I
Respectfully Disagree
April
8, 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.
Last night I was
watching a rerun of a program on a local PBS station about the similarities and
differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These three Abrahamic faiths
have more in common than most Christians think they do. All three believe in
one God (although Muslims often think that Christians worship three gods). All
three trace their origins back to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham. Although a great
many believers in each of these traditions sometimes grossly misread and distort
what their faith is about, all three are at heart religions of peace. There are
differences between them in this regard, but in their own ways they are all
committed to social justice. There really is no reason for adherents of each of
them not to learn about and respect the others. And no, most Muslims by far
are not terrorists and wish they could get the world to understand that the
terrorists who claim to be Muslim are a tiny fraction of all Muslims and that
those terrorists distort the faith, disgrace it, and turn it into something it
truly is not.
There was one
comment in that PBS show that states a difference between Islam and
Christianity that I want to address here. Someone of that program said that
while Islam considers Jesus to have been a great prophet, it cannot accept the
notion that he was crucified. Islam says that God would never have let a great
prophet like Jesus be executed like a common criminal. That sibling faith of
ours says that someone who looked like Jesus was crucified, but that person
could not possibly actually be Jesus.
It is this
contention with which I respectfully disagree. I believe that there are five
foundational aspects of the Christian faith. They are the Trinity, the
Incarnation. Jesus’ teachings, Jesus’ crucifixion, and Jesus’ resurrection.
Jesus’ crucifixion is truly central to the faith convictions of Christian
people. Most Christians would say that the cross is central to their faith
because it was there that Jesus suffered and died to pay the price for human
sin and thus to procure God’s forgiveness of that sin. I reject that
understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion in brief because I don’t think
God requires that anything be paid to procure forgiveness of sin. I also
consider the notion that God sent Jesus for the sole or at least the primary purpose
of suffering and dying to be cosmic child abuse, something God would never do.
A different understanding of the significance of the cross is, however, central
to my Christian faith. With all due respect to Muslims who cannot accept that
Jesus was crucified, I will here briefly explain that understanding.[1]
It is perhaps
unfortunate in the context of this essay that to understand why the cross is so
central to Christian faith we must start with another of those central
Christian tenets I listed above. It is the doctrine of the Incarnation. The
Incarnation has been central to Christian faith virtually from the faith’s very
beginnings. This understanding of Jesus Christ asserts something that is
impossible but true. The doctrine of the Incarnation holds that the man Jesus
of Nazareth was at the same time both fully human and fully divine. To us he is
nothing less than God, the Trinitarian person of the Son fully incarnate in
this one human being. The best biblical statement of the Incarnation is in the
Prologue to the Gospel of John: “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. Thus, when we see Jesus suffering and dying on the cross,
we see more than a human being suffering and dying. We see God Godself suffering
and dying,
And that makes
all the difference. The doctrine of the Incarnation radically informs our
understanding of the cross of Jesus. In Jesus on the cross we see displayed in
the most graphic possible way the truth that God does not reject human
suffering. God does not reject us humans when we suffer and die, as all of us
do. Rather, God enters all aspects of human life, even the suffering and death
caused by human sin like Jesus’ suffering and dying was. Yes, on the cross Jesus
cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34 and Matthew
27:46. Yet because of the paradox of the Incarnation we know that in that cry
God is experiencing and entering into the very human experience of believing
oneself to have been abandoned by God. But for the cross of Jesus we would not
have this divine demonstration of God’s unshakable solidarity with us humans no
matter what.
Yes, the Romans
(definitely not the Jews) executed Jesus the way they executed at least
ordinary political criminals, namely, by crucifixion. In that tragic but holy
truth we see that God is with and for all people, including especially
ordinary, unremarkable people like most of us are. Jesus was not a man of high
birth. He was a prophet and to us Christians much more than a prophet, but he
lived and died as an ordinary person (albeit one who could do extraordinary
things) precisely because it is us ordinary humans who God especially loves and
came to serve.
So, my dear
Muslim sisters and brothers, truly with the utmost respect for your great
monotheistic faith with which we Christians have more in common than most
people know, I disagree with your assertion that Jesus was not crucified. I
disagree that God would never let something like crucifixion happen to a
prophet like Jesus. One of the primary things Jesus did was to teach God’s way
precisely for ordinary people like us. He demonstrates through his humble
origins as the son of a poor tradesman in an insignificant town in the an
outlying part to the Jewish homeland in the backwaters of the Roman Empire just
how God really relates to all people. His brutal crucifixion as a common
criminal demonstrates the same thing. Yes, it demonstrates it to the wealthy
and powerful too; but it demonstrates is especially to poor, weak, vulnerable,
ordinary people like most of us humans are. And for that all I can say is,
Thanks be to God!
[1]
For a much more complete explanation of the faults with the common Christian
understanding of the meaning of Christ’s cross see, Sorenson, Thomas, Liberating
Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised
Edition, Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement.”
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