I’ve been poking around on BlogHer recently, and ran across this post, which got me musing about Christianity. Most of these ponderings occurred to me many years ago, back in the day when I hadn’t yet rejected Christianity for myself. I was raised Methodist, in a small town, and around this time of year often get nostalgic for when the religious side of Christmas meant more to me. But–well, whatever. On to the ponderings. Which I decided to post here instead of in a comment on SandyHov’s blog because they will seem blasphemous, and possibly offensive, to many Christians, and I have no desire to offend her.
There are a couple of basics of Christian belief represented in the cited post which seem to appear/feel self-evident and profoundly meaningful to many/most Christians that I just don’t quite get. Such as:
1. Sins must be paid for with death.
Why? I sorta get why one might feel sins must be paid for–I think it’s related to reciprocity, which seems to be very deep in the human psyche; part of how we “do” being a social species–but why “by death”? The slightest sin–I yelled at one of my dogs this morning, for instance–requires a death in compensation? Seems a bit disproportionate–it violates, rather than appealing to, my sense of recirpocity.
Some Christian apologetics I’ve read seem to say that this requirement is imposed by God, which is why it took Jesus’ death–Jesus being God incarnate–to fully balance the books, and eliminate the requirement for “those who believe in Him”. But if God imposed it, and God wanted to change it, why didn’t He just snap His fingers or something, and change it? Why all the sturm und drang of the crucifixion?
2. Jesus’ crucifixion was a supreme sacrifice, greater than any other ever made throughout history, which is why it’s adequate to the task of salvation.
But really was it all that much more of a sacrifice than others? The Romans crucified thousands of people, and many of them suffered much worse than Jesus did, according to the Biblical account (rather than hanging there for days, dying gradually, he hung there for a few hours, and was then mercifully stabbed). Vlad the Impaler sat thousands of people on a sharpened stake to killl them, which seems at least as horrific if not more so than being crucified. And how many people were burned at the stake in medieval Europe? That seem pretty awful too. So it can’t be the horrific nature of the death that makes it “supreme”.
But maybe it’s because Jesus aubmitted to this death for others that makes it “better” than sacrifices done by ordinary people. Except thousands of people have accepted death for others over the centuries, and many of those deaths have been horrific, so this to doesn’t quite wash for me. At least, that it would make Jesus’ death special or especially efficacious for salvation certainly isn’t self-evident to me.
Or perhaps it’s because Jesus was completely innocent of any sin, including that lovely Pauline invention, original sin, that makes his sacrifice efficacious for salvation. Well, maybe. But I doubt Jesus’ complete innocence, based on the Gospels. He cursed a fig tree for behaving like a fig tree and not fruiting for him out of season just because he was hungry. Sounds like men I’ve known (and women too, I’ll admit), who want what they want and want it now, regardless of how reasonable that might be, and blame others when they don’t get it.
He also had a habit of being deliberately obscure and then sneering at people, his disciples in particular, when they didn’t get the point. However admirable the Jesus described in the gospels may be, these actions do not seem perfectly virtuous to me.
Also, at an abstract level, as a matter of the logic of limitations, I can’t see how one can be fully human and also perfectly virtuous, with never a bad thought nor harmful action to your name. There are situations in which one has limited choices, and none of those choices are without “sin”. Jesus would have had to reach full adulthood without ever having faced such a situation to maintain his pure innocence–which seems highly implausible to me.
The final rationale for why Jesus’ death is salvific is that he was/is God, and therefore had the power to not submit to execution, but chose to do so anyway. As a child, I had no problem with the idea of the Trinity–it worked at an intuitive level for me just fine. But no longer. The logic of it just doesn’t work for me anymore. In fact, the ultimate, final block to my returning to pretty much any version of Christianity is that I can’t worship a human being as God.
But even if Jesus was God, with all that infinite power–now we’re back to the point that if God wanted to change the system God had set up in the first place, why not just change it? Why all the drama and suffering? For that matter, why set it up that way in the first place?
3. One other point that struck me in SandyHov’s post is her emphasis on the sacrifice of Jesus’ death in comparison to the emphasis given to the resurrection. Another thing I pondered as a young person. Being raised Protestant, I used to think about why Catholics used the crucifix and Protestants the empty cross. Really, I’m sure, it just had to do with Protestants needing a distinct symbol of their own, but still I think there’s something to the difference. While pretty much anyone who self-identifies as a Christian will adhere to both the death and the resurrection of Jesus as essential to their faith, some put way more emphasis on the sacrificial suffering and death (e.g., Mel Gibson) and some more emphasis on the resurrection–Jesus’ overcoming of death and opening the way to eternal life for us all. As a young Methodist, I decided I like the empty cross, the emphasis on resurrection and eternal life, better. And still do. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why some people dwell on the suffering and death so much.
