"I damn you to hell," we said to God

A long time ago, an ingenious theologian with a chronically guilty conscience and a neurotic suspicion of his own sexuality started writing about the book of Genesis.  He said many things that still frame the worldview of Christians and, unwittingly, “post-Christendom” culture. But maybe the most influential of his ideas is the concept of “the fall.”

It’s not that the Adam and Eve story doesn’t genuinely contain insights into things like human pride, idolatry, and moral self-deception, which all leave the human creature in need of redemption. And more conservative theologians are absolutely right to protect against wishy-washy-ness on such matters (though, I don’t tend to point my finger in the same direction as they, when I’m coming up with modern day examples of each).

But when reading the Bible, we need to always remember that the ancient Hebrews tended to speak in story rather than dogma. They probably held this narrative with a light grip, intending it to open up conversation about the human situation rather than shut it down. It was old, “concupiscent” St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) who calcified this heavily mythological language into a pseudo-scientific explanation of the genetically transmitted disease called “original sin.”

Since then the equation in most Christian minds has looked like this:

God – Jesus = Angry God.

So deep has this assumption run for the majority of Christians that anyone who would question it is immediately accused of being liberal or loosey-goosey in their interpretation of scripture (read: their interpretation of Genesis 2-3 and not the hundreds of stories that suggest something else). So the burden of proof seems to always be on any theologian who would show how Jesus was able to persuade, cajole, or otherwise satiate God into no longer being angry.

In other words, the only remaining question on the table is to show how

God + Jesus = Happy God.

Many theories as to how Jesus “atones” for our God-angering ways have been suggested: Jesus as a ritual sacrifice for our sin, Jesus as a ransom (in the sense of a payment for the release of slaves) for our sin, Jesus as substitute or surrogate for the punishment we deserve, Jesus as payment to the devil, Jesus as trick played on the devil, and subtle variations of the same. Since it seems we’re all agreed that God is angry in the first place, the common thread in all of this is that some sort of transaction needs to take place in order for God to ease off.

Like the idea of “the fall,” not one of these “atonement theories” is totally unbiblical. But they all ossify what is intended to be a loosely gripped metaphor or image into bone-hard dogma. They put a white-knuckled stranglehold around something that should be held lightly. It’s as if the women weeping at the foot of the cross looked at each other with the self-evident realization, “Ah, yes. Clearly this gruesome death is payment to God for the sins of humanity.” 

But in the 16^th century, there was another ingenious theologian with a chronically guilty conscience and a neurotic suspicion of his own sexuality. Driven nearly mad by his own self-loathing and resentful of a God who would create a flawed humanity only to punish them for being what they are, he began to ask a different kind of question:

What if Jesus isn’t a sort of burnt offering that we give to God? Instead, what if it is he who reveals how God is to us? What if the cross is not where Jesus satisfies God’s thirst for bloody, retributive justice? What if the cross is where Jesus shows us how God responds to our bloody, retributive justice? 

If all previous theories were like pieces added to the atonement puzzle, Martin Luther was sweeping all the pieces off the table. He was not tacking one more atonement theory onto an already overgrown list but was turning the whole way in which we think about atonement on its head. He saw clearly that, rather than let Jesus inform how we see God, most “atonement” theology had actually been one big effort to protect our core assumption about God from being contradicted by the actual Jesus—what he actually reveals, if we take incarnation seriously.

What actually happened is we put Jesus to death, and he died saying, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” We found a clever way to twist that into yet another story about God being the wrathful one. That is to say, Luther realized that most Christian theology was being done sans Christ. It’s as if Jesus became human, talked, healed, was crucified, was risen, and we all paused for a second, stroked our beard a couple times, and said, “Huh, that was weird.” Then we went right back to speculating on how to turn God-in-the-clouds’ frown upside down just as we had been doing before.

 At one point, Luther called any theory that would make Christ’s death into a satisfaction that God demands for our sin the “beginning, origin, door, and entrance to all the abominations” (WA 51:487, 29). Satisfaction, he said, “Should be done to humans but not to God…otherwise Christ would have stayed with his entire satisfaction for us in heaven” (WA 302:291, 34ff.).

In other words, if it were God who’s anger needed to be appeased the whole crucifixion could have taken place up in the clouds. There would be no need play out the drama on earth and make us, at best, third party spectators. Jesus’ suffering and death as a flesh and blood human would only be necessary if it was we who demanded it.

