A Vision of the Church

 

A Vision of the Church

A Sermon from 1992

Slightly revised, October, 2022

Given again at Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ

Shoreline, Washington

October 23, 2022

 

In 1992, thirty years ago now as hard as that is to believe, I was, as I told you last week, a practicing lawyer who had never had a thought about going to seminary and becoming a church pastor. My late wife Francie and I were members of this church at the time. One Sunday our pastor, Rev. Steve Hanning, whom some of you at least remember, was going to be away, and either he or someone else at the church asked me if I would preach that Sunday. I agreed. I gave a sermon with the title “Vision of the Church.” I recently rediscovered the text of that sermon and reread it. I thought it was really quite good, good enough to be worth giving again this morning. I thought, perhaps a sermon on what the church could be might be helpful to RBCC in their interim time. I have edited it a bit to reflect some of today’s realities. I also made a few other edits, but much of what I say here is exactly what I said thirty years ago. When I reread the sermon I thought, gee, I guess it was inevitable that I would end up going to seminary and becoming a pastor, which, as you know, I eventually did. This sermon certainly did not give me that thought back when I first gave it. So, for what it’s worth, here it is.

A Vision of the Church

In 1975 and 1976 Francie [my since deceased wife], our son Matt (who turned two while we were there and who is now Division Chief of Training for the Everett Fire Department), and I lived in what was then the Soviet Union while I was doing research for my PhD dissertation in Russian history. (Yes. I have one of those too. I go to school better than I do anything else.) The Soviet state was officially atheistic. The society it created was, in its outer, public aspect at least, bleak, humorless, largely hopeless, and oppressive in a way that it is difficult for most Americans to conceptualize. The official values of that society were entirely material. Outer conformity to standards of conduct and to a system of belief, Marxism-Leninism, was rigorously enforced by a system of secret police and secret informers, and any deviation from the imposed norm was punished, not so much during my time there by arrest and jail, thought that did happen, as by the withholding of career, housing, recreational, and other opportunities, the absence of which made life, already materially difficult in that country, even more difficult. Most Soviet citizens adopted a survival strategy of coldness, even rudeness, in public life that made the accomplishing of even routine daily tasks difficult and unpleasant. Although in private Russians could be the most gracious and engaging of hosts, daily life in the Soviet Union was depressing and oppressive in a way I had never experienced and could hardly have imagined before living there.

In that oppressive atmosphere, I was exposed to an alternative—actually the only intellectually consistent and comprehensive alternative to materialism available in the Western world then or for that matter now—religious faith. Francie, Matt, and I became regular attenders of the Anglo-American Church associated in those days with the American and British embassies in Moscow. The Church became for me a refuge from the materialism and despair of Soviet society. The contrast between the warmth and love expressed in the church and the coldness and meanness of Soviet life was overpowering. In the church, I came to see the humanizing and enabling power of faith in God in stark contrast to the dehumanizing and diminishing effect of faith in human beings under which the Soviet Union operated

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church in contemporary America? I submit to you that the society in which we live is similar to the society of the now defunct Soviet Union in at least a few important ways. The problems we face aren’t identical to those the Soviet Union faced by any means. As flawed as our country is, it is nowhere near as oppressive as the Soviet Union was.  Nonetheless, we have more than enough of our own shortcomings. In our society—

·        People are valued for what they produce not for who they are.

·        Success is equated with wealth, and it doesn’t much matter how that wealth was acquired.

·        A times we  elect top national leadership which legitimizes racism by calling white supremacists fine people, failing to provide leadership for the continuation of the civil rights movement, and catering to bigotry in the guise of code words like law and order.

·        Bigotry based on sexual orientation and gender identity or expression still destroys families and blights the lives of millions of God’s people.

·        We tolerate the most gun violence in the industrialized world, and we refuse to enact the obviously needed ban of the assault-style weapons that massacre our schoolchildren and other innocent people, including people gathered for worship.

In short, we live in a society which falls so far short of its expressed ideals, so full of violence, so full of injustice that one is tempted to react with nothing but despair and a self-defensive apathy in the face of seemingly intractable problems.

What does any of this have to do with a vision of the church? I suggest to you that the church properly understood is the only institution that offers a viable alternative to the failings of the society in which we live. Only the church offers a consistent, intellectually honest, and spiritually satisfying belief system that answers the problems and vices of the world.

