts out as a conservative, fundamentalist preacher who’s head of an organization called Churches United for Decency (CUD), in an alternative-universe America with only 46 states and the kind of laws fundamentalist Americans in our universe would appreciate.  During a firewalking experience while on vacation in Papua New Guinea, our friend Alec finds himself in an parallel universe–the first of many–where his own morals and faith run headlong into those of cultures and Americas with decidedly different outlooks.

But although Heinlein could have resorted to the usual caricature of conservative Christians by those who are neither conservative nor Christian, he absolutely did not do so.  Alec’s story is told in the first person, with frequent quotations from the Bible.  The character is portrayed in a completely sympathetic light, and whatever Heinlein’s own predilections about faith may have been, there is not a hint of mocking or hostility toward this character.  At least twice within the narrative, Alec makes a heartfelt effort to lead other characters to Christ in the context of a premillenial rapture that he is convinced is imminent (turns out he’s right), and each time, the message Alec conveys is straight out of an Evangelical Christian playbook, delivered without a hint of irony or ill motive.

And yet the arc of the story is clearly not one that resonates with Christian teaching.  Beyond the character’s shift in his sexual standards and choice of beverages, the real issue at the climax of the story is that Yahweh doesn’t play fair (a la Job), and never has.  Consider this section near the end of the book:

Alec, ‘justice’ is not a divine concept; it is a human illusion.  The very basis of the Judeo-Christian code is injustice, the scapegoat system.  The scapegoat sacrifice runs all through the Old Testament, then it reaches its height in the New Testament with the notion of the Martyred Redeemer.  How can justice possibly be served by loading your sins on another?  Whether it be a lamb having its throat cut ritually, or a Messiah nailed to a cross and ‘dying for your sins.’  Somebody should tell all of Yahweh’s followers, Jews and Christians, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  “Or maybe there is.  Being in that catatonic condition called ‘grace’ at the exact moment of death–or at the Final Trump–will get you into Heaven.  Right?  You got to Heaven that way, did you not?”

“That’s correct.  I hit it lucky.  For I had racked up quite a list of sins before then.”

“A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven.  An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain–then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity…”

“…I’ve known Him too long.  It’s His world, His rules, His doing.  His rules are exact and anyone can follow them and reap the reward.  But ‘just’ they are not.” (Hardcover edition, pp.291-292)

OK, so first of all it’s obvious in the next-to-last paragraph I quoted, that Heinlein’s not referring to the “eternal security” brand of Christianity; however I doubt he’d have come out any differently in his conclusions if he were.  Heinlein forces the reader face-to-face with a painful fact:  the God that is portrayed by much of traditional Christian teaching is not just.  No amount of wordplay can change the obvious truth of this statement.  Genocide of the Canaanites, the angel of death slaughtering thousands in penalty for David’s adultery, the infinite punishment of hell for the necessarily-finite violations of temporal sin, none of these is remotely akin to our basic, reasonable notion of making the punishment fit the crime.  Merely shouting “but God is just” in the face of such evidence beggars belief.

I know people will defend their doctrines to the nth degree, and some will accuse me of heresy or blasphemy, but here I have to side with Heinlein’s assessment (as a character says elsewhere in the book, “anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything–just give him time to rationalize it.”

My frustration, and the one that made me finish “Job” with some sadness,  is that, like so many before him and since, Heinlein may have rejected the Gospel precisely (only?) because he was fed a counterfeit “gospel!”  He clearly knew–even understood–the message that churches have trumpeted for centuries.  He knew all about the Old Testament sacrificial system as portrayed by Evangelicals.  Like a lot of Christians, he apparently did not know that the “scapegoat” in the Old Testament wasn’t sacrificed.  Heinlein knew about Old Testament blood sacrifice too, again as Evangelicals teach it.  He did not know that blood sacrifice in the Old Testament represents cleansing or thanksgiving, but not payment for forgiveness of sin (go back and read Leviticus!).   He understood the Evangelical teaching that Jesus’ death finally fulfilled the blood-for-sin paradigm upon which Penal-Substitutionary Atonement is based.   But he was not equipped to realize that the PSA theory of atonement is at best a tiny fraction of the work of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Heinlein had presumably met a lot of Christians, but he had never met Jesus.  How could he?  The “gospel” message preached by most Christians throughout the Twentieth Century (Heinlein died in 1988) had very little Jesus in it…a “four laws and then the rapture” gospel needs Jesus for his blood and for his second coming, but completely ignores his teachings and his life, and only gives a passing nod to his resurrection.  If Heinlein believed the God of Christians and Jews to be unjust, well, when did anyone in either group introduce him to the justice preached by Jesus and before him by the prophets?

And most importantly, of course, here and now and today, what portrait of God are you holding up to the world around you?  If people consider your testimony of Jesus and ultimately reject him (as some will), are they rejecting the real thing?

