It seems that all of my views of the issue are non-standard. I used to really hate this topic and refuse to even talk about it. There isn't a visual cross in all of this blog and there won't be, how about wearing a replica electric chair around your neck as well? But anyway, the proponents of some of the most questionnable theories of the atonement have no such qualms, and they teach their own view as the only view there is. So as someone with a grand total of zero hours of theology under my belt, here are my own two pence:
1. For a start we don’t really know. We cannot know. Claiming to understand God is ridiculous, it would be like my cat claiming to understand me. We can assume that Jesus knew what he was doing, and that his death does what he says it does.
2. The martyr option. Jesus refused to play by the rules of the empire of his day. He was really undermining them, and suffered the fate of those who did likewise.
3. The inhabiting human suffering option. God does not wish to remain privileged while we suffer.
4. Showing whose side God is on. God is with the ones you despise and torture.
5. Becoming vulnerable. You’re pissed off at God and you want to hurt Him? Go ahead. God is vulnerable, hurting him has been done before and it can be done now.
6. Freedom from fear (the Gandhi option). If your enemies want to exert force, let them. It is your fear that keeps them in power. When fear is gone, and you are able to absorb the blows and return only love, you undermine the foundations of violence.
Conspicuous by their absence from my little list are all the variants of Penal Substitution, Ransom and Christus Victor, which are accepted by quite a few churches while little heretic me refuses to even link to them.
1. For a start we don’t really know. We cannot know. Claiming to understand God is ridiculous, it would be like my cat claiming to understand me. We can assume that Jesus knew what he was doing, and that his death does what he says it does.
2. The martyr option. Jesus refused to play by the rules of the empire of his day. He was really undermining them, and suffered the fate of those who did likewise.
3. The inhabiting human suffering option. God does not wish to remain privileged while we suffer.
4. Showing whose side God is on. God is with the ones you despise and torture.
5. Becoming vulnerable. You’re pissed off at God and you want to hurt Him? Go ahead. God is vulnerable, hurting him has been done before and it can be done now.
6. Freedom from fear (the Gandhi option). If your enemies want to exert force, let them. It is your fear that keeps them in power. When fear is gone, and you are able to absorb the blows and return only love, you undermine the foundations of violence.
Conspicuous by their absence from my little list are all the variants of Penal Substitution, Ransom and Christus Victor, which are accepted by quite a few churches while little heretic me refuses to even link to them.
1 comment:
This is all well and good, but I think your options begin to founder unless they are connected to something like the Christus Victor model.
That is to say, the cross may reveal Jesus' refusal of the rules, his inhabiting of human suffering, his solidarity with the oppressed, and so on, but unless this produces some sort of result (like, oh, resurrection and conquest over sin and death) then all we learn is that God is just as fucked as we are.
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