On the Use of Religious Symbols

 

On the Use of Religious Symbols

April 22, 2022

 

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.

 

I, and a lot of other people. have insisted for a long time that the language of faith is symbolic and mythic not factual. The language of the Bible itself is, for the most part, symbolic and mythic not factual. Though it does contain some accurate historical facts (and some inaccurate ones), its primary intent is to give us symbols and stories that function like symbols that point beyond themselves to the mystery of God, enable us to enter into that mystery, and discern something about God’s will and nature. I recently came across a discussion of a symbol in the Gospel of Mark that I have long understood to have one particular meaning. In that discussion, the Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan tells us that the Gospel of Mark, in which the symbol first appears, gives a different meaning to that symbol. It seems likely that rather than giving his own reading of the symbol, Crossan is here giving us what he takes to be Mark’s intended meaning of the symbol, or at least that’s what he says. I will here call that meaning the Markan meaning. Considering both that interpretation and mine will be a good exercise in how to read and use biblical symbols and myths.

The symbol I’m talking about appears at Mark 15:37-38: “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” The symbol in question here is that torn curtain of the temple. To understand either my interpretation or what Crossan says is the Markan interpretation of that symbol, we have to start with an understanding of what that curtain of the temple was. The temple in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was the center of the Jewish faith. It was constructed with a series of spaces most of which were called courts. The Court of the Gentiles was the first one you came to when you entered the temple. It was open to everyone. It is where vendors sold animals sufficient for sacrifice, animal sacrifice being the temple’s main activity. It is also where moneychangers changed unclean Roman money for clean temple money that people could give to the temple. I’ll have more to say about both of these activities below. There is then a progression of other courts deeper into the building. These included the Court of the Women, the Court of the Israelites, and the Court of the Priests. The Court of the Priests surrounded the most sacred part of the temple, which had only a small entrance on one side. It was a small space called the Holy of Holies. The curtain that is the object in the symbol we are considering hung across that small entrance. Only the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, and he did it only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The Holy of Holies was where Jews believed God dwelt in the temple.

Mark says that the curtain of the temple was torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death. He means the curtain that hung in the entrance to the Holy of Holies. We must understand Mark’s statement symbolically not literally. The tearing of the curtain when Jesus died is a symbol not an historical fact. It is a symbol with truly powerful significance. Yet, at least according to Crossan, Mark and I understand the meaning of the symbol differently. I will consider both interpretations, but I’ll give you my understanding of the symbol first. The curtain in question hung between the Holy of Holies and the Court of the Priests. The Court of the Priests wasn’t open to the general public, though we mustn’t let that detail derail our understanding of the symbol. No symbol is perfect. Anyone (except the high priest on Yom Kippur) would be stopped by that curtain. Not physically stopped but effectively stopped nonetheless. The curtain separated the people from God. God was in the Holy of Holies, the people weren’t.[1]

So what is the meaning of its being torn in two when Jesus died? For me (and for many other Christians who have considered the matter), it is that with Jesus’ death any and everything that we believe separates us from God has vanished. In Jesus’ death on the cross we see God Incarnate in Jesus Christ experiencing human suffering and death. God has entered fully into human life. God has taken every aspect of human life into Godself. In doing so God shows us that God truly, always and everywhere, is with us people as we experience human life. With us not apart of us. The Gospel of Matthew (which repeats Mark’s curtain symbol) calls Jesus Emanuel, which means “God with us.” Matthew 1:23, citing Isaiah 7:14. Jesus is very much one of us as he suffers and dies. He didn’t die as an atoning sacrifice for sin. (As we’ll see below, Jesus rejected the whole idea of sacrifice as what God wanted from us. Jesus died to show us in the most dramatic way possible that God is present with us and sanctifies every aspect of human life. For me and for many, that is the meaning of Mark’s symbol of the tearing of the temple curtain. After Jesus’ death nothing separates us from God. If we think anything does, we’re just flat wrong.

No so for Mark’s meaning of the symbol as interpreted by John Dominic Crossan. Crossan ties the meaning of the symbol of the temple curtain to Jesus’ prophetic action in the temple the day after he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. About Jesus the first thing Jesus did in Jerusalem we read, “Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves.” Mark 11:15. Jesus’ action here is usually called “the cleansing of the temple.” Crossan and I agree that cleansing the temple is absolutely not what Jesus was doing. In driving out the sellers of doves and overturning the tables of the moneychangers, Jesus was not ridding the temple of anything that wasn’t properly there. He was doing something far more radical than that.

To see how radical what Jesus did actually was, we need to understand that the sellers of doves and the moneychangers against whom Jesus acted were not doing anything wrong as far as the temple was concerned. Rather, they were essential to its operation. The main type of worship in the temple was, as I have said, animal sacrifice. Torah law specifies the animal sacrifices the people were to offer to God, and the temple was the only place where animal sacrifice was permitted. The people could not, however, bring with them the animals there were going to give to be sacrificed. The animals to be sacrificed had to be healthy, essentially perfect animals. In the book of the prophet Malachi we read, “When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not wrong? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not wrong?” Malachi 1:8. See also Leviticus 3:1. The people who were selling doves or other animals in the Court of the Gentiles were selling animals that met the law’s requirement of purity. The temple could not operate the way it was meant to operate without the buying and selling of animals that took place there.

The same is true of the moneychangers. The only money in circulation in Roman occupied Judea was Roman money. All money was coins, and Roman coins had images of the Roman emperor on them. Sometimes they also had the words “Divii Filius,” “Son of the Divine One,” on them. These features of the coins made them ritually unclean under Torah law. The temple could not accept them. So there were moneychangers in the temple who changed the people’s unclean Roman money for clean temple money that the people could then give to the temple. As with the sellers of animals, the moneychangers were not defiling the temple. The temple couldn’t operate the way it was meant to operate without them.

So if Jesus wasn’t cleansing the temple when he disrupted the business of both the sellers of animals and the moneychangers, what was he doing? Crossan and I agree the he was symbolically overthrowing the temple with its practice of animal sacrifice as its primary function. He did nothing less than symbolically destroy the temple and the legalistic religious system, including the practice of sacrifice as worship, that it represented. He couldn’t destroy the temple physically. He couldn’t actually stop people from basing their faith on law and practicing animal sacrifice. He could destroy both the temple and the law symbolically. So that’s what he did. Crossan interprets Mark’s symbol of the torn curtain in the light of Jesus’ symbolic overthrow of the temple. Mark, Crossan says, meant his symbol to mean that God confirmed Jesus’ action in the temple by abandoning the temple, that is, by leaving the Holy of Holies, tearing the curtain in the process.

So which interpretation of the symbol of the torn curtain is correct? To answer that question we have first to consider the nature of symbolic truth. Symbolic truth is different from factual truth. If two alleged facts contradict each other, one (or perhaps both) of them must be false. Not so with symbolic truth. True symbols can express powerful truth, but it takes discernment to draw meaning out of them. It is perfectly legitimate for discernment of the symbol by different people to come to different meanings for the symbol. Were that not true, the Bible, which consists largely of symbols and stories that function like symbols, would be of interest only to scholars studying ancient history. It is the way different people in different times and places can draw different meanings from the Bible’s symbols that have kept the Bible alive and meaningful for so many people in so many different times and places.