Suddenly Luther’s world, Bible, and Trinity made sense in a way they never had before: if Christ is not the handler of God but the revelation of God, then one need only look around at the plain facts at the foot of the cross to see that it is not God who requires Jesus’ death, it is humanity. Putting all speculation aside about what God must be thinking up “in the heavens,” these are the plain facts on the “hill of the skull,” if we take Jesus seriously: we are the angry ones, God is being gracious; we are the violent ones, God is refusing to retaliate; we are the grudge-holders, God is being forgiving; we are the ones who refuse to drop it, God is saying, “It is finished.”

The irony that gradually became clear to Luther was that, for all of their talk about the seriousness of human sin, the atonement theories of the medieval theologians all had a subtle way of insinuating that God was the problem. Not us. It’s as if they were all saying, “Hey, man, don’t look at us. We all want to forgive and forget. It’s God who won’t let it go until someone suffers.”  

But the fact remains that Jesus’ death does not seem to placate an angry God. It seems to placate an angry us.

Notice how other atonement theories imply that God is inconsistent at best, a mad tyrant at worst. God creates humanity somewhat shoddily and then gets mad at them for being what they are. Rather than just fix the problem, God requires the one good one be tortured to death so that all the bad ones can be forgiven, and this is called “justice.” 

But Luther’s new paradigm preserves God’s integrity. God has been consistent all along. God created the world and loved it. The Word came into the world as flesh and loved it. The world put him to death, he responded by loving it. On the third day, God raised him for the sake of the world because he loved it.

We try to ignore God, we try to distort God, we try to mock God, we try to put God to death, and through it all, God just goes on “[making] his sun rise on both the evil and the good” (Mt. 5:45).

That’s the only “Good News” that can really be called either “new” or “good.”

Alleluia!

pt. 2 - things you thought i believed as a christian, but i don't

Being a Christian means that you have to be politically conservative

Where does this perception come from?

I don’t have room here to say much about why the later New Testament letters began to focus more one institutional maintenance and private morality and less on the explosive message that “Jesus is Lord” (as opposed to Caesar), nor on how the Roman Catholic priesthood came to be the overseers of private morality in the medieval world, nor on how early American Protestantism developed as a reaction to social decay in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries century. That would require more than a blog and probably a different author.

The observation I can make here is that sometime in the last quarter of last century, the GOP closed the loop on a brilliant ideological move that it had been working toward for some time. They verbally linked the capitalistic policies that the wealthy care about (lower taxes) to the conservative social values that many poorer communities in southern and Bible Belt states care about. Of course these two things have nothing to do with each other and many sociologists will point out that they outright work against each other. But the fact that that observation is so rarely made by their opponents in popular discourse shows how effectively far right fiscal policies and conservative social values have been made synonmous in our popular consciousness.

Tough to believe now, but as recently as 1972 the platform of the Republican Party contained no references to God and argued for no specifically religious issues. But the next year would be defining for politics right up until today. Capitalizing on the outcry from the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), the 1976 platform famously called for “a position on abortion that values human life.” By the turn of the next decade, “family” and “human life” had become unlikely partisan buzzwords in Reagan’s lexicon and the language was reciprocated by a whole new spate of purportedly Christian movements—Jerry Fallwell’s “Moral Majority” in 1980, James Dobson’s “Family Research Council” in 1983, and televangelist Pat Robertson’s rise in popularity resulting in a presidential bid in 1988—who throw their unquestioning support behind Reagan’s party.

So popularly, in just a couple rhetorical moves, family is seen as almost the sole moral concern of Christians and the GOP the official party of family.

Is there a more authentically Christian perspective?

I should say here that, while I do believe my faith has strong political implications, I do not, with some of my liberal contemporaries, flatly say that “Jesus was a socialist.” Whether we lean right or left, it is an absurd case of apples and oranges to try to extract a comprehensive economic structure from a the hand full of parables and aphorisms of a man speaking to a two thousand year old, non-democratic society where official political agency wasn’t even an option for his listeners. That said, if you’ve noticed how rarely “Bible believing Christians” mention what’s actually in the Bible and you yourself have skimmed the parable of the Rich Young Man or the account of the early church in Acts, you’ve probably noticed how much easier it would be to build that case than to build any case for either the nuclear family or unchecked capitalism.

But again, I make no argument for extreme left-wing policy here. What we can say without hesitancy is that the Jesus of the Bible shows aggressive favoritism on the side of the poor and marginalized. He is obsessively concerned with those who are on the outside even when it puts him at odds with the people who are inside. We can also say that he is livid at individuals and institutions—public, private, or religious—that profit on the backs of the poor.

