"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!

the comma between Jesus birth and death

In the word-frugal cadence of an aging man speaking in a second language, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann said this in a recent interview: “Between the birth and death of Christ there is a fairly emphasized comma.”

The legendary thinker was quipping on the habit that Christians have had, dating back to the authors of the Apostles’ Creed, of embellishing the importance of the last few chapters of our gospel stories and forgetting the rest of them. Perhaps the culmination of this 18 century trend is the tagline in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ which reads, “He was born in order to die.”

What we’re left with when we drop that “comma” is the three day narrative on that back end of Holy Week. What’s missing is any clue from Jesus himself as to why these three days might have any significance for us. The knee-jerk responses—“he died as punishment for my sins,” “he is risen so that I might be risen too”—are little help. Thought through critically, these are interpretations of these events that later generations have handed onto us, and if they appear self-evident now, it’s only due to sheer repetition. They were self-evident to no one standing before either cross or gravesite during those strange days. These first witnesses had neither Augustine’s 4^th and 5th century writings nor Anselm’s 11^th century writings to inform them. They were left to scratch their heads and look back across their memories of Jesus’ life, asking, “What does this mean?”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Christians would make this <.02% of Jesus’ life story into the main thing. The death and resurrection by themselves are theologically far more malleable than that “fairly emphasized comma.” They are not as demanding as the Sermon on the Mount, as confusing as the parable of the dishonest land manager, or as upsetting as the whole fiasco with the money changing stations in the temple.

If we subtly brush all those other events to the side, then the meaning of death and resurrection can be shaped as we please. They can ease whatever existential worries we might have, while, conveniently, asking very little of us or the status quos of our world during this lifetime. Baptism becomes fire insurance, life becomes a comfortable waiting room, and “what happens when you die?” is promoted to the only meaningful theological question.

But there is a tradeoff for this kind of easy existential satisfaction (Bonhoeffer called this “cheap grace,” though not, as some believe he meant it, to simply reinstate legalism). What we give up is any kind of purpose for which the Gospel might call us to strive, any call to embrace this world for all of its warts, and any of the joy of Zaccheus when Jesus told him, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” In short, all we give up in order to have just our death and resurrection cake is everything that Jesus lived and died for in the first place. The risk and the hard work of incarnation is undone, and God can once become scarce as a disembodied abstraction up in the clouds, perhaps just leaving some paperwork to guarantee us an afterlife at the end of the day. And we can get back to whiling away our time in entertainment and consumer distraction until our number is called.

But assuming Jesus wasn’t just yammering uselessly before fulfilling his Gibson-given purpose to die, what else could that “comma” have to show us?

Well, to name a few things:

All but one of our gods will abandon us. Take, for instance, our primary god, money. Turns out, we’ve been worshipping, fretting for, and fixating on a god that can’t even stand up to some moths and rust, let alone preserve our lives.

All social hierarchies and stratifications will be flipped on their heads. It’s been lost on generations of Christians, but Mary apparently intuited it even before her first morning sickness (Luke 1:46-55). Status and influence are a hoax, hierarchy is doomed, most of the titles and honors that we’ve been working so hard to achieve will be forgotten, and the only meaningful association will be association with an itinerate carpenter’s son.

Our private moral status no longer matters. All the times we’ve turned down a potential friendship with someone for fear that they might “drag us down to their level,” all the times we’ve patted ourselves on the back for the vices that we don’t have, all the times we’ve frantically dusted the windowsills before receiving company because “cleanliness is next to godliness;” too bad. No one cares.

Life is not fair. You want to beat yourself up? You want to receive the “forty lashes minus one” for some terrible thing you did? You want to skulk about with your tail between your legs because you can never forgive yourself? You want to punish others for the same reason? Tough. Our heavenly father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45).

Safety is not the overriding concern. Of all these things, this one feels the most heretical to even write in the post 9/11 world and the age of the “helicopter parent,” but the gospel narratives read almost exclusively as a series of dangerous binds that Jesus gets himself into, essentially for loving the wrong people and not saluting the right institutions. This ultimately leads to his own shameful demise, just before which, he tells his disciples, “…And you can too.” As a theology professor of my alma mater is noted for saying, “There is more to do with our lives now than simply to preserve them.”

Our religions don’t matter…Yes…Even that one! Jesus didn’t come into a world that was split between Christians and non-Christians and tell the former that they would be saved. Neither did he ever even hint that he would be establishing new doctrinal thoughts or holy institutions to which we must ascribe in order for his work to become activated for us. Rather he came into a world of stoic philosophers and neo-Platonists, of resurrection believing Jews and non-resurrection believing Jews, of Greek pagans and Roman pagans, of pious old ladies and iconoclastic young men. He was rejected by them all, he died at the hands of them all, and he was raised for them all. He asked for none of their permission to do this.

Hallelujah.

the age of the Jesus nerd

At this point, it has been around a few years and, of course, picked apart in scholarly circles. But anyone with even a passing interest in what’s going on in our church or, for that matter, our culture right now should familiarize themselves with Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence.