Taking Crossan’s reading of Mark at face value, Mark and I discern different meanings in the symbol of the curtain of the temple being torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death. Our different meanings make two different assumptions about what happens with this symbol. I assume that the symbol includes the symbolic presence of God in the Holy of Holies both before and after the curtain is torn in two. Mark’s interpretation assumes that God leaves the Holy of Holies and is not present there after the tearing of the curtain. Were we talking about facts here, one of our assumptions would have to be false.[2] But we’re not talking about facts. We’re talking about symbols, and the text that gives us the symbol doesn’t explicitly address the question of God’s presence in the Holy of Holies after the tearing of the curtain. It is perfectly legitimate for us to make either of those assumptions about the symbol in question. Yet it is difficult if not impossible for us to hold both of those assumptions at the same time. So what are we to do? Choose one interpretation over the other? Or perhaps look for another meaning we can legitimately draw from the symbol that works better for us? Actually, any one of those three options can be legitimate. I haven’t come up with a third meaning of the symbol of the torn curtain, but if you find another one that is true to symbol itself and works better for you, fine. All I’ll do here is explain why I prefer my interpretation of this symbol to the interpretation Crossan ascribes to Mark.

First, the Markan interpretation of the symbol seems to me to have limited usefulness for us today. It says that it isn’t just Jesus who rejects the temple’s version of the Jewish faith. It says that God rejects that version of the faith too. The idea that God rejected the temple’s version of the Jewish faith was radical and important in the early 70s of the first century CE when Mark was written. It is significantly less radical and important to us. The Jerusalem temple hasn’t existed since the year 70 CE when the Romans destroyed it. Judaism has long since transformed itself from a temple and sacrifice centered faith led by priests into a scripture based faith led by rabbis. That Jesus rejected the temple and the law based religion it embodies suggests at least that that sort of faith never was an option for Christians. That interpretation of the symbol surely was more important in the first century CE than it is today. The biggest issue in early Christianity was precisely whether one had to follow the Torah law to be a Christian. Whether or not we Christians have to follow Torah law just isn’t an issue for us, a fact that significantly reduces the value of this interpretation of symbol for us.

Moreover, this Markan interpretation of the symbol of the torn curtain has a distinctly anti-Jewish tone to it. It says that when Jesus died God abandoned what was at the time the center of Jewish faith. That Mark was anti-Jewish in the first century CE probably wasn’t terribly significant. The very few Christians  of the first century world were utterly powerless and unable to inflict any sort of harm at all on the much more numerous Jews. Not so today. Today Christianity is the largest religion in the world; and while Judaism remains a faith of world importance, there are today far fewer Jews than Christians. Add to that fact the reality that Christianity has a history nearly two millennia long of virulent, often violent anti-Judaism. There is a direct line historically from the anti-Judaism of the New Testament to the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. Today we Christians must live down and atone for our history of murderous violence toward the Jews. It is utterly inappropriate for us today to take the anti-Judaism of the New Testament as God’s own truth. It isn’t. It never was. The anti-Jewish tone of the Markan interpretation of the symbol of the torn curtain that Crossan gives us is in itself sufficient reason to reject it.

Does the interpretation of the symbol that I advocate here work better for us Christians today? Recall that the function of the temple curtain was to mark off the only entrance to the Holy of Holies. It marked the nearest to the symbolic presence of God in the temple most people could ever reach. Only the chief priest could enter it, and he did so only once a year. The curtain functioned to separate the people from God. So what does it mean that the curtain was torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death? It means, symbolically and powerfully, that anything that we think separates us from God is destroyed through the life and death of Jesus. Whatever it was, or is, that we think separates us from God is gone. There never actually was anything separating us from God, for symbols do not mean that God somehow changed with the advent of the symbol. The symbol reveals something that was always true. Yet, as I’ll discuss further below, we humans are so amazingly creative in coming up with things that we think separate at least some people from God. The most important, indeed salvific, meaning of Jesus Christ is that God stands always in total solidarity with every human being there ever was, is, or ever will be. The symbol of the torn temple curtain works perfectly with that understanding of the significance of Jesus Christ.

So what do we learn about how to interpret the symbols of faith? We learn that we must first of all understand a symbol in the historical-cultural context in which it was first created. We ask: What would the people of that time and place have understood the symbol to mean? To get to any kind of legitimate  answer to that question we must consider the cultural, linguistic, and religious knowledge and understandings the person creating the symbol could assume people to have. All of these things help us first of all to understand the symbol in its original context. They may also give us information that is important for our finding a meaning in the symbol for us. For example, how many of you have just ignored that little bit of the story of Jesus’ death because it didn’t mean much to you? That’s what I did with this symbol for decades. I trust that my explanation of what that curtain was helps you as much as it once helped me to understand the symbol of the torn curtain. That explanation comes from the symbol’s original context, and we cannot understand the symbol without it.

Once we have gained an understanding of the symbol’s original context we can consider what the symbol can mean for us. One step in that process is to consider whether some change between the symbol’s original context and our context makes some possible meaning for the symbol unacceptably harmful in ours. The anti-Jewish implications of Mark's meaning for the curtain symbol that we discussed above is a good example of how that can happen.

Then, after we have taken those preliminary steps, and only then, we can consider what the symbol can mean for us. I and others read the symbol of the torn curtain as meaning that upon Jesus’ death everything that we think stands between all people, or even just some people, and God is gone. Is that important to us? If it is, how is it important? I am certain that the symbol of the torn curtain is powerfully important to us. Religions, including Christianity, seem to see as one of their main tasks the erection of barriers between the people and God. In Christianity, those barriers appear in two basic forms. One is institutional, the other dogmatic.

The Roman Catholic Church is the best example of an institutional barrier to God. Many enlightened Catholics today, including the Catholic teachers at the seminary I attended, have moved away from this doctrine.[3] However, the doctrine “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” which means outside the church (the Roman Catholic Church of course) there is no salvation, remains an official dogma of the Catholic Church. That doctrine really does say that in order to be saved you have to be Roman Catholic. The entire, massive institutional structure of the Roman Catholic Church stands between the people and God. The Church makes it a barrier between God and people like me who, despite the Catholic Church’s wonderful spiritual traditions and practices, cannot accept some aspects of that Church and therefore are not Catholics.

The dogmatic barrier that Christians put between the people and God has to do with right belief. Sadly, most Christian churches put “right belief” between the people and God. The Christian hang up on right belief goes back to the very beginnings of the faith. The earliest Christian documents we have are the authentic letters of Paul. Those letters are mostly about right belief. The most common issue in them is whether or not one had to comply with Jewish Torah law in order to be Christian. That issue was all about what you believed God wanted from God’s people. Did God want Torah legalism or the freedom of faith? By the fourth century CE Christianity had become fractured over issues of right belief concerning Jesus Christ. The Roman Emperor Constantine wanted to use the Christian churches of the time to help him reunify the divided Roman Empire. Problem was, Christians were so split up into different factions that he really couldn’t do that. So he called a convocation of Christian bishops in an effort to get them to reconcile their differences and get unified. This convocation came to be known as the First Ecumenical Council. It didn’t work. Christianity never came together the way Constantine wanted it to. The important point for us is that the divisions within the faith had mostly to do with right belief, wrong belief being seen as a barrier between the person with the wrong belief and God.