What does the church offer in response to the seemingly overwhelming problems of society? There are two major aspects to its response—a pastoral response and a prophetic response. On the pastoral level it offers refuge, comfort, and hope. Christianity teaches us above all else that God loves and accepts us as we are. That we don’t have to be perfect or even good to be saved. Church is a place where we can bring our cares and burdens and be assured of understanding and forgiveness. When life can be so overwhelming, we need more than ever the refuge and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness and acceptance that the church offers us when it is functioning as God calls it to function.

But if the church’s response to the world were merely pastoral, merely a place for us to go for comfort, it could and likely would deteriorate either into a narcissistic self-indulgence that would ultimately be spiritually damaging and irrelevant to the world or a country club with some Christian symbols attached. But Christianity, and the Judaism out of which it grew and with which it is so closely connected, when properly understood, do not stop with the pastoral response. We are the heirs of a great prophetic tradition going way back into Old Testament times. The ancient Hebrew prophets are important not because they predicted the future but because they spoke God’s message of justice for all, or at least many of them did. The saints of our spiritual tradition have for millennia called on the societies and states in which they lived to repent and to improve. Inspired by their understanding of the divine will, they have fearlessly challenged the powers of the world to live by the eternal truths in which they and we believe.

The church today is called perhaps as it has not been for many decades to continue that prophetic tradition. Our faith compels us to speak out against the evil we perceive. Our faith also empowers us to do it. We know that God will forgive our failures and our shortcomings. We know that ultimately the world can do nothing to harm us in terms of eternity. And we know that we can be true to ourselves and to our faith only by speaking out, by demanding that our leaders and our society as a whole turn away from the paths of violence and bigotry which they so often travel. Only the church has the great legacy and the great faith which empower it to be prophetic. If the church does not speak out for what is right, no one will.

Now the question arises of what I mean by the church. Obviously a great many churches do not stand for the kind of end to bigotry and violence I am talking about. Sadly, many churches are more a part of the problem than they are of the solution. Large, socially respectable Christian churches stand today for a subordinate status for women and for scripturally justified bigotry against God’s LGBTQ+ people. They preach an anti-intellectual and intellectually dishonest fundamentalism and offer a faith that is so self-centered that it loses all sense of social responsibility except for concern with a few narrow issues around which they preach the end of individual freedom and responsibility. They preach not the infinite vastness of God’s love for all people but a judgmental doctrine which requires not a life of faith and love but fear-based, rigid adherence to traditional life-styles and a restrictive morality that results in wide-spread misery and the alienation of huge numbers of people from the faith. Today, a great many of them identify Christian faith with American nationalism, something I find to be simply beyond comprehension.

What then is the proper vision of the Church? It is of a church that is true to its real self. A church that responds to the evils of society by spreading the priceless treasure of the good news of God’s love for all people, where all, regardless of their station in life, regardless of their sex, race, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or other distinguishing characteristics can come to know the love of God and the tremendous power of God’s forgiveness. And it is of a church that fearlessly and tirelessly calls our society to be true to itself, to its professed ideals, not to seek to impose Christianity on anyone but to offer to all the vision of life we have received from Jesus Christ, a life of love and forgiveness for all.

As a church and as individuals, myself included, we have been too timid in our prophetic mission. We have been too complacent and too comfortable. If the church is to be what it can and should be, we must more aggressively speak out for what we know to be true. Way back when I was a member here, this church took a good step in the right direction by adopting the open and affirming covenant by which you still live. (I was a member of the Open and Affirming Taskforce that led the church to adopt that covenant, something of which I still am quite proud.) We Christians must continue to speak out, and we Christians must do so more visibly. We must take to heart the message we profess to believe, that in Jesus Christ we are forgiven. In that forgiveness lies an infinite empowerment for good if we will only truly believe and act on it.

So as you go through this time of transition, I pray that you will continue to commit yourselves to making Christ’s church all that he would have it be—a refuge for our souls and a source of inspiration for good for all of society. May it be so. Amen.

Letter to the Editor "The Crisis We Face"

 This is the text of a letter I sent to the editor of my local newspaper, the Everett Herald, of Everett Washington.

Today our country faces a political crisis more extreme than any it has faced since the Civil War over a century and a half ago. An anti-democratic movement has taken over the Republican Party. That movement’s leaders seek to destroy the rule of law so that they can impose their will on the country without legal obstacles in their way. They care only for power so they can accomplish that goal. Facts mean nothing to them or to their followers. They seek to impose their simplistic, bigoted views of gender identity and abortion on all Americans. They want to roll back the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement including in particular the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They want to repeal Medicare and Social Security, two federal insurance programs we all pay for and that make life better than it otherwise would be for millions of Americans, myself included. Their policies would take this country back to the nineteenth century world of the robber barons and Jim Crow segregation. Every American who values liberty, the US Constitution, and the rule of law should be greatly alarmed at the direction our politics are taking. Some of us are, but the Democratic Party is acting as though it were facing merely another ordinary election against the Republican Party the way it used to be. That is not what it is facing. It is facing a radicalized, anti-democratic, authoritarian, populist movement that threatens to overturn all of the core values this country has always said it holds. Unless the freedom-loving opposition to that movement gets more active and energized than it is, the political future of the United States is bleak indeed.