But whatever. Religion is sort of like a Rorschach blot, each person reads into it, and gets from it, that which resonates with her/his own psyche. My Methodist upbringing shaped my own psyche growing up, and consequently there is still much in Christianity that I do resonate with. Celebrating new life in the depths of winter, celebrating light during the shortest days of the year–yup, I like that. Finding and giving good stuff to people I love, stuff they’ll like–I like that, too. Easter as a celebration of regeneration, or as defiance to letting suffering and death keep us down, the power of hope and of maintaining hope and commitment to goodness in the face of all life’s rottenness–I can totally get behind that, still. Love expressed through suffering and sacrifice–yes, that reaches into my psyche and moves me.
But the Christian theology of sin and payment for sin, not so much. And worshiping a man–definitely not.
Happy New Year.
I know I don’t stop by often, but when I do you never disappoint. You do raise some good points that many Christians (progressive and otherwise) would themselves agree with. So let me enter into it here.
1.) I have NEVER bought into Anselm’s Theory of Atonement. I don’t have to. I can still be a Christian without that.
Joan Chittister said it well, “If we assume, as the Western world did, thanks to Anselm’s theory of Atonement, that the ’sacrifice’ of Jesus to appease an angry and insulted God is the explanation for the crucifixion of Christ, then the spiritual life totters on the edge of becoming one long excursion into masochism.”
The alternatives to this theory are easy. Like, everything Jesus said and did. I teach my students that we need to look at the Bible in context. That means looking at the culture of the time and place it was written. The reason we have this imagery of the sacrificial lamb is because it’s something people of that day understood. They were at the temple every year offering a sacrifice of whatever they could afford. Whether bird, goat, or lamb. And of course, the unblemished lamb was thought to be the best blood sacrifice.
But we have grown past this. We no longer offer blood sacrifice at temple. We no longer think of God in those terms. We should no longer think of Jesus in those terms.
God did not put Jesus on the cross, people did.
The divine values that Jesus embodied, the cosmic vision for the world that Jesus proclaimed, the pinnacles of human development that Jesus made plain–love, mercy, peace, and justice–these are the principles that put Jesus on the cross. These cost. These accuse. These are the principles that keep Jesus pinioned there still, and made a laughingstock, or, worse, ceremoniously celebrated and ceremoniously ignored.
Love, mercy, peace, and justice–these are the apogee of human existence to which the Creed is calling us every time we pray, “I believe in Jesus… crucified.” And they are no more acceptable now than then. Call for life sentences for those on death row and see how people look at you. Call for an end to the war in the name of human services and see how fast you’re accused of being unpatriotic.
2. Death is the supreme sacrifice. For anyone, not just Jesus. Which is presumably why we celebrate martyrs.
I don’t know, I could argue the little points about the character of Jesus, but I won’t. I like his humanity. This is why I like the Gospel of Mark so much. Jesus is at his most human in Mark, his most divine in John. If we keep telling ourselves that Jesus is God and ignore the human side we let ourselves off the hook. We say, “I can’t emulate him, he’s God.” If we embrace his humanity then we are on the hook–Jesus came to show us how to behave, not to die for us. Jesus with the tax collector, Jesus with the adulterer, Jesus with the little children, Jesus with the Syro-Phoenician woman at the well, Jesus challenging old ideas and breaking rules, on the other side of every boundary, liberal, sharing, compassionate, raising a girl child from the dead amidst a culture that taught, “when a boy child comes, peace comes; when a girl child comes, nothing comes.” Why did he do this if her life had no value? The answer is too obvious, Jesus simply does not share that opinion–he rejects that theology for the fraud it is.
3. So yeah, I tend to be an intellectual hard case. Once, discussing my doubts with a priest I was told I don’t have to believe in all that other stuff–the only thing I must embrace as a Christian is the Resurrection.
And I do. (cue the “Spirit in the Sky” music)
Peace, my friend.
Hey, Addofio. I linked up and carried on the discussion over at my place. You should check out the essay I found:
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2141
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Peace.
MIssy–I want to respond–I really appreciate the thoughtfulness in your comment, and in your own post too. I just don’t know when I’ll have time to put into it. I’m being “punished” for not keeping up with things last semester–I’m finishing up stuff that should have been done before Christmas.
Just as a quickie–while my own Protestant upbringing wasn’t fundamentalist (thank God and Mom and Don Smith [if you click on the link, scroll down for the part about Don]), but quite liberal, there’s something very Catholic in flavor in your thinking that I appreciate. I have a half-sister who is a pretty conservative Catholic (though now her kids are mostly grown I sense a loosening up in her), and our relationship is strong enough that if we’re careful we can talk religion. I remember bringing up the cursing of the fig tree once (it’s a story that particularly sticks in my craw, obviously), and she interpreted it in some lovely way that I’ve forgotten, but that somehow your comment reminded me of.
Crossan also had a way of interpreting the cursing of the fig tree in one of his last books (I could go look it up, but there’s that time thing again; I think it was all about the gospel of Mark) that made it purely metaphorical. It seems to me that maybe one of the elements missing from most, if not all, Protestant theology, regardless of whether liberal or conservative, fundamentalist or not, is a kind of hermeneutics that is still alive and well in Catholocism, or in parts of it anyway. It would be hard for me to put my finger on it any more precisely, becasue it’s just an impression, a faint sense that I’m on to something. Something that it would be very healthy to bring back more into the forefront of public consciousness.