Fast forward more than one thousand years from the First Ecumenical Council, and we come to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther believed differently about God, the church, and salvation than did the Roman Catholic Church of his day and the Roman Catholic Church was essentially the only Christian church there was in western Europe at the time. Luther’s objections to the Catholic Church led eventually to the creation of a new kind of Christianity. It’s called Protestantism. The differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are in part about ecclesial structure, but mostly they’re about differences in belief.

Fast forward another 375 years or so, and you find today’s conservative Evangelical Christians. A little bit more recently you find the first true Christian Fundamentalists. Conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians all insist that salvation depends on right beliefs, especially beliefs about Jesus Christ. They, along with some other Christians, make right belief a barrier between the people and God. Believe the right things, they say, and you have access to God and God’s salvation. Believe the wrong things, and you don’t.

The notion that one must have the right beliefs about Jesus in order to be right with God is deeply engrained in many Christians. The symbol of the torn curtain in the temple, however, says no to belief as a barrier between God and the people as strongly as it says no to any other barrier between God and the people. God may or may not care about what God’s people think as opposed to how they act. Either way, the symbol we’re considering tells us that neither wrong belief nor wrong action separates us from God. There simply is no prerequisite to benefitting from God’s grace. That’s what the symbol of the torn temple curtain means to me today. I hope it means that to you too.

I also hope that this rather lengthy exercise in how to handle religious symbols has been helpful to you. Symbol and myth (that is, stories that act like symbols) are the language of faith. We can pretend that the Bible and other sources of our faith give us indisputable facts. A great many Christians today somehow manage to cling to the belief that they do. They don’t, and the belief that they do is ultimately unsustainable. We must learn how to use symbols and stories that act like symbols if we are to understand our faith at all. I wish you God’s help and good success as you learn how to use them.

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[1] We must understand the claim that God was in the Holy of Holies as being a symbol not an historical fact every bit as much as Mark’s tearing of the curtain was a symbol not an historical fact. In our consideration here we are dealing only with symbolic meaning, not that symbolic meaning isn’t far more powerful than mere factual meaning. It is.

[2] They could both be false if you don’t accept the symbol of God’s presence in the Holy of Holies in the first place.

[3] While I was a student at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, Josef Ratzinger, not yet Pope Benedict XIV, wrote, and Pope John Paul II issued, a statement reaffirming the exclusivity doctrine I discuss here. One of my professors, a Catholic priest and a brilliant theologian and teacher, said well, let’s just put that away in a drawer and leave it there. It doesn’t say anything new. Seattle University is a Jesuit university. At the university’s School of Theology and Ministry (sadly soon no longer to exist) the Catholic staff and students fully accepted Protestant students and teachers from many different denominations. My time at STM was one of the best times of my life.

Something Old, Something New

 

Something Old, Something New

April 19, 2022

 

Though I didn’t get this piece posted until two days after Easter, I began drafting it on Easter, and it is an Easter message of a sort. On Easter we Christians around the world proclaim “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” Easter is the greatest celebration of the Christian faith. Russian Orthodox and other Orthodox Christians make Easter an even bigger deal than most of us Protestants do, but Easter is the day in the Christian year when were celebrate Jesus Resurrection, God’s sign and seal that Jesus really is the one for us to follow and that with God the end is not the end.

For the most part, Christianity has always proclaimed that in Jesus Christ, and especially in his death and resurrection, God did something completely new. God extended grace for the first time and made salvation possible for the first time. Easter is a magnificent celebration, but I have to tell you that, although I am an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I have a massive problem with that traditional Christian understanding of the Christ event, the culmination of which we celebrate on Easter. My problem is that this interpretation of the Christ event necessarily implies that God’s forgiveness, grace, and salvation were not present and were unavailable on earth until the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet that notion has some enormous problems within it. One is that human beings, who we claim God loves now and always has, had been around for a very, very long time before Jesus came. Before quite recent times, historically speaking, Christians didn’t know that humans had been around for a very long time when Jesus came, but we do. Are we to believe that none of the people who came before Jesus were saved because Christ hadn’t happened yet? Because I know God to be a God of love and grace, I simply cannot believe that they were not.

The other problem with this traditional understanding of what happened when Jesus Christ came is what it says about God. It says that once upon a time God woke up one morning and thought, “You know, I’ve got all those people down there on earth. I love them, but I haven’t saved a single one of them. Maybe I should do something about that. I know what I’ll do. I’ll send my Son, who both is and is not identical with me, to earth as one of those human beings. He can teach them and heal them. Then they’ll probably kill him. The powers on earth hate being told they’ve got things all wrong. But I’ll raise him the tomb, and voila! My people are saved. Yeah. That’s a good idea. I’ll go ahead and do that.” And that’s precisely what God did.

This reading of what God did in Jesus is horribly flawed. It says that for some undiscernible reason God decided that people who came after the Christ event could be saved, but people who came before the Christ event could not. I have to ask: Were those of us who have come after the Christ event more worthy of salvation than the people who came before Christ? I sure don’t think so. Did God suddenly one day decide to become a different sort of God than God had been before that day? Did God decide one day to be a God of grace and salvation rather than the God of wrath, judgment, and damnation that God had been before? Again, I sure don’t think so. The idea that God’s salvation came with Jesus and wasn’t there before Jesus just makes no sense.

It seems that some early Christians sensed this problem with the proclamation that Jesus had brought a salvation that wasn’t there before. They seem to have known that that contention meant that all the people who came before Jesus had been condemned just because they couldn’t believe in a person and events that hadn’t happened yet while they were alive. So they made up a story in an attempt to deal with that problem. They said that between Jesus’ crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday he descended into hell and brought the souls of the righteous up from there with him. I suppose that story, though it’s totally unbiblical, is better than nothing; but it doesn’t solve the whole problem. It still leaves the souls of people who lived before Jesus being tortured in hell from the time of their deaths until Jesus came to get them. For some of those people that length of time would have been at least tens of thousands of years long. Is it supposed to be OK that they suffered at all, much less for thousands of years, because they lived before Jesus? It’s not OK with me. I can’t believe that it was OK with Jesus or is OK with God. The massive problems with the notion that Jesus brought a new salvation remain. That’s just not what happened in the Christ event.

So does that mean that Christianity is just a bunch of hokum that we should abandon altogether and have nothing more to do with? By no means! If I thought that the only way to understand the Christ event were to understand it literally, that is, as only a matter of historical fact, I’d have to answer that question yes. Dump the whole thing. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Yet I haven’t dumped the whole thing, and I never will. How can that be? How can I say that my faith tradition may be hokum and still have it be my faith tradition?

The answers to those questions lie in the truth that there is a way of understanding all of the stories of the Christ event that is not literal, that is not factual or at least doesn’t depend on the factual accuracy of the stories. That way is to understand those stories not as accounts of actual historical facts but as the myths that they really are. And before you stop reading here and condemn me as a heretic (which I suppose you may do anyway) let me explain what I and a great many other Christians mean when we call the stories of the Christ event myths.

