Category Archives: Atonement

Good News?

13 Friday Nov 2015

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The way things are going, I’m beginning to think there ought to be a good news website where we can go and be cheered up; as yesterday’s post showed, even my irrepressible cheeriness is under strain! But then, of course, we have the Good News, and the fact that so many will not receive it says more about them than it does the Good News, and reminds us of why we need it.

It has been said before here that the main reason why Christianity is losing its hold in the West is that so many here no long believe in sin; if you don’t believe that, then it makes no sense to believe you need a Saviour, and ‘do as you will – as long as you don’t harm others’ is the whole of the law. It is a comfortable law for a comfortable people – Jeshun waxes fat and kicks – but then it was always so. It is easy to see whence the extreme Calvinists derived the idea that Christ died only for the elect. Few there are, in any generation, who follow the ways of the Lord.

I can understand why some, seeing part of the message in the Good News, think it a branch of social work or psycho-therapy, for surely our faith commands us to help others, and offers the only real cure for what ails us; but it should not be reduced to just those things, important though they are. Jesus died in agony on the Cross – the was the price of love. In the shadow of that, it is hard to credit that some folk think sin does not matter or is a matter of definition if it even exists. It was from the consequence – and the cause – of our sins that Jesus came to save us.

Convenient though it would be to believe that all that is needed is ‘mercy’, that jumps the gun a bit. We know that God loves us even when we are far off; we know that his mercy is offered to us all, as was the sacrifice of Jesus; we know he wants all to be saved; and we know he is all-powerful. It is characteristic of modern man (though it has been so in all ages too) to suppose that all of that requires nothing from him. But if we stop a moment, there is a mystery here which points to some hard lessons. If it had been sufficient for our salvation that God forgave us our sins in advance, then what need was there for the Son of God to suffer and die on the Cross? Whatever variety of atonement one holds, that there is a need for it seems so plain to me that I can attribute the desire not to believe in it only to a horror of the thought that God had to pay the price for our sin. But for me, either he did, in which case there was a need for it, or he didn’t, in which case there’s no need for Calvary at all. It’s the same with Original Sin. There are a variety of ways in which Christians hold this notion, some see it as an hereditary taint, some as a marring of our nature, but whichever way you view it, it is in us, it is what makes us go to the wrong, and the one remedy for it is Christ.

Someone asked me the other day whether I was a fundamentalist, and, outlining something if what I’ve just written, I responded that if these are fundamental to being a Christian, I was happy to say I was a fundamentalist. I wondered, however, how many BIshops could say yes to the same?

What’s the point of Christianity?

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Atonement, Bible, Faith, Salvation

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The Batlló Crucifix. Barcelona © National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC)

The Batlló Crucifix. Barcelona © National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC)

I agree with what Chalcedon said yesterday about the need to find a balance between an emphasis on hell-fire and the fact that God is love. A God who is love is not going to create millions of folk just so they can burn in hell for eternity; but that does not mean that millions of folk will not do just that – simply that is not what God created them for. There is a central and disturbing fact at the centre of our faith – Christ on the cross. In having Him on their crucifixes, Catholics rightly focus our attention on His sacrifice. But what is the use of it, what is its point if there is no hell? Just what are we being saved from? Why did Jesus need to become incarnate? Why did he need to atone for our sins on the Cross? If we do not believe in damnation, not only do we deny the many times Christ talked of hell, we deny the reason for his sacrifice. I repeat – what is it we are being saved from?

Those who doubt the reality of hell, do they also doubt the reality of the Incarnation and the Resurrection? I know some do (I have Anglican acquaintances who are very consistent as they take just that view), but for those who do not, I am not sure what it is they think that whole Christ getting born and dying on the Cross was for? If Christianity is no more than a call for social justice (whatever that may be) then why did Jesus have to be born and die? We can, as many atheists (rightly) remind us, be decent human beings, be kind and compassionate without any religious faith. The question we Christians often ask – but what canon do you use to measure ‘goodness’? – can be by-passed by their simply pointing out that treating other human beings decently is not a Christian prerogative (and if they want to be provocative, adding it is sometimes not a Christian practice either). We can have peace, good-will and harmony (somewhere?) without Christianity, just as we have had Christianity and none of those things. Our faith is, if anything, a call to go beyond the obvious criteria we use as humans: walking extra miles, loving our enemies, turning the other cheek and the rest of it are all very radical. But those things are all part of whhat is at the heart of our faith – a radical personal transformation of the heart.

