What Jesus Brought

 

What Jesus Brought

March 3, 2022

 

We’ve all heard it. Jesus Christ died to save sinners. A price had to be paid before God could or would forgive human sin. Yet human sin was so powerful, pervasive, and evil that no mere human could pay the price for it. The price was simply too high. So God became incarnate in a man named Jesus of Nazareth. As both fully God and fully human Jesus could pay that price. That’s what he did when he suffered and died on the cross. That suffering and dying was what God became incarnate to do. Once he had done it his mission on earth was done, so he returned to heaven whence he came. The job was done. The price had been paid. Now God could and would forgive human sin. We’ve all heard it. We’ve probably heard it proclaimed in different ways over and over again. It’s what the Christian faith is all about, right?

Well no, not right. Yes, the very fallible humans who are and who lead the church pretty much turned Christianity into it. It is what most people both in the churches and outside them who think about Christianity at all think the faith is. I have written a good deal before about why I reject that soteriology, that is, that theory of salvation. I won’t go into all of my reasons for rejecting it. If you want to read about those reasons see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in my book Liberating Christianity either the original or the revised edition. Here I will try to refute that theory, which is known as the classical theory of atonement, in a way I didn’t when I wrote that book. I know full well that the theology I will present here is radical. It rejects what most Christians consider to be the bedrock of their faith and replaces it with something else. So here goes.

We start by uncovering a necessary implication of the classical theory of atonement. In saying forgiveness of sin and salvation came with the suffering and death of Jesus, conventional Christianity also necessarily says that forgiveness of sin and salvation were not present or available before the suffering and death of Jesus. This type of Christianity says that something new came into the world with and through Jesus Christ. That something is divine forgiveness of sin and salvation for us sinful mortals.

The classical theory of atonement we are considering here necessarily says something else happened when God came to us as one of us. It necessarily implies that God did something God had never done before, something like this. From the beginning of humanity God did not forgive human sin, and people weren’t saved. Then one day, after we humans had been around for a very long time, God said to Godself, you know, I could do a very good thing for those humans of mine. I could forgive their sin and grant them salvation. But I’m afraid it’s really not that simple. I can’t give salvation to them free of charge. Human sin is so wrong and has so affronted me all these years that those humans have to buy my forgiveness if they’re going to have it. They have to pay a price for it. But the offense of sin is so enormous, what could they possibly pay that would be enough? Really the most they can do is die, but they’re all going to do that anyway. So what is one human life? Could it possibly be a high enough payment to make up for sin? Not really. I mean, in the end they can’t avoid death. So if they died as the price of forgiveness they’d just be doing something they’re going to do anyway. Maybe they’d do it earlier in their life than they otherwise would, but that really isn’t much, is it.

What would be enough of a price? Maybe my suffering and dying in their stead would be enough, but how could I do that? I’m eternal spirit not some mortal being, but that truth gives me an idea. I could become a human being. Of course I’d still be God too, but that’s how I could die for them. I could die as a God-man. It wouldn’t be much fun of course. I imagine that as a God-man I’d want to avoid suffering and death as much as anyone. I imagine I’d suffer as much as they would if, say, the Romans crucified me. But that would do the trick. Then I could forgive human sin and thus give the people salvation. OK. That’s what I’ll do. And that, this classical theory of atonement says, is exactly what God did in Jesus of Nazareth.

Where does this scenario leave us? It leaves us with the understanding that for all the millennia before the year we call 1 CE millions upon millions of men, women, and children died unforgiven and unsaved. But would God really do that, leave all those people without salvation? Certainly not. At least some of the earliest Christians knew this problem, namely, that Jesus created salvation for us when it wasn’t there before. Some of them dealt with that problem by making up a story about Jesus that never made it into the Bible. They said that in the time between his death and his resurrection Jesus descended to the underworld and brought the souls of the righteous with him to heaven. This theory, however, solved only half of the theological problem these earliest Christians were wrestling with. It got the souls of the righteous dead to heaven, but it didn’t and couldn’t do away with the fact it assumes that righteous people hadn’t been saved before Jesus came and got them. Those Jesus took to heaven had been unforgiven and unsaved for a very long time. That problem was still there. It is a problem that conventional Christianity and its classical theory of atonement can never solve.