The word myth has a meaning in theology very different from the meaning the word has come to have in common usage. In common usage, to call something a myth is to say that, while some people may believe the thing to be true, it is in fact not true at all. It is false. That is absolutely not what myth means in theological language, and it Is not what I mean by the word myth here! So please, if that’s what you think myth means, do all you can to set that meaning of the word aside. Please read what I say about the word myth here and understand that what I mean by myth.  I use myth to mean a story that has the power to connect people with God and God with people. A myth may not be factually true, but a true myth is true on a level much deeper than mere fact.

The meaning of a myth on one level is simply the story it tells. But a true myth (and no, that is not an oxymoron) has a much deeper meaning than that. A true myth takes the reader beyond the story itself and points the reader to a truth far deeper than mere fact, a truth about a God who transcends creation absolutely while still being immediately in, with, and for creation. A true myth invites the reader on a sacred journey of contemplation to discover a meaning in the story that is both far deeper than and utterly transcendent of fact. The story elements in the myth are important only in so far as they contribute to the myth’s invitation to that contemplation.

Because myths are stories, they are usually set in a particular time and place. The meaning to which the myth points, however, is not limited to any time or any place. A true myth points to a truth that was real before the time in which the story is set and remains true after the time in which the story is set. To read a true myth as merely a journalistic report about that something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away is to rob the myth of most of its mystic power to connect people with God and God with people.

What happens, then, when we think of the stories about Jesus not on the superficial level of fact but as myths that point beyond themselves to God and seek to connect us with God? At the very least we see that when those stories speak of Jesus Christ having brought God’s forgiveness and grace into the world we must not read them as referring only to the time and events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Rather, we must understand them to reveal a truth that has always been there and has always been the same.

When we read the Christ event as a myth, we see that it speaks a truth that was not new in Jesus’ time. God did not extend God’s grace to the world for the first time and start forgiving human sin for the first time when or because Jesus came to us. God’s grace has always been present and available to God’s people—and all people are God’s people. God has always forgiven human sin. God hasn’t always done that because Jesus paid a price for that forgiveness. God has done it because God has always has been and always will be a God of grace and forgiveness. The truths about God which the Christ event reveals are not new. They are as old as humanity, indeed, as old as creation itself. We miss that profound truth if we read the stories of the Christ event as mere historical and biographical fact. Reading those stories as true myths transforms stories about a particular time and place into universal truths that has always been there and always will be.

So I ask: If salvation didn’t come for the first time with Jesus, does that mean that Jesus Christ has no significance? I answer: By no means! What Jesus revealed was ancient, but how he revealed it was brand new. We Christians confess that Jesus Christ was at the same time both fully human and fully divine. The eyes of Christian faith see much more in Jesus than just a poor man from a tiny, insignificant town in a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. On a superficial level, that’s exactly what he was. But we Christians see in him nothing less than God come to us as one of us. As I’ve become very fond of saying, what happened with Jesus isn’t possible, it’s just true. In Jesus we see the most explicit revelation of God possible. Yes, the manuscripts of the documents available to us come from centuries after Jesus, but they are manuscripts of documents composed in the first century CE. We must read them carefully. We must understand their original cultural context if we are to use them properly. We may question some of the details, but we confess that in the broad sweep of Jesus’s teachings as they are related in our sources we see nothing less than the nonviolent, just, and merciful values and ways of God. In Jesus on the cross we even see how God relates to creation. God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. Rather, God is present with us as our rock in all the bad things that happen, even when we are convinced that God isn’t with us at all.

These divine truths were always true, and there were people in all the ancient faiths before Jesus who got it, or at least mostly got it. But sadly, in the ancient world too many people didn’t get it though they could have. For example, we see some of the ancient Hebrew prophets and some of the psalmists speaking real divine truth hundreds of years before Jesus. Yet even the prophets made a mistake when they saw God as judgmental and wrathful. God didn’t condemn them or anyone who didn’t fully get it, but God clearly wanted to provide one final revelation of God’s nature and will. The way God chose to do that was to come to us as one of us, a human being like us who we could understand and who we could follow.

The revelation of God in Christ Jesus can speak to everyone, but of course not every one is a Christian and not all Christians understand God the same way. The truth is that neither any particular type of Christianity nor Christianity in general is the only way to God. The revelation of God that we have in Jesus Christ is one way, and for us Christians the best way, to know God and to live our relationship with God. What Christ revealed about God wasn’t new. How he did it was. Therefore we can know that God has been the same God from the beginning of time and always will be. God has been present with God’s people on earth for as long as there have been people on earth and always will be.  God has saved God’s people on earth for as long as there have been people on earth. For that most profound of all divine truths let all the people say, Thanks be to God!

On America's Collective Shadow

 

On America’s Collective Shadow

April 16, 2022

 

I’m currently working my through the book The Inner Work of Age, Shifting from Role to Soul by Connie Zweig.[1] The book has prompted me to do a lot of introspection, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Rather, I wish to reflect on a brief Insert into the book’s text on page 177. It has the title “A National Life Review.” It’s subject, or at least the most important thing that I got from it, has to do with our country’s collective unconscious and its shadow. Those things are concepts from Jungian psychology. I am not a psychologist and have no formal training in Jungian psychology. I did however receive an introduction to Jungian psychology over twenty-five years ago, and I saw a Jungian therapist regularly for over twenty years until his retirement last summer. If the only psychology you know is Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology can seem odd, but because Jungian psychology is so important to the brief passage in Zweig’s book that I want to reflect on here, and because I can’t assume that all readers of this piece are at all familiar with that psychology, I’ll say a few words about it before I get to that particular passage.

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist. Early in his career he was a colleague of Sigmund Freud (1875-1939), but he came to disagree with Freud about some basic psychological concepts. He continued his own studies and analysis. He eventually developed a model of the human psyche quite different from Freud’s. Like Freud, Jung saw the human psyche as containing both conscious and unconscious elements. He differed from Freud in the way he understood the unconscious as much bigger and more complex than Freud did. For Jung, the unconscious was where most of our psychic activity takes place. Freud spoke of the mind suppressing unwanted thoughts and desires, mostly sexual ones, into the unconscious. Suppression of unwanted things into the unconscious was an important concept for Jung too. For Jung, however, there was much more in the human unconscious than merely repressed sexual desires, though those can certainly be there too. Two of Jung’s concepts relating to the human unconscious are important here, namely, the shadow and the collective unconscious. I will attempt here briefly to explain these concepts as best I can.

First the shadow. In Jungian psychology the shadow is the part of the unconscious where we put things our conscious mind doesn’t want to deal with and therefore suppresses. The things we suppress into our shadow may be negative things like fears, angers, resentments, disappointments, guilt, and shame. They can also be positive things like a talent we’re afraid to  or were prevented from developing, life, educational, or professional goals we were somehow stopped from realizing, and many other things. The important point for our purposes here is just to be aware that we all have things both negative and positive in our shadow. Those things are there, but unless we do proper inner work we won’t be conscious of them.

Yet the things we suppress into our unconscious don’t disappear, nor do they cease to be active parts of our psyche. They come out in unexpected and often destructive ways. When we surprise ourselves by having an unreasonably strong negative reaction to something or someone it is virtually certain that there is something in our shadow that is triggering that response. When we lose our temper and don’t know why, there is almost certainly a shadow element in play. Things that we suppress into our shadow affect our behavior in many unexpected and usually negative ways. The only way we overcome their negative effects on our lives is to do the inner work of identifying them, then bringing them up into our conscious mind and doing whatever needs to be done to come to terms with them so we can be at peace with them.