The refiner’s fire burns away (over time) the dross in us, the image of God in us, marred by sin, is cleaned up, and we should become more as God intended us to be. But not all will do that. That’s where I part company with Bosco. It seems to me Paul is writing to those in Corinth and Galatia who considered themselves born again, and he is telling them that what they have gained can be lost. Why is Paul so urgent? Why are John and Peter and Jude all so keen that born-again folk should receive the right Gospel? Why does the early Church care so much about orthodox belief? In our bloodless age we tend to go on about how beastly some of those early Christians were to each other, but we forget why that was. It was because they believed something really important was at stake – our salvation. A man who believed wrongly, or who followed a false prophet was not just going wrong in this life, he was in danger of hell-fire for ever. That being so, they didn’t go ‘meh, whatever, as long as you are a good person’, and they didn’t because they cared.

Jesus became incarnate, was crucified, died, was buried, descended into hell and rose again on the rid day to redeem our sinful selves – to redeem us from hell. I have no idea what hell is like, but I know someone who died so I could be redeemed from it. I don’t say it should be at the forefront of all we say and do, and I do agree a balance in which we respond with love to the love God first showed us in necessary. But I do say we should think on those last things and before succumbing to universalism, ask again, what is the point of Christianity if it is not that we should be saved from the fires of hell and come to the beatific vision?

God and man

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Atonement, Bible, Faith

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Recently we have been tackling the subject of our relationship with God from a variety of angles, coming, in the end, to the solemn truth that our sinful flesh is redeemed only by his sinless flesh, and that the chains of sin are broken by the nails hammered into his hands – he paid the price for our sin; we are redeemed by his blood. These are familiar words, so much so that they can veil from us the awful truth of what happened after Gethsemene. Much as I love praying the Rosary, the Sorrowful Mysteries are a great burden. I can only shudder as I pray them, knowing that every sin of mine is a lash upon his back, a spike in the crown of thorns, a weight upon his torn and bleeding shoulders, a nail in his hands. I cannot meditate upon these things easily, and I can scarcely bear to visualise them. But they tell me that God knew the keenest woes this world had to offer, and they caution me against railing at any slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which come my way. There was only one who was without sin – and mankind crucified him. Yet, as Peter told the crowds, this was the Messiah and he has risen and he forgives us if we follow him; we are made righteous in God’s eyes through his sacrifice.

There is something amazing in the thought that God emptied himself and became man for my sake, for your sake, for all our sakes. That God, who created everything and who is beyond our measuring, should have become one of us is a sign of just how much he loves us. That he hung and suffered there on Calvary for us is a love beyond us. There can be no doubt God could have secured our redemption in any way he wanted – that he chose this way is the deepest of mysteries; but nothing could show his love more than to suffer for us, and to take on himself the bitterest pains mankind can inflct and suffer.

There is so much we cannot know. Why then? Why Judea at that time? Why not just come now, go on TV and no doubt everyone would – for a while – believe? Far more questions come than there are answers that would satisfy us. But God is not answerable to us – we are answerable to him. If we accept his love, if we will turn and follow him, that is enough for us to know. Neither did he leave us without help. The Church, that great pilgrim through time founded by Christ, exists to bear with us and to carry us to him. From age to age, he does indeed gather a people to his own possession, feeding us through the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and leading us through the wilderness of the world whose lusts are passing away. It is a marvel – it is the greatest of miracles – and He gives it to us because He loves us.

The Tree of Life

03 Monday Aug 2015

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We ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and tasted the result of that misuse of our free will. One need only look around our world to see the consequences of this moral evil and disobedience to the All Good God. It is of note that the fruit of the tree of life was also prohibited; as they had no immediate need of its fruit. Christ was hung on a tree for our transgressions and bore all of our iniquities . . . and the tree of life has now become, though still a mystery, a little less mysterious.This thought of the Tree of Life, the Holy Cross, bearing the dead body of our own God upon it, brings to my mind the very melancholy and haunting words from a tune that Billie Holiday made popular;

Strange Fruit.

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, 

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, 

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, 

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south, 

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, 

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, 

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, 

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, 

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, 

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98CxkS0vzB8

And so a dead body hanging from a tree is indeed strange fruit and sickeningly painful to think of, though we find our salvation in just such a fruit as this. Christ with twisted mouth, battered, bruised, whipped bloody, crowned with thorns and nailed to a tree and planted into the ground: the Tree of Life for all of mankind for all time. He was raised up so that He would draw the whole world to Him; not as a spectacle but as our very hope of salvation and eternal life. For it seems that God has known from the beginning that man would not be able to receive the gift of free will without abusing the good and bringing evil upon themselves. So the Tree of Life was there from the beginning . . . the fruit of which was God Himself in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ.