My very simplistic summary is this: approximately every 500 years, throughout its history, Christianity has had to radically reinvent itself in order for its “Good News” not to turn into bad news. Ways of thinking and doing the Christian faith, which were once believed to be permanently valid, eventually fail to hold water as the world changes around them, and new ones need to be adopted. In each case, there is a moment of cultural crisis where the church either needs to adapt or lose all relevance.

These “cycles of history” actually begin in the context of an intra-Jewish dispute, with Jesus himself totally turning the idea of covenant faithfulness on its head, seeking out the unclean and the sinners rather than avoiding them in order to preserve his own ritual purity. A little less than five centuries later, the whole western world is nominally Christian, but with the fall of Rome, after which the “Gospel” can no longer be synonymous with the growth and triumph of the empire, a handful of oddball mystics smuggle it out into the desert. Five centuries later the schism between Eastern and Western church shattered any notion that the one universal church might be visible across all particular geographies and cultures, each with their own limited hierarchies and thought patterns. Five centuries more bring us to the Great Reformation, which, on the surface, was a grievance against corrupt men in power but, at its core, signified the breakdown of the medieval way of doing Christianity. And that brings us up to today. 

I don’t think you need to buy the almost Asimovian prophesying of her 500 year schema, and I question how much she has left out in order to tidy up a bit (e.g. the rise and then re-encounter with Islam, Copernicus, Darwin, etc.). But it’s hard to deny that she is basically onto something. Christianity changes.  And it’s changing fast right now. What each of Tickle’s 500 year crises have in common is that they all result from a breakdown in authority of some sort, and when authority breaks down, the church tends to move from visible unification to fragmentation.

Now, whether the imperial church of the 4^th century was actually more unified than the protestant church of the 20^th century on the ground is a much more complicated question, but the decreasing centralization of money, authority, and influence is undeniable. This is a byproduct of the increased spread of information, which enables people to think for themselves. The more people feel authorized to think for themselves, the more difficult it is to get a whole lot of them to lend you authority. The Gutenberg printing press skyrocketed the number of Bibles and the writings of the reformers in circulation. For everyday smiths and cobblers (who likely couldn’t read, themselves, but knew a parish pastor who could), this unlocked the previously inconceivable notion that the Pope might be wrong about something. How much more now that a live tweet of an American political debate can be read by a kid in San Salvador?

We call this postmodernity. In philosophy-speak this means the breakdown of any overarching “meta-narrative.” In normal-speak, it means that we’re not all on the same page.

As the church grapples with what postmodernity means for us, the culture is having to figure it out too. One of the most interesting manifestations of this is the rise of the nerds. If you still assume a jock-centric hierarchy in popular culture, you probably haven’t talked to a high school kid in quite some time. 

The geeks have inherited the Earth. By “geek,” I don’t necessarily mean someone who is academically inclined, though it could be that. Geeks are any persons who both exercise their individuality and find community through the shared love of anything that is not general interest. Whether it be theater performance, the Harry Potter series, or expensive barbecue sauce. The particular object of affection doesn’t matter so long as it can act as a conduit, connecting small pockets of community in a wearyingly massive and pluralistic world. In my life this looks like “Blazer-Con,” a convention for American fans of English Premier League Soccer who wear tweed and listen to the “Men in Blazers” podcast. My wife and I will be traveling to the next convention in Brooklyn late this year.

I wouldn’t suggest that people are merely feigning interest in Battlestar Galactica or designer cheeses in order to meet people. I think the enthusiasts of these things really like them. But in a world without one overarching cultural narrative where almost no commonality with a random passerby can be assumed, people are building sub-communities through the things that they like.

This has relevance for the church. In a weird way, we have the opportunity to be Jesus nerds in a way that we have not been able to replicate for 17 centuries. When 4^th century Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman world, in one day, the word “Christian” went from describing about 5 to 10 percent of the population to 100 percent. Only one of two things could result: either everyone in the empire would start actively seeking to reflect Jesus in their lives—forgiving each other’s faults, protecting the vulnerable, renouncing violence, etc.—or the meaning of the term “Christian” would become diluted. I don’t need to tell you which one ended up happening.

It’s the paradox of church history that if everyone is a Christian, then no one is a Christian. Christians who fear that the faith is dying because smaller numbers of people are showing up to church on Sundays, or we don’t have the ten commandments posted in public schools, or we use of the term “holiday” rather than “Christmas” have likely not thought much about what it would really mean to embody Christ’s way of being in the world. In the US, the data is clear: there were way more people sitting in pews on Sunday mornings in the 40s and 50s. It’s not at all clear that the country was more Christ-like back then.

The decline of Christendom is a huge loss, if your goal is to get a large collection of warm bodies together once a week. But it’s so much the better for the more discerning Christian. Suddenly, we are entering a time where “Jesus nerd” might actually mean something.