The sum of this observation is that, whatever we decide to do in our private lives or in the institutions we support—public, private, or religious—followers of Jesus had better also be aggressively on the side of the poor and the marginalized. How we can best serve them in a non-patronizing and genuinely beneficial way is on the table for debate. That we must serve them is not.

Ethical concerns are black and white for a Christian

Where does this perception come from?

I suspect that this partly comes from the rubber stamp alignment of American Evangelicalism and the Republican party discussed above. But a much more objective thing to comment on is the biblical literalism that began to invade American Christianity in the 19^th century. If you think of the more “literal” way as the more traditional way of reading the Bible, that’s likely because you’ve believed the rhetoric of the Fallwells and Robertsons mentioned above who have needed to coopt biblical authority to provide some basis for their unquestioning support of the GOP. There is nothing traditional about it. In fact, it is a completely novel innovation that we can date to fairly recent times.

Until about a century ago, respect for the overall authority of scripture was high but respect for inappropriately simplistic interpretations of scripture was low. In the middle ages, reading multiple layers of figurative meaning into a line from the Bible was not only permissible in the Christian tradition, those were considered more weighty than the literal meaning with the “allegorical” reading taking the most prestigious spot in a sophisticated ranking system. Reformers in the 16^th century called for a more “literal” reading, but they only meant to put a check on some of the wildly imaginative nonsense that came out of the medieval church; they did not mean, in the modern sense, that obviously mythological or poetic language in the Bible should be applied in some stupidly matter-of-fact way.   

As we’ve seen already, religious views in America tend to take their queues from political concerns; not the other way around. It was not just Christians’ but everyone’s paradigms that Darwin’s theories initially challenged after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 (some obscure anatomists had proposed similar things and the scientific community was not enraged by his theories, but his were the first that were readable at the popular level).

It would be another decade and a half before theologians, politicians and popular commentators began to see its full implication for human origins. It is sheer coincidence that around the turn of the century, debates over whether to teach Darwin’s theories in schools coincided with concern in American churches that modern historical criticism of the Bible (e.g. analysis of original manuscripts, historical context, dating inconsistencies, etc.) was eroding the authority of the good book.

Two huge tectonic shifts in our perception of ourselves and our Bible at one time proved too frightening for a certain personality type. A reactionary group called the “Niagara Bible Conference” formed in 1878 and drafted the principles that would eventually morph into “The Five Fundamentals” of the 1910 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church from which we get the word: fundamentalism. All of these five had to do with some kind of supernatural belief that they felt was under attack in modernity. One of these five fundamentals was a dogma that Christianity had never before bound itself to in the 19 centuries of its existence: the inerrancy of scripture (assumed but not written alongside this, was belief in the easy and straightforward interpretability of scripture).

The older Christian tradition of serious and intelligent ethical reflection that had only just escaped a longstanding obeisance to the “infallible” Pope four centuries earlier was being relinquished once again, and American protestants were once again kowtowing to an even more inflexible “paper Pope.” 

Is there a more authentically Christian perspective?

If you’ve ever been to a Lutheran worship service, then from the very first words out of your mouth after the opening song, you have foresworn any chance that your political leanings, ethical insights, lifestyle preferences, biblical interpretations or anything about you might be one hundred percent right and without fault. We call this part confession and absolution.

It might sound pessimistic at first, but in fact, when the wrongness of the state of our world and our place in it are realities that continue to intrude on our subconscious even when we choose not to acknowledge them, then telling the truth about these things actually comes out as a hopeful sigh of relief. It’s our way of forcing the issue and saying from the outset that our doctrines, stances, and ideologies get us nowhere if there is no God behind them actually doing stuff. And if God actually does stuff, then anything we think or say about what God is doing is of secondary importance at the most. We then spend the rest of the service proclaiming that God has, in fact, begun doing something to set the world right.

Having confessed that whatever seeds of rightness we’ve ever planted will ultimately wither in the holy sunbeam of God’s presence,

-       we can get on to a more serious and complex ethical conversation about the relative rightness of a certain choice given the alternatives;

-       we can admit to the huge grey areas of a world that often doesn’t give us a choice between right and wrong but between wrong and less wrong;

-       we can argue an issue with someone else without attacking their basic humanity, as if they had taken the dark side in some dualistic battle;

-       and when the time for deliberation is over, we can actually act toward whatever limited good we’re able without getting hamstrung thinking that we need to find some panacea option that will fix everything;

-       and we can actually do what we do for the sake of someone else, since the issue of justifying ourselves with our actions is not on the table.

Luther called this sinning boldly.