So the Catholic Church has prescribed the remedy of men for two-thousand years to partake of the fruit, this wonderful and strange fruit, that is the Manna from Heaven, the Eucharist and thanksgiving which we share. We eat His Body and drink His Blood and realize that this was indeed His purpose . . . to deliver to us from Heaven the fruit from the Tree of Life to sinful and disobedient humankind now separated from Heaven and the All Good God; our only hope and salvation. So we receive with great joy and thanksgiving remembering both the infinite love of God and also the terrible cost for sin; a strange fruit indeed . . . the mystery above all other mysteries.

The God who hides himself

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in Atonement, Bible, Early Church, Faith, Islam

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God is hidden from our eyes, mankind cannot look upon him and live. He appears in a cloud, in a burning bush, in the quiet after the storm, and he speaks through the prophets and through His Law. This is the God we see in the Old Testament. This is God as King, as Judge, too splendid for human eye to see – only to be accessed through other mediums – never directly. God made man. We are the creature, He is the Creator: his wisdom so far above our imaginings that we cannot quite grasp it. All of this is the language we might expect from a people who lived with the splendours of the Pharoahs or the rulers of Babylon: God is like those rulers, but so much more potent and so much more mysterious. He is the God who drowns Pharoah’s men in the tide, who assails the enemies of the House of Israel, and who will avange all slights and wrongs. This is like the most powerful monarch ever known to the power of a million. God is hidden from our eyes, immortal, invisible, the only wise.

All of that granted, we can understand better why so many Jews would not receive Christ. Yes, by all means, when He was doing great miracles, they could believe he was the Prophet long-promised – even the Messiah who would sweep the Roman filth from the land and restore Zion. But when he hung there on the Cross, scourged and battered beyond recognition? Were they to believe that the God that was hidden was now hanging there for all to jeer at? Were they to believe that God had come in human form as a tiny baby, nursing at his mother’s breasts? What was this? How could it be so? It was little wonder that even some of those who confessed Christ as saviour sought to find a way to align that with the God who was hidden. One of the earliest heresies – docetism – posited that God’s Spirit had inhabited the body of Jesus, but had departed at the crucifixion – a belief shared today by many Muslims, picked up, in all probability, by Mohammed from Christian heretics. It was certainly a way of reconciling the grandeur of the hidden God with the reality of Christ’s suffering.

But it is a heresy, because we cannot be redeemed by a fellow creature, no matter how holy. Only the assuption of our human nature on the part of God could redeem it. The whole of early Christology was a search for how this necessary condition could have happened. When the smoke of battle cleared, the Church accepted that the divine and human nature existed in the one body of Christ, without intermingling. Christ was fully human and fully God. That is why it mattered that Mary was the ‘Mother of God’ – Christ is God, Mary is his mother, she is therefore the mother of God. That is why it was important to the early Christians to be able to represent Christ pictorally and in other ways – the fact that God was made flesh meant we could see Him – he was no longer hidden from our eyes. Those who mistakenly suppose God fobids us to make an image of Jesus and his mother, inadvertently fall into the trap of supposing God does not mean us to worship him in images. Images of God in the flesh are a living testimony to the truth that God is man and God is divine. The divinity we see as through a glass darkly – but the flesh we see, and through the flesh our flesh is redeemed and we are made one with him.

 

The forbidden tree

01 Saturday Aug 2015

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Second Adam

One of the early heresies of the Christian era was the Gnostic idea that God did not creat evil. This is not what we read in Isaiah 45:7: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things – or in Genesis where He plants the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Evil thus existed before Adam and Eve – mankind came to know it through the fall of our first parents. Adam and Eve could not have known what evil was before the Fall – but they knew God and they knew His command – which was not to eat of the fruit of that tree. In so doing, they did, indeed, become like God – they knew good and evil – and, as far as we know, we are alone in the Cosmos with God with this knowledge.

With the Fall, the problem of evil became mankind’s burden; God had tried to spare us it, but we insisted. I say ‘we’ advisedly, because even if you do not believe we inherit the taint of Original Sin, you can see in yourself the desire to do good and the failure to do it, and the desire not to do evil and yet to do it. We all say, with St Paul: “Oh wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

Only Christ can do that. Only the God who created evil as well as good can redeem his fallen creation. The mystery of evil cannot be solved by positing some other creator with whom the One God fights. All things work to the good if we are in God, we are told, but outside of that, what should work to the good goes in the other direction. We are like children who have the keys to a very powerful car but do not know how to drive it properly. We abused the goodwill of the Father – indeed we abuse it still in our stubborn sinfulness. Twist and turn as we will, we cannot escape the snares of sin by ourselves. The chains of sin drag us down to hell. Only when we see the King of Glory set it aside on the Cross in our stead can those chains be broken.

