Eyre Lines

“Why did Jesus die” was the title for this week’s talk and discussion. I knew I was going to have problems!

Arriving only marginally less horribly early than last time, I tried to make myself useful, and after setting out the library again (seems to be my main job) ended up on the door. Well, it is better to be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to dwell in the tents of iniquity, or so says psalm 84. As I now know that Ben is reading this blog, I suspect he may have kept me away from the sacred song and extempore prayer out of charity!

I was pleased to find that the speaker didn’t follow the outline in the course manual at all closely. As a result, the result was significantly less unadulterated PSA (penal substitutionary atonement) than I’d feared, but at the end of the day, that was still the main content. I always like the suggestion that, had the event been more modern, we might be going around with small silver electric chairs on a chain round our necks now, which caused some merriment.

Happily, in the discussion, I was able to stress the “sin is separation from God” argument, and move things slightly away from the “list of transgressions to be answered” model; self-centredness is clearly inimical to union with God. Have we “sinned”? Yes, if we have not loved God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and our neighbour as ourself. Much as one attender might have wanted to talk about drink, drugs and promiscuous sex, which I’d have wanted to avoid anyhow as one of our number was actually fairly drunk, it felt like safer ground.

The group didn’t want to explore further my reference to Ezekiel 18, in which firstly the sins of the fathers (presumably including Adam and Eve) are not visited on the children, and secondly it is made very clear that you’re exactly as good as your last action (and probably thought, as well); repent, turn to God, and you are OK. It is, of course, thus clearly established some hundreds of years earlier that there is a serious flaw in the development of the argument from Paul’s ad hoc theologising in Romans 3:23-25 to PSA.

With this group, I’m trying to avoid any suggestion that anything in the New Testament should not be read as if it’s an instruction manual, but rather as the product of members of a faith group trying to make sense of  their experience as it was at the time. I did make an attempt to introduce this way of thinking by raising the issue of the massive disappointment which must have afflicted Jesus’ followers, who expected their Messiah to usher in the supremacy of Israel and world peace, living for a positively patriarchal span and acknowledged as leader, whereas in fact he’d been executed particularly nastily as a common criminal by the hated Romans. Sadly, the author of the Fourth Gospel has already sold his message of a Jesus who really didn’t need to do this and could have extricated himself at any time far too well to this group.

No-one bit at my mention that there were at least four atonement concepts I was aware of either. Penal substitutionary is, to my mind, inferior to Exemplary and Christus Victor, though not a lot worse than Ransom, which I have to remember was the dominant concept for nearly two thirds of the history of the Western Church. Ah well.

I’m still at a loss to understand how PSA has twisted what Paul actually wrote in Romans backwards. Verses 24-26 read “whom God put forwards as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus”. It is not to make mankind righteous, but to prove a point about God, i.e. that God’s mercy does not represent a lapse of standards; the expiation is of God, not of us.

I recall also that this comes after Paul has spent a chapter and a half finding reasons why the law of Moses is not applicable to followers of Jesus. It’s clear that his main target is circumcision, which he doesn’t want to be thought necessary for Christians. Reading between the lines of Acts, it seems fairly clear that the then dominant Jerusalem Church considered that Jesus was a Jew and that his followers should therefore be Jews too, in the sense of following Mosaic Law, the sticking points being circumcision and dietary issues. (As an aside, I’m pretty confident that the passage Mark 7:20-23 referred to in the Alpha manual  is a part of this conflict, and that Jesus probably didn’t intend it to be a suspension of dietary constraints, assuming he actually said it as quoted). He therefore finds an outside reason, within what is by now central to the movement, namely that Jesus died but is in some way still active – and in the next chapter also refers it to Abraham, “justified” by faith, although clearly there not in Jesus.

The speaker had said that the most important thing about Jesus was his death. I disagree. We started in week 1 with Lewis’ ” if he were just a great moral teacher” argument. What seems all to likely to be forgotten is that in the complex thing which is what we have since made of Jesus, the thing about him which can be most widely agreed is that he was just that, a great teacher. Less people agree that he was also a variety of other things, such as Jewish Messiah, son of God, God incarnate, a person of the Trinity who can in some fashion communicate with us directly today – or a substitute for a burned offering which was no longer necessary after Hosea 6:6, or a quite ridiculous putting right of a theological problem in the mind of Paul, or later  a different one in that of (perhaps) Anselm or (definitely) John Calvin, neither of which would have been a problem if they’d believed Ezekiel 18. Frankly, I think that to say this demeans Jesus. They also, to my mind, demean God. How His mercy could possibly be regarded as a fault, I fail to understand; how it could be regarded as good, let alone as a principle ruling God that he should exact maximal punishment even from someone who has repented and turned to Him, and that for any slightest transgression including thinking of transgressing, beats me. Let alone (as a friend puts it) the divine child abuse of torturing and killing His son to correct something he could readily just have announced – but hey, didn’t he already do that in Ezekiel 18?

Words occasionally fail me…