There is, I believe, only one valid way to solve the problem of salvation not being available before Jesus. It is, however, a very radical solution. It is to say that Jesus did not create anything that wasn’t there before him, at least not in terms of ultimate divine forgiveness and salvation. God has offered, and indeed has extended, forgiveness and salvation to every human being who has ever lived. Jesus did not reveal a new God to us except perhaps for his teaching that God is radically nonviolent. Ancient Israel knew of God’s salvation centuries before Jesus. Psalm 51, for example, knows of God’s salvation when it says “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” Psalm 51:12. That psalm also calls God the God “of my salvation.” Psalm 51:14b Many other examples of ancient Israel knowing God’s salvation could easily be found. Ancient Israel also knew that God is gracious to us and gentle in spirit. We read: “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing." Joel 2:13. This phrase about God also appears at Psalm 103:8, Psalm 145:8, and Jonah 4:2. The confession of God as gracious and merciful without the rest of the saying appears at 2 Chronicles 30:9, Psalm 111:4, and Psalm 116:5.

Yes, of course there are other, less appealing images of God in the New Testament. But there are images of God very different from the main one Jesus gives us in the New Testament too. Compare Matthew 5:38-39 on nonviolence with most of the book of Revelation. In other places Matthew has the wrong sort of people cast into the outer darkness, Matthew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30, or into the furnace of fire, Matthew 13:14 and 13:50, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. No other New Testament writer uses those phrases. The important point here is that Jesus’ revelation of God as a God of grace wasn’t new. At least some of Jesus’ Jewish forbears knew that truth as well as he did.

So Jesus didn’t create forgiveness of sin. He didn’t bring a salvation that wasn’t there before. Except perhaps for his teaching of nonviolence, Jesus didn’t reveal God as a God of grace and forgiveness who had never been known before. He certainly expressed his view of God in new, powerful, and sometimes maddeningly puzzling ways. His view of God, however, did not originate with him. It had been around for centuries before Jesus came.

What then are we to say” That Jesus isn’t worth adoring and following? By no means! What Jesus did that is of immense value to us was to demonstrate how God actually relates to us and to all of creation. In Jesus Christ as God the Son Incarnate we see that God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening, not that that isn’t pretty obvious just from human life and human history. God didn’t stop a very bad thing from happening to God’s own Son. God certainly isn’t going to stop bad things from happening to mere mortals like us.

Instead, in Jesus as God the Son Incarnate we see that God is present with us in whatever happens to us in life. In Jesus on the cross God even entered into and experienced human death. All profound truths of faith are paradoxes. One of the great Christian paradoxes is that in dying on the cross bereft of hope and feeling abandoned by God—“My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46—we see that God is there even when we are unable to feel God’s presence with us. Though this understanding of how God relates to human suffering and death certainly feels new to us, in a way it isn’t. The psalmist of Psalm 23 knew this truth at least to some extent. He wrote: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me. Psalm 23:4.

So no, though virtually all of conventional Christianity insists that he is, Jesus isn’t important because he brought something new. Indeed, the notion that salvation came only with Jesus is radically inconsistent with a God of eternal forgiveness and grace. Jesus matters mostly because he picked up certain truths from his Jewish heritage, lived with them, died with them, and demonstrated them in new and powerful ways. Jesus didn’t and doesn’t save us. Rather, he demonstrates to us the truth that we already are and always have been saved even if we didn’t know it. He is our Savior not because there was no salvation before him. There most certainly was salvation before him. He is our Savior because it is in and through him that we know our God of grace who has already saved us and every other person who has ever lived and who ever will. This is a radical rethinking of the foundational elements of the Christian faith. It is, however, exceedingly good news. For that divine truth let all the people say, “Thanks be to God!”

 

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.