I just came across two articles today that anyone who really cares about poverty, justice, and the gospel must read:

http://www.humanitarianchronicle.com/2009/07/nairobi-my-introduction/
http://www.humanitarianchronicle.com/2009/07/kibera-and-the-reality-of-the-gospel/

I love Nairobi. I used to go there a lot when I worked in Tanzania in the mid-80s. It seemed a somewhat safer place then, though even back then I suspected it was a bit of an illusion–there was such a disparity between wealth and privilege on one hand, and poverty and despair on the other, and they were side by side all the time. I last saw Nairobi in 2002 when I went for a conference, and I was struck by how much a lot of the city had decayed, but yet how incredibly built-up certain wealthy areas had become (the Sarit Centre in Westlands in particular). I still dream of taking my family there some day, but unless I land a job in international health I fear it may remain a dream.

But anyhow, I want you to read Frank’s posts, in particular how his experience in the Kibera slum expanded his understanding of the gospel. One brief quote:

On Sunday I came face to face with the ravages of sin and it messed with my sense of humanity. Driving through Kibera on Monday I was made intensely aware of how humanity was being ravaged and the need for redemption. It was all around – I believe God’s anger burns white hot at the depravity of his people that would result in such chaos and destruction of the pinnacle of his creative expression.

In the dirt with those children I found the redemption of the cross – the act that wipes the slate clean, I sensed the victory of the resurrection pointing to a renewed world, I felt the assurance of the ascension, I reveled in the hope of God’s future time of complete restoration where his justice shall be displayed in full and I relished the visible transforming power of that story on display before me in the very lives of those children. Right there, in the middle of human depravity was a small point where the very transforming power of the gospel could be seen. Right in the middle of the darkness there was a light shining very brightly.

I must act, not just out of gratitude for the substitution Christ gave on the cross – no, the story and message of good news (the Gospel) doesn’t end there. Because the Kingdom has come near, it is active. Christ’s work has given me citizenship and I work to transform this world in anticipation and with the hope of God’s complete justice in view. As those children transformed my life, it’s that Gospel that overwhelmed me and I will permit no scholar to demand that I settle for less, no matter how popular their name.

Now go read the whole thing!

OK, time to stir the pot a little. Our particular corner of the blogosphere has been buzzing fow a while now on the subject of atonement. I’ve enjoyed it, I don’t think we’ve nearly closed the topic, and I certainly intend to return there myself at some point. Nevertheless, I think we need to step back and pause for a reality check.

First of all, whatever the mechanism by which sin has been atoned, the clear message of the gospels and the epistles is that Jesus has done it. It’s not conditional on us understanding or believing any point of detail as to how he did it. It’s not even conditional upon us knowing or understanding that there WAS a problem! It should suffice us to recognize that Jesus had–and has–both the means and the authority to deal with the problem, whatever problem it was.

More importantly, though, the whole question of atonement for sin, at least as it’s discussed in most definitions of “the gospel,” presupposes that sin and its remedy are the central focus (or at the very least one principal focus) of the mission Jesus came to do. While I do not dispute that Jesus’ death and resurrection had a beneficial effect with regard to human sin, it was never the point of the process. Salvation was always a means to an end, it was never intended to be the end in itself.

The story of Jesus’ time on earth is replete with redemption and healing. This is indisputable. But the point my Mom just made in her word study on repentance is also true for the rest of Jesus’ redemptive acts: the healing, the repentance, the salvation of people from whatever mess they were in, was always and only a beginning. What really mattered wasn’t the key that got them in the door, it was the life they were called to live on the other side of that door.

For this reason, while we may continue to debate the mechanism by which Jesus dealt with sin, the vista we must regain shows us that the process actually doesn’t matter. Jesus’ message was, and is:

If you’re sick or hurting or wounded, I can take care of that. Follow me!

If you’re feeling guilty or worried about the sin propitiation you’ve been taught you need, I have taken care of that. Follow me!

If you’ve learned “every man for himself” all too well from your society, I can take care of that and lift you out of yourself. Follow me!

If you are afraid of the others–human or supernatural–who are exercising the power of fear and death over you, I’ve defeated them; I took care of that. Follow me!

If you’re worried about your life beyond the grave, I’m already beyond the grave. I took care of that. Follow me!

If you’re oppressed by any of the ills that have afflicted my Father’s creation, whether poverty or injustice or disease, I’ve now sent my followers to take care of that in my name. Join them in following me!

If you’re one of the oppressors that are helping to perpetuate the abuse of my kingdom and my followers, I can free you from the tyranny of power. I can take care of that. Work with me to lift up what has been trampled down, and follow me!

And perhaps most compellingly to us amateur theologians (and the pros too, if they’ll listen): If you’re wrapped up in endless controversies over how I took care of all that, let go, accept that I DID take care of that, and follow me!