Reconciled!
February
21, 2021
WE humans have long sensed that
there is something wrong with the world and our lives on it. We’ve thought
about what’s wrong in different ways. We’ve said life has no purpose. Or life
has no meaning. We’ve said that the problem is violence or injustice. We’ve
said we’re all alone in a universe that is indifferent to us at best or is even
dangerous and hostile. We’ve said that the problem is that there is no God or
that there is a God but that God is judgmental and vindictive and is therefore
to be feared not loved. We humans have been quite creative in coming up with
ways to talk about what’s wrong with the world and with human life.
Christians have
for the most part analyzed what’s wrong in terms of sin. We’re all tainted by “original
sin” because Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the garden, we’ve said. We’ve
said we’re enslaved to sin, that the devil rules the world, and there’s nothing
we do about it on our own. We’ve said that we’re so blinded by sin and our
minds are so disordered by sin that there is a chasm between God and us that we
can’t even begin to cross, that any crossing of it that’s going to be done has
to come from God’s side not our side. We have attributed sin to our physical
nature, making the physical sinful and the spiritual divine.
Because we’ve
understood sin to be our existential problem we’ve said that Jesus Christ died
for our sin. We’ve said that he was both divine and human and that his suffering
and death were an atoning sacrifice, a price that had to be paid to God before
God could or would forgive human sin. We’ve said that dying was his reason for
living because only by suffering and dying as God Incarnate could he procure
divine forgiveness of our sin. That notion that Jesus was an atoning sacrifice
for human sin, known as the classical theory of atonement, has virtually
swallowed the Christian faith whole. For a great many people both inside the
churches and outside of them, the classical theory of atonement is what
Christianity is all about.
At least some of
us today have rejected the idea that Jesus Christ was a God-man who had to
suffer and die so God would forgive human sin.[1]
To many of us today that theory sounds like cosmic child abuse. It makes God
too small by saying that God needs to be paid off before God would forgive
human sin. We understand that Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sin has very
shallow biblical roots at best. Some theologians today say that it has no
biblical roots at all.[2]
We have asked why, if all Jesus was for was to suffer and die, the canonical
Gospels say so much about what he taught and did during his life. For us the
theory of Jesus as a necessary sacrifice to procure God’s forgiveness of sin
just doesn’t work.
Fortunately the
Christian Bible offers us another, far more powerful and satisfying view of
what Jesus was about and of what God was doing in Jesus. It’s in 2 Corinthians.
It reads:
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything
old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who
reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;
that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their
trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.[3]
A couple of caveats are necessary
here. This passage does refer to human “trespasses,” which we can and must take
to be a synonym for sin. Sin is not, however, what these verses are primarily
about. Also, it is quite possible to read the classical theory of atonement
into these verses. Doing that, however, reads into them something that isn’t
there. Paul says here that God reconciled the world to Godself, but he says
nothing about the mechanics of how God did it. He certainly doesn’t call Jesus
an atoning sacrifice that procured that reconciliation. He just says that God “was
reconciling” the world to Godself through Christ. The ongoing nature of “was
reconciling” certainly suggests something other than the once for all suffering
and death of Jesus in which what Jesus came to do is completed. Let’s not read
into Paul’s words something he didn’t say.
What he said was
that through Jesus Christ the whole world is reconciled with God. That is about
the best news there ever was or ever could be. All of the analyses of what’s
wrong with the world come down to a belief that the world is radically
separated from God. We fear what we’ve been told are the consequences of sin
because we think God is opposed to us. We find life meaningless and without
purpose because we don’t know that God is with us offering everyone meaning and
purpose in service to God and God’s people. Paul tells us that our sense of
separation from God is entirely of our own making. As far as God is concerned
we’re reconciled. Period.
Our
reconciliation with God didn’t take the suffering and death of a God-man to
bring it about, although Jesus’ suffering and dying show us a lot about how God
relates to the world by entering into all aspects of life with us, even or
especially the horribly bad ones. No, what it took to reconcile the world with
God was God’s unfathomable love in which the whole world is reconciled with God
and always has been. We can know and live into that reconciliation or not, but
our not knowing it and not living into it don’t mean it isn’t there. It is. It
always is because God is in God’s very nature reconciling love.
So let’s get over
this entirely human notion that we are somehow separated or alienated from God.
We aren’t. We are reconciled with God, and that isn’t because we deserve to be
reconciled with God. It isn’t that because we’ve done something to procure
reconciliation with God. For the most part we haven’t. No, we’re reconciled
with God because that’s how God wants it. That’s how God sees God’s
relationship with us. Because God is reconciling love we are reconciled with
God. So let’s get on with living into that divine, universal reconciliation,
shall we?
[1]
That’s not the same thing as denying the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. I
do not deny that truth but cling to it with joy.
[2] If
that theory has any biblical roots they are in the book of Hebrews. That book
calls Jesus Christ both the priest who offers the ultimate sacrifice and the
ultimate sacrifice himself. To read most of the rest of scripture as expressing
the classical theory of atonement is to misread it.
[3] 2
Corinthians 5:17-19.
No comments:
Post a Comment