Battlestar Galactica appreciation groups have a clear commitment to something and there is no ambiguity as to who they are. Finally, we are nearing a time where Christians can say no less than that. Perhaps we can even say more.  

what the bible says about refugees

Since we'll be celebrating someone, in a few days, who was born a refugee, I thought it might be interesting to see what the Bible says about hospitality to such persons.

If you’re not interested in providing hospitality to refugees, this doesn’t apply to you. I’m only writing for other Christians (with thanks to the Jews to whose tradition we’re indebted).

The command on God’s people to provide hospitality to refugees is constant and consistent throughout the Hebrew and Christian testaments. I’ll just write about one example.

Zephaniah spends much of his short book (ch. 2) doing something that the rulers in his society might have actually appreciated under other circumstances: he calls out all the sins of surrounding nations. The nations of the Cherethites and Philistines are bound for destruction. The incessant taunting of the Moabites and the Ammonites will be their downfall. The lands of Cush and Assyria won’t fair any better, and so on and so forth. 

Now this should all be music to the ears of Judah’s leaders, met with nods of approval. But Zephaniah keeps talking. He is not interested in simply buttering them up. His bigger concern is the plank in Judah’s own eye (ch. 3).

There is something going around in the attitude and spirit of his society, which Zephaniah sees as completely toxic and repugnant to God. Here, “officials” and “judges” are corrupt and incorrigible. Powerful men prey on the fears of the people like lions and wolves, manipulating weak minds with circuitous and self-serving rhetoric, all the while devouring the society’s resources for personal gain.  Where their cynicism isn’t total, their arrogance makes up the difference, and they are impervious to correction (vv. 1-3).

While this goes on, the prophets and priests of the establishment are fickle and spineless, undoubtedly preaching safe religious doctrines while they live off the earnest piety of the poor. Fat, dumb, and happy, nothing could be further from their minds than voicing the true state of the society and holding its politicians accountable. In that failure they “profane what is holy” and “do violence to the law” (v. 4).

“If that ship has sailed, and this nation can no longer avoid some severe material consequences, there is still a chance, a chance, for them to find their soul.  And true to form, God will use the unlikeliest of outsiders to help them find it.”

With its leadership willfully asleep at the wheel, you’d think the impending downfall would be so apparent that they would be forced to change, but instead, they double down, eager to cash in a few more dividends before the whole thing falls apart (v. 7). And, of course, it’s lost on them how their insular little system of personal gain might look from the outside—how it might cut them off from other nations and cause a deep-seated resentment, which will finally be their downfall.

Will they ever learn? Likely not before the moral and cultural degradation of the society has run its course.

BUT if that ship has sailed, and this nation can no longer avoid some severe material consequences, there is still a chance, a chance, for them to find their soul.  And true to form, God will use the unlikeliest of outsiders to help them find it.

The people whom God will use to restore this nation’s soul to them will be of such little worldly significance that God will have to stack diminutives, one on top of the other, to even identify them: “the daughter of my dispersed ones…a people humble and lowly” (vv. 10, 12). That these men, women, and children can’t be identified any more precisely than this, speaks volumes about who they are.

These people don’t strictly belong to any particular jurisdiction. And it would be misleading to put them under the heading of any particular nation state. Their religion and ethnicity are of little consequence as it concerns God. What matters is that, in the clash and friction of national tectonic plates, these are the people who fell through the cracks. These are the lost ones. The best we can do is say that they come from somewhere “beyond the rivers of Cush” (v. 10). They are the refuse that no one will claim.

No one, that is, except for God. While politicians angle for seats of power and priests congratulate themselves in religious high places, God has been paying special attention to what goes on in the dead zones, the lands “beyond the rivers,” the places that Haitians refer to as the peyi andeyo—the “country behind the countries”—where neither vote is cast nor decision made but one can only be tossed about by the feuds and ambitions of the vain.

Are these humble ones merely a charitable concern for God? Absolutely not. It will be through them that Judah will find its redemption. These daughters of the “dispersed ones,” central to nothing and nowhere, will turn out to be the beating heart of God’s plan for the world.

“Both refugee from without and exile from within will rediscover their humanity in the embrace of one another.”

“They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord” (v. 12), right here in one of the many societies that had forgotten them. And when they do, that society will be reminded of what it is supposed to be.

When this people remembers what it is, the “proudly exultant” and the “haughty” will make themselves scarce in the midst of the humble. But for “those who are left,” who are not too far gone, and who still have eyes to see, God is not interested in rubbing their noses in past shame (vv. 11-13). God is interested in reconciliation. In a nation that had lost its way, both refugee from without and exile from within will rediscover their humanity in the embrace of one another.    

Then maybe this will be a nation worthy of the name. For a nation to only have concern for its own interests is to cease being a nation in God’s eyes. The difference between a nation and a mere collection of animals is the ideal that God handed on to Abraham long ago: it’s a people whom God has blessed “so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2) to others.