The other Jungian concept that is important to us here is the concept of the collective unconscious. Jung taught that it isn’t just we individual humans who have an unconscious. Similarities in cultural patterns, myths, and symbols between cultures that had no contact with each other convinced Jung that humanity as a whole has an unconscious just as we humans do. He called that unconscious the collective unconscious. An example is the way the swastika, before it was forever made unusable by the Nazis, appears in different cultures across the globe. Another is the presence of hero myths in most human cultures. Entities smaller than humanity as a whole can have a collective unconscious as well. Nations and regions of nations have their own collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious has a shadow just like an individual’s unconscious does. Groups of people both small and large have things they don’t want to deal with. The group as a whole suppresses those things into its shadow. The things a group suppresses into its shadow act just like the things we suppress into our personal shadows do. They find expression in unexpected and usually negative ways. The only way to deal with them is the same as the way we can deal with the things in our personal shadow. The group having shadow problems must address whatever it is in the group’s shadow that is causing trouble, bring it into the conscious life of the group, come to terms with it, and be reconciled with it.

That is what Zweig calls the United States of America to do in the little insert into her text that I want to consider here. In that insert she writes:

 

Many voices are now calling for a collective life review, a social and political accounting of the history of the United States….We can explore our national shadows, speaking the truth about genocide, slavery, internment, torture, and immigrant policies that have been committed in our name. Without this kind of rite of passage, profound shame and grief lie buried in our collective shadow. Without it, we cannot understand the underlying roots of privilege and injustice.[2]

 

Can policies be “committed”? I guess it doesn’t matter. I wish Zweig had explicitly named the racism of which every one of the things she mentions is associated. Racism is after all deeply suppressed in America’s shadow despite the efforts of many people both in the past and today to bring it to light and, by acknowledging and confronting it, overcome it.

If our country is ever even to approximate the land of freedom, justice, and opportunity we claim to be, we must do collective inner work to neutralize many of the nasty things we keep in our collective shadow. There are a great many such things. Most of them have to do with gross income inequality and the racism that is our country’s original sin. Zweig’s list of horrors tells us some of the things we have suppressed into our collective shadow though by no means all of them. She first names genocide. The devastation of Native peoples by white intruders into the Native’s land does indeed amount to genocide, genocide being an attempt to eliminate all or a major part of a particular demographic group. Some of that genocide was unintentional. An enormous number, in some places even a very high percentage, of Native people died from diseases the Europeans brought with them against which the Natives had no natural immunity. Yet much of it was a direct policy and the result of military actions by the US against Native peoples. The US made numerous treaties with Native nations and violated every one of them, presumably because at least at an unconscious level we didn’t think of Native people as people we had to respect as people. Incidents like the massacre at Wounded Knee, where uniformed American soldiers shot and killed Native women and children apparently just for what they thought was the fun of it, were far too common. Adolf Hitler thought the US could not object to what he was going to do to Europe’s Jews because the US had already done the same thing to Native Americans. We have suppressed these truths and the guilt and shame they so properly produce so deep into our shadow that most Americans have no idea that they are beneficiaries of nothing less than genocide and are outraged and go into hard denial when they are told that they are.

Zweig next names slavery in her parade of America horribles. White Europeans brought the first enslaved Black African people to what became the United States in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. For the next one and three-quarters centuries the economy of the United States, primarily but not exclusively in the south, was based and depended upon the enslavement of millions of God’s people of African origin. This country did not abolish slavery until after a bloody civil war in which over 700,000 Americans died and in which one side was fighting for the sole purpose of maintaining the enslavement of Black human beings. As a nation we bear much guilt for our history of slavery, and I haven’t even mentioned the horrific history of American racism that came after the Civil War. We have buried most of the guilt from these truths in our collective shadow rather than admit it and deal with it in some constructive way. The list of American horribles could continue with the other things Zweig mentions and many more besides that we have suppressed into our collective shadow and not come to terms with, but I trust the point is made. Our nation has an immense collective shadow. We still need to address and deal with a great many things in that shadow.

So what is happening in this country today with regard to dealing with our collective shadow? Some good things are happening. Some people are trying to get us to deal constructively with the junk we have stuffed in there. The Black Lives Matter movement is trying to get us to address institutional racism, which of course is a manifestation of our psychologically suppressed national racism. The Me Too movement is trying to get us to address our shadow element of sexism and misogyny. The environmental movement is trying to get us to deal with the environmental crisis we have created and packed our responsibility for into our shadow. Many good things are happening among us with regard to our collective shadow.

Tragically though, so are some very bad things. Huge numbers of people fall for the bogus scientific claims of the far right that there is no environmental crisis, or if there is it’s not our fault. Our criminal law system (I won’t call it a criminal justice system because it has a great deal to do with law and very little to do with justice) continues to imprison Black people at a grossly disproportional rate compared to white people. The statistics continually show that courts impose heavier sentences on Black than on white defendants for the same crime.

Perhaps most alarmingly, many of our states led by Republican governors and legislatures are taking actions against efforts to deal with elements of our collective shadow. Texas and other states have banned critical race theory from public schools though critical race theory is nothing but an attempt to come at last to an honest depiction and understanding of our sinful history of racism. These same states, and others, are hellbent on eliminating women’s reproductive freedom recognized by the US Supreme Court in 1973 in the Roe v. Wade decision. That freedom is something we need if we are every going to overcome our shadow element of racism and misogyny. Moreover, many people expect today’s Supreme Court, which Republican presidents have packed with jurists who rule on the basis of their personal preferences rather on the law and the wellbeing of the American people, to overturn Roe v. Wade in the near future. Florida has enacted a “Don’t Say Gay” law that aims to end honest discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the state’s public schools. Yet a free and open discussion of those things that are so central to human life is essential if we are ever to overcome our shadow element of homophobia and discrimination against people of minority sexual orientation and gender identity.

Social progress always produces a backlash, and the backlash against the social progress we’ve made in recent decades is strong and getting stronger in parts of our country. Efforts to bring shadow elements into the light of consciousness always produce the response “No! Those things don’t exist! Or it they do, for God’s sake keep them down and out of sight so we can continue to ignore or deny them.” Yet ignoring or denying the reality of the bad things we have hidden in our collective shadow is nothing but dangerous. Suppression of our history of racism has in the past broken through in riots and violence by both Black and white people. If we continue to suppress it, it will do so again, to cite just one example.

Stuffing social ills and the guilt and shame we feel around them away in a collective shadow never makes them go away. It just makes it impossible for us to deal with them. Social reaction is strong among us today. Efforts to keep our shadow dark and hidden are strong among us too. May we at long last have the wisdom and the courage to face the many negative aspects of our country’s past and of our present. Only by addressing the shadow can we overcome those negative aspects and perhaps make this nation a bit more the land of the free and the home of the brave that we claim we are. May it be so.

 

---

[1] Zweig, Connie, The Inner Work of Age, Shifting from Role to Soul (Park Street Press, Rochester Vermont, 2021)

[2] Id., 177.

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: A Good Friday Reflection

 

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross:

A Good Friday Reflection

April 15, 2022

 

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.