How easy, indeed how comfortable it would be, to be able to claim that God created only wat was good, but this is not what we are told in Scripture. The devil himself is a fallen angel, and, having fallen, it comforts him to drag souls to the place of ever-lasting fire. We know that in this world, and the next, there is only one sin which cannot be forgiven – the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. For the Catholic Christian, there is the recognition that some sins can therefore be forgiven in the next world – where we shall be pruged ouf our sins and restored to everlasting life.

Foolish to the Gentiles – The Atonement

01 Monday Jun 2015

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The cross is meaningless to those who are perishing. Christ crucified is a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles but to us who are being saved it’s the power and wisdom of God seen in Jesus Christ. In this manner of redeeming us God’s foolishness proves wiser and His weakness stronger than we can conceive. I began in faith simply knowing God gave Jesus for me and that believing I would experience His life.

However as time moved on there was an underlying disturbance in my soul over the explanation I was receiving of how Christ was given for me. The picture emerged gradually that Jesus agonising death on the cross was in order for God the Father to punish Him for my sins so that I could be released from the punishment I deserved.

Love for Christ was the response whenever I considered His suffering, but accompanied with that unease. How could this work, conscious doubt was notpossible, the concept of Christ dying for this purpose was so pervasive in the church I dare not question it. The explanations that the cross satisfied Gods demand for justice and exhausted His wrath against sin by inflicting it on Jesus only made things worse. What sort of justice is this that kills the innocent in order to let the guilty go free? Is God schizophrenic, ‎‎needing to vent his anger before He can offer His forgiveness? Is the Father actually forgiving if the Son is paying the debt? The explanation was totally unsatisfying butwas not to be considered.

When we live with un-answered questions they can have a corrosive effect on faith. Fortunately I knew enough of Christ for the cross to act as a magnet of love towards Him despite the year’s long, un-voiced question over what I was obliged to believe in order to hold onto Him. I was unaware of other explanations of how the cross might work but the power of it still drew me to Him. I was not equipped to consider the dilemma between my feelings and intellectual dissatisfaction with the explanations, so the matter lay dormant. I did not know that the explanation I had received had a name ‘Penal Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement’ (PST) or that it was rather poorly represented and just one theory amongst several. My dilemma came to a joyful end as I encountered other explanations of the cross and learned that many claimed that PTS was not heard of before the fifteenth centuryand others advised to treat it carefully.

This was good news for me, it actually was Gospel! I began to study and consider  other views and the theories of ‘ransom’, ‘recapitulation’, satisfaction’, ‘moral influence’, ‘government and Christus Victor. Once the field opened up I was free to think my suppressed thought of PTS as it was often spoken of, it seemed completely repugnant and intellectually bankrupt. One recent Baptists writer caused a stir in amongst British evangelical by quoting in reference to PST, when presented as the Father’s punishment of the Son that it was like “cosmic child abuse” and I found myself in agreement.

I now consider such views an obstacle to faith for many non-Christians and particularly so in confronting Islam, that questions “Why cannot God just forgive”. The question of the atonement is tied closely to that of the Trinity as it required the incarnation and the sacrifice of the God-man. If this can be clarified for Moslems we may make headway on the Trinity.

Several atonement theories are fully compatible with one another and may be combined along with insights of other theories. Let us consider Paul’s Words: – “The cross is foolishness to the Gentiles”. If we start with Paul’s perspective in our evangelism that the cross appears foolish when misunderstood or if misrepresented, perhaps we (I particularly refer to evangelicals whose practice I know best) may do a better job in disclosing the meaning of the cross. I feel our failure to do so is part of the reason we are losing ground and that this is one element that we need to address in order to meet with greater success in the evangelism of our societies. This post is presents from a subjective point of view in order to illustrate the personal effects of atonement theory and how a simplistic ‘one brush fits all’ approach may also be unsatisfactory for many we seek to witness to. An overview of each theory and its history can easily be achieved by other means.

That which satisfies me and which I would use as appropriate in evangelism is the Christus Victor, Recapitulation and Moral Influence Theories with insights from others. My hope is that the post will prompt consideration and discussion producing more light than steam.

Perhaps I might initiate discussion in two ways. You could indicate which theories you find most satisfactory and why, and which if any cause concern.

Jesus said He came to give His life as a ransom to many, giving rise to the ‘ransom theory’ popular in the early church and supported by a number of Fathers until Anselm’s satisfaction theory became more popular. How do you understand the‘ransom’ Jesus spoke of? Who was the ‘ransom’ paid to if indeed to any?