I Just Do Believe It

 

I Just Do Believe It

October 20, 2022

 

In the last two essays I have put on this blog, titled “I Just Don’t Believe It, Part One” and “I just Don’t Believe It, Part Two”, I disagreed with St. Paul’s statement at 1 Corinthians 15:3 that Jesus Christ died for our sins in accordance with the (Hebrew) scriptures. The more important part of that two part statement is Paul’s assertion that Jesus Christ died “for our sins.” In Part Two of “I Just Don’t Believe It” I took apart the two most common ways that Christians have understood that classic Christian confession. I suggested that there is another way of understanding the saving work of Christ. I will now attempt to explain that other way is as simply and briefly as I can.

The theology I accept is called “theology of the cross.” Theologians, always inclined to make things more complex than they need be, sometimes call it by its Latin name, theologia crusis. It has been what the preeminent contemporary theologian of the theory has called “a not much loved” part of the Christian tradition from the very beginning of the faith. It’s been there, but it has never been the main Christian soteriology. It is a bit unfortunate that all we have to call this theology is theology of the cross. After all, both ransom theory and the classical theory of atonement are theologies of the cross in that they posit explanations of the effect of the cross for humanity’s relationship with God. Theology of the cross is, however, what Martin Luther called the theology I will discuss here. It’s what theologians call it still today.

All soteriologies begin with an understanding of what it is that humans need to be saved from. In the dominant Christian soteriology, classical atonement theory, we need to be saved from the separation from God and God’s forgiving grace and the alleged consequences of that separation that supposedly results from human sin. Theology of the cross views the matter a bit differently. One of the foundational understandings of theology of the cross is that we are not actually separated from God and God’s grace at all. We aren’t, humanity never has been, and humanity never will be. That from which we need to be saved, then, isn’t separation from God, it is our belief that we are separated from God. We humans pervasively sense that something has broken the God-human relationship. In conventional soteriologies that something is sin. In theology of the cross what plays the role of sin in traditional soteriologies is the human conviction that we are separated from God. That conviction is not hard to understand. God, after all, hardly presents Godself to us with banners and trumpets the way some of us would like God to do. Mostly (though not always), we experience God as silent. Difficult life experiences can convince us that God stands far off rather than near us. Physical and emotional suffering often lead people to believe that God has deserted them.

Theology of the cross says no, God has never deserted anyone. So why does it so often seem to us that God has deserted us? Well, there are two sides to every personal relationship, and the relationship can appear to be different when viewed from one of the sides than it does when viewed from the other. The same is true of the God-human relationship. It is from our side of the relationship that it can seem that God has broken that relationship essentially by disappearing. Theology of the cross asserts that, viewed from God’s side of the relationship, the relationship is not broken at all, never has been, and never will be. For God, God’s relationship with humanity isn’t broken at all. The belief that it is broken is entirely of our own making.

So how and why do we convince ourselves that God is at least not with us and may not be real at all? It is, I think, because we misunderstand how it is that God is present to us. We want God to be obvious. We want God to be dramatic. We want God’s presence and involvement in whatever is going on in our lives to be unmistakable. Yet that is not how God works. It never has been. God does not overpower us. God works in our lives and in the world in much quieter, more subtle, and harder to discern ways. To discern the presence of God in our lives, most of the time, we have to be attentive. We have to be quiet. We have to leave a space for God to fill, and God never, or at least rarely, does that dramatically. God never, or at least rarely, does that noisily. We so want it to be otherwise. We don’t want to have to work at knowing God. We want God to appear and magically make things better in our lives, especially when we are suffering in some way. But as much as we may want it to be otherwise, it isn’t. It never has been. It never will be. Because God so rarely appears the way we want God to appear, we convince ourselves that God is not present with us at all. Many of us convince ourselves that God is not even real. Saving us from those beliefs is what God did in Jesus Christ. Or rather, it is one of two major things God did in Jesus Christ. The other was to show us in new and powerful ways God’s ways of love, peace, justice, mercy, forgiveness, and grace. It is, however, on the cross of Jesus that God most powerfully