 

Good Friday. A day in the Christian calendar when we especially remember an event that , on its face, was anything but good. As that Friday so very long ago dawned, Jesus of Nazareth was under arrest and in the custody of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. The Romans had arrested him the evening before. Yes, our Gospels want it to have been the Jews who arrested him, but it wasn’t. The Jewish temple authorities, though not the Jewish people generally, may have been in cahoots with the Romans to get rid of him; but the police power in Jerusalem at the time was with the Romans, not with any Jewish person or institution. The Jewish leaders at the time did want him gone. They accused him of blasphemy for claiming to be God’s Son. Whether he did that or not as a matter of historical fact, we know that he rejected and condemned the system of sacrificial worship over which those authorities presided. He also taught an understanding of God and God’s requests of us that, while thoroughly Jewish, was radically different from the law-based faith of first century CE Judaism. They also were afraid that Jesus might incite a popular uprising against the Romans who occupied the Jewish homeland and oppressed its people at the time. Those leaders had a deal with the Romans. The Romans would not interfere with the Jewish life of faith (about which they couldn’t have cared less), and the temple priests would work to prevent public disorder.

Both the Romans and the temple authorities knew that there had been violent uprisings against the Romans in the past. One of the more significant ones was the rebellion led by Judas the Galilean in 4 BCE when Herod the Great, a Jewish Roman puppet king, died. The Romans crushed that rebellion, but they didn’t want to have to do it again. So they took out anyone they thought posed even a threat of public unrest. Jesus, though he was thoroughly nonviolent, at least seemed to them to pose such a threat. So they were perfectly happy to be rid of him. Pilate had legal authority to crucify anyone he wanted to, a power the Jewish temple authorities definitely did not have. So they executed Jesus the way they had executed thousands of people and would execute thousands more throughout the Roman Empire. They nailed him to a cross and left him there to die, which of course he did. Crucifixion was a terrible way to die. Having nails driven through your hands and fee of course hurt like hell. Even worse, it usually took crucified people as long as two or three days to die, though our texts say Jesus died much more quickly than that. The cause of death was usually suffocation as the person on the cross could no longer hold his body up so he could breathe.

For the Romans crucifixion was more than a nasty way to get rid of people they wanted rid of. It would have been much easier for them to kill people the way their soldiers killed people in battle, with a sword. The Romans used crucifixion not just as a means of execution but as a terror weapon. They crucified prisoners where the people of the area could see, indeed probably could not avoid seeing, the crucified man suffering horribly and dying. By crucifying prisoners in public view they showed the people what would happen to any of them who got too badly out of line.

Yet we Christians see the crucifixion of Jesus as unique. He was in fact the only founding figure of any major religion who was executed as a criminal rather than dying a natural death, but that’s not why we see his crucifixion as unique. We Christians see Jesus’ crucifixion as unique because we see it as salvific. How can that be? Wasn’t he just another guy the Romans and maybe the temple priests wanted to get rid of? Well, superficially, yes. To anyone observing the crucifixion of Jesus it would have looked like any other crucifixion, except perhaps that Jesus died more quickly than most crucified people did. So how is it to us unique and even salvific? It is to us unique and salvific because for us Jesus of Nazareth was not just another guy the Romans wanted to get rid of. To understand why Jesus’ crucifixion is so important to us Christians we have first to wade into the thorny thicket of the theology of incarnation.

For us Christians, the human being Jesus of Nazareth was nothing less than God the Son Incarnate. Though most New Testament authors probably did not see Jesus as divine, the Christian conception of the Incarnation has at least some roots in the Bible. In the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke, Jesus’ conception was by the Holy Spirit not by the usual human biological processes. Then in the last of the canonical Gospels to be written, John, we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us….” John 1:1, 14a. John’s “Word”  is actually a masculinization of the older Jewish feminine concept Wisdom, and it had not yet morphed in Christian language into the Son. It would do that later. By the fourth century CE orthodox Christianity proclaimed that Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully God at the same time. He had two natures in one person, one nature human and the other divine. Of course, what our faith says about Jesus as God incarnate is impossible, it’s just true.[1]

The doctrine of the Incarnation completely transforms the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion. To us Christians there is of course a human being suffering and dying on the cross; but that is by no means all that is happening on Jesus’ cross. Because Jesus was God Incarnate, God Godself was nailed to the cross of Jesus. Traditional Christianity says that only Jesus’ human nature suffered and died on the cross. Our faith says that, I think, because it so hard for us to accept the true horror of Jesus’ cross. The great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann understands the cross better. He titled one of his books The Crucified God.[2] The correct understanding of Christ’s cross includes the shocking truth that God Godself was nailed to that cross and died. Once again it’s not possible, it’s just true.

This understanding makes Jesus’ crucifixion unique, but how is that crucifixion salvific? That question leads us straight into the greatest theological error Christianity has been making for at least the last nine hundred years. That error is usually called the classical theory of atonement. More technically, it is the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement. It says that Jesus took our place and suffered for us because of human sin in order to procure God’s forgiveness of that sin. It has a bit of a root in the New Testament, though it is by no means the New Testament’s primary understanding of salvation in and through Jesus Christ. The classical theory of atonement didn’t get its classical formulation until the year 1107 CE, when a monk named Anselm of Canterbury published his book Cur Deus Homo? The literal translation of that title is Why God Man? In English translations it us usually rendered as Why God Became a Man or Why God Was Made Man. In that book Anselm advances his theory of the dynamics of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Anselm’s book is thoroughly medieval. In it he posits that human sin is evil because it dishonors God. His model for that theory is what happens when a person in the social order of feudalism fails to do what a person farther up the feudal social scale has a right to expect them to do. That failure by the subordinate person dishonors the person whose bidding the subordinate person did not do. To get back in the superior person’s good graces the subordinate person must do more than at last do what the superior person told them to do. Merely doing that would not restore the dishonored honor in question. Only something more than that was needed to restore that honor.

Anselm applies this model of the relationship between a superior person and a subordinate one in feudalism to the issue of human sin and divine forgiveness. God, he says, has the right to expect us humans not to sin, yet of course we sin all the time. Our sin, Anselm says, dishonors God. We often seek God’s forgiveness of our sin, and of course we can, in theory, stop sinning. The problem for Anselm is that our merely not sinning anymore is not enough to procure God’s forgiveness of our prior sin. That sin has so dishonored God that it would be unjust for God to forgive that sin unless we sinners pay a price for our sin beyond merely not sinning any more. For Anselm, God’s got to get paid more than that before God can forgive human sin without committing an injustice, which Anselm of course says God would never do.

Which raises a problem for Anselm. What, after all, could we mere mortals do other than stop sinning (assuming for the moment that we could even do that) to restore the divine honor we have tarnished with our sin? The most we could to would be to die because of our sin. Yet for Anselm all human sin, however minor we might think it to be, so grossly dishonors God that even a human death would not be enough to restore God’s honor, which we have supposedly so horribly tarnished with our sin. Yet God wants to forgive our sin. It’s just that Anselm can’t imagine God just doing so just because it is God’s nature to do it. To restore the divine honor we humans must do more than we can possibly do, which was a big problem for Anselm.

So did Anselm think that God just didn’t, indeed couldn’t, forgive human sin? Not at all. He concluded that a person who was also God could, by suffering and dying, pay a price high enough to restore God’s honor and thereby make it possible for God to do what God wanted to do anyway, namely, forgive human sin. Just what advantage God gains in that scenario isn’t clear, but never mind. We’ll deal with other faults of this theory anon. Coming as a human to suffer is, Anselm said, Cur Deus Homo?, why God became human. The human being that God became suffered and died on the cross, which is precisely what God became human to do. Christians who accept this classical theory of atonement, and most of them do, have believed essentially the same thing ever since Anselm. You may recall that the marketing slogan for Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ was “Dying was his reason for living.” Christians whose faith is solidly grounded in the classical theory of atonement loved that gruesome movie no end. The rest of us not so much.

There are more things wrong with the classical theory of atonement than I can possibly relate here, but we must at least look briefly at some of them. The first fault of the theory I’ll mention is that it posits that a price had to be paid to procure God’s forgiveness of human sin. Anselm said that was because human sin so dishonors God. Today few if any classical atonement Christians speak of God’s tarnished honor. They do however insist that, basically, God’s forgiveness of sin has to be purchased. A price has to be paid. We can’t possibly pay that price ourselves. The problem with this aspect of classical atonement theory is that it denies grace. The concept of grace is that God’s love and forgiveness are freely given to everyone. We don’t have to pay for it. God’s grace is there always and everywhere because that’s just who God is. God is love, and, as the Beatles sang, “Can’t buy me love.” Can’t, and don’t have to. I’m sorry Anselm. You were just wrong about that. Christians who have accepted your classical theory of atonement have been wrong in the same way ever since no matter how they have expressed your theory.

There’s another way in which that notion that God’s forgiveness must be purchased is wrong, namely, it makes God too small. It reduces God’s grace to the level of a commercial purchase and sale. The notion that a price had to be paid before God would or could forgive sin says that God’s love is for sale. Here’s the price, one we humans can’t possibly pay. We humans of course engage in commercial purchase and sale transactions all the time, and for the most part there is nothing wrong with us doing so. The idea that we had to purchase God’s grace is nothing but a projection of the human way of being onto God. Yet if God is real, and God is, God is not human. God is present with us in creation, and we may relate to God on a personal level; but at the same time God transcends the human absolutely. God’s ways are not human ways and God’s thoughts are not human thoughts.

Our Judeo-Christian tradition has known this truth for a very long time. In verses probably written in the sixth century BCE the book of Isaiah has God say:

 

For my thoughts are not your

thoughts,

     nor are your ways my ways, says

the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than

the earth,

     so are my ways higher than your

ways,

     and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaian 55:6-8.

 

The classical theory of atonement to the contrary notwithstanding, God is not a forgiveness merchant. God just is forgiveness.

Here’s another problem with the classical theory of atonement. What does it do with all of Jesus’ teachings? The Christian Gospels, or at least the first three of them, have more in them about how we are to live than they have about anything else. Yet the classical theory of atonement says that the only thing Jesus Christ was about was suffering and dying to procure God’s forgiveness of human sin. If that’s all or even primarily what Jesus was about, why is all that stuff about what Jesus did before he suffered and died even there? Why did he go about teaching the ways of life to which God calls us, ways that turn the ways of the world upside down? Christians who accept the classical theory of atonement don’t usually ignore all of Jesus’ teachings. Yet when the classical theory of atonement is faith’s foundational theology—and for most Christians it is—minimizing or even ignoring those teachings becomes a legitimate possibility. Yet the world needs Christ’s teachings about peace and justice achieved through nonviolent opposition to evil a whole lot more than it needs a suffering savior, which is just one more reason we must jettison the classical theory of atonement.

Then there’s this. It is an objection to the classical theory of atonement that means a lot to me though I don’t know that I have seen it expressed anywhere else. The classical theory of atonement says that divine forgiveness of sin came to humans when Jesus Christ died on the cross. A necessary implication of that notion is that before Jesus died on the cross God did not forgive human sin. Yet ancient Hebrew people knew that God forgave their sin. There are more references to God forgiving sin in the Old Testament than I can include here, but here are a few of them. At Numbers 14:20 God says to Moses, “I do forgive, just as you have asked.” Psalm 103:10 tells us that God “does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.” At Isaiah 1:18 the Lord says “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” At Isaiah 43:25 God says, “I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” I suppose some Christians hold on to their belief that Jesus brought forgiveness of sin to humanity for the first time by saying that these ancient Hebrew passages somehow predict what would happen hundreds of years after they were written. They don’t, and it is not appropriate for us Christians to try to force Hebrew scripture into a Christian mold. People of faith have long known that God forgives human sin, but the classical theory of atonement says God began to forgive human sin only with the crucifixion of Jesus. About that it is simply wrong.

Here is what is perhaps the most shocking but also the most important flaw in the classical theory of atonement. What it says God did to God’s Son so that God could and would forgive human sin constitutes cosmic child abuse. I once read of a conservative Christian pastor who illustrated the classical theory of atonement this way. He took a human baby in his arms in front of his congregation. He stretched out the child’s little arm and turned the palm of their hand toward the congregation. He said, “Which one of you would drive a nail through this little hand?” He point was that of course none of us would, but that, he said, is what God do to God’s Son so that God could forgive human sin. Of course driving a nail through a human infant’s hand is unthinkable child abuse. Yet the classical theory of atonement posits that that is precisely what God did to God’s Son. “Dying was his reason for living,” remember? The classical theory of atonement models child abuse as the way to salvation. Not only do we not need that model, we must get rid of it if our Christian faith is ever to become the faith of nonviolence that Jesus intended it to be.

OK. So we reject the classical theory of atonement. But then we must ask: Does that mean that Christ’s death on the cross has no power to save us? To quote St. Paul, “By no means!” There are at least two other ways of understanding the salvific work of Jesus Christ. One is called the ransom or Christus Viktor theory of salvation. It is the most common understanding of salvation through Christ in the New Testament, though classical atonement theory Christians are forever reading the passages that express it as really expressing their theory. The ransom theory says that the human existential dilemma is that we have been taken captive by Satan. That’s why we sin so much. To free us from sin, which is what Paul and others say Christ did for us, God had to pay a ransom to Satan just like the relatives of a person kidnapped by other people must pay a ransom to the kidnapper for the release of the one kidnapped. The ransom God had to pay to Satan was the suffering and death of God’s Son. Once the ransom had been paid by Jesus’ crucifixion, we were freed from sin and free to live sinless lives the way God wants us to do, not that any of us ever actually do that. This theory of salvation has in common with the classical theory of atonement that a price must be paid. The difference is that in the classical theory of atonement the price is paid to God, in the ransom theory it is paid to the devil.

Few Christians accept the ransom theory of salvation anymore. Indeed, most Christians read the New Testament as setting forth the classical theory of atonement, which for the most part it doesn’t do. Yet our rejection of the ransom theory does not leave us only the classical theory of atonement as a way of understand the meaning of the death of Jesus on the cross. There is another way, though relatively few Christians know about it. As its lead exponents today say, it has been a minority voice through most of Christian history.[3] It is the way called “theology of the cross.”[4] It is a Christian soteriology, a theory of salvation, with none of the numerous shortcomings of the classical theory of atonement. It has the power to save Christianity from the dead end of cosmic child abuse into which classical atonement theory forces us. It goes like this.

First, we must understand that theology of the cross sees the human existential dilemma differently than does the classical theory of atonement. For the classical theory, sin is the human existential dilemma. It is indeed the only human existential dilemma. For that theory, to be saved is to be saved from sin. Yet today few people are as bothered by sin and its supposed consequences than most Christians were in the past. Other things concern us more. Most particularly, most humans today are more concerned with the threat of nonbeing and the meaning of life than they are about sin. One of the great virtues of the theology of the cross is that it can address whatever existential dilemma we struggle with. It is thus a much broader soteriology than is the classical theory.

Like the other two soteriologies I have mentioned, the theology of the cross requires the Incarnation.[5] It begins with an acceptance of the truth that the human being Jesus of Nazareth is also God Incarnate. It is grounded in the traditional Christian confession that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine at the same time. Because for the Christian faith that’s who Jesus is, in him we see God living and experiencing a truly human life. Though Matthew and Luke (though no other New Testament authors) express Jesus’ dual nature by saying that he was a human being conceived by the Holy Spirit, even in those two Gospels Jesus lives a human life. As only one human being he of course lived only one life. He didn’t live your life. He didn’t live my life. The important point, however, is that Jesus’ life really was human. It didn’t just appear to be a human life, it really was a human life. When the Gospel of John says that the Word became flesh and lived among us, it means that God lived among us precisely as a human being, as one of us, not as some transhuman sort of being.

Now, the classical theory of atonement says that God sent Jesus to us as God the Son Incarnate for the purpose, indeed probably for the sole purpose, of suffering and dying. Theology of the cross doesn’t say that God sent Jesus to die, but it doesn’t say that God sent Jesus not to die either. God sent Jesus as God the Son Incarnate to live a truly human life. And of course, as we all know, human life includes death. Because Jesus was truly a human man, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would die one way or another. All of us do, after all. God didn’t send Jesus specifically to be tortured and crucified by the Romans, but God didn’t send Jesus not to be tortured and crucified by the Romans either if that was where his life led.

And of course it is where his live led. God didn’t prevent Jesus’ torture and miserable death. But we must understand that God didn’t prevent them because God needed them to happen before God would forgive human sin as the classical theory of atonement asserts. God didn’t prevent them because if God had prevented them Jesus as God Incarnate would not have lived a full human life with all of its risks and tragic possibilities.

Yes, Jesus suffered and died, but in that suffering and dying theology of the cross does not see a price being paid either to God or to the devil. Rather, in Jesus’ torture and execution theology of the cross sees God Godself, in the person of Jesus, entering into and experiencing the fullness of human life including the worst that we humans do to each other. God entered into and experienced the dynamics of human sin at their worst. God didn’t avoid them. God didn’t mitigate their horror. God took them into God’s own being and suffered them just as any human being would.

In God incarnate suffering and dying on the cross we see how God truly relates to us humans, and therein lies the saving significance of the cross. Theology of the cross sees the foundational human existential dilemma as being the we don’t know just what God’s relationship to us is; and it isn’t what most people think it is. Christians as well as people of other faiths often believe that if their faith is strong enough and they pray hard enough, God will stop bad things from happening to them or their loved ones. Folks, that just isn’t true. We should be able to draw that quite obvious conclusion from our own lives and from human history, yet so many of us don’t. So God demonstrates that truth to us on the cross of Jesus. God didn’t prevent a horrifically bad thing from happening even to God Godself as God the Son on that cross. God didn’t let Jesus’ crucifixion happen because  God had to be bought off as the classical theory of atonement asserts. God let Jesus’ crucifixion happen because in Jesus God was leading a full human life. In Jesus on the cross we see precisely that God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening to us humans, not even to the best of us humans.

Rather, in Jesus on the cross we see God entering into the worst that can happen to a person. In doing that God shows us that God is always with us as we suffer and as we die. In Jesus on the cross we see that God is with us even when we are positive that God’s isn’t. On the cross Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46. Many people try to avoid the existential horror of that cry of dereliction by saying that all Jesus was doing with that cry was reciting the opening lines of Psalm 22, which does indeed open with those words. It is true that Psalm 22 as a whole is a prayer of trust in and praise of God. But reducing Jesus’ cry of dereliction to a prayer of trust and praise completely misses the profound meaning of that cry. Jesus cry of Godforsakeness gives us one of the most profound paradoxes of our faith (and all of the most profound truths of our faith are paradoxes). In that cry we see God present in God’s own experience of the absence of God. Yes, our rational minds say that isn’t possible. It is a logical fallacy. Our minds say it isn’t possible. Our souls say it isn’t possible, it’s just true. God getting crucified and dying isn’t possible either, it’s just true.[6]

Salvation in the cross of Jesus lies precisely in this, that we see demonstrated in the most concrete way that God never leaves us. God never abandons us. Not in life, not in death. God is always there. God is there even when we cannot feel God’s being there, even when we would cry with Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God is always with us to turn to, to hold onto, to trust, to be the one from whom we can draw the courage and strength to endure whatever we must endure. Even the courage and strength to die in peace, knowing that even death does not separate us from God. St. Paul expressed this truth beautifully when he said he was convinced that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39. On the cross Jesus isn’t paying a price. He is demonstrating to us who and how God really is.

Friends, I have experienced the truth of theology of the cross in my own life. I have known the presence of God with me during the worst times of my life. I have held on to God in deepest grief and most intense pain. I have prayed to God through both grief and pain and have felt the courage, strength, and consolation that only God can give us. I know from contemplation of Jesus on the cross and from my own life experience that God will never desert me. God will never desert you. God will never desert anyone, not in life and not in death. And that is about the best news there is or ever could be.

So today and every day let us celebrate and rejoice in the unfailing presence and solidarity of God with us and with everyone. Let us celebrate and rejoice in our good times, for God is with us in those times too. Even more importantly, let us know not just with our minds but with our hearts and souls that God is with us as a source of strength, patience, and hope in our bad times. Even in our worst times. That is the good news of Good Friday. That is theology of the cross. Thanks be to God!

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[1] The notion that the great truths of our faith are impossible but true is one of my favorite notions about it. By it I mean that our truths are illogical. We cannot reason our way to them. Our rational minds reject them, but our hearts and souls know that they are nonetheless profoundly true.

[2] Moltmann, Jürgen, The Crucified God, The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993. First published in 1972 as Der gekreuzigte Gott.

[3] The leading exponent of theology of the cross in English today is the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall. See for example his book The Cross in Our Context, Jesus and the Suffering World (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2003).

[4] This is perhaps an unfortunate name for it. The classical theory of atonement and the ransom theory are both theologies of the meaning of the cross. Sometimes you’ll see theology of the cross called theologia crusis, but that’s just Latin for theology of the cross. Theology of the cross is what this theory is always called, so we stick with that designation though we might prefer to have some other one.

[5] And the doctrine of the Incarnation requires the doctrine of the Trinity for it to make any sense at all, but I won’t lead us into the morass of trinitarian theology here.

[6] In a note above I mentioned trinitarian theology and said I wouldn’t go there. I will say here that it was God the Son who died on the cross. God the Son both is and is not the fullness of God, another of those wonderful paradoxes of ours. Moltmann says that in the death of Jesus one the cross God experienced the horror of the death of God’s Son. He can say that only because he understands that God the Father, like God the Son, both is and isn’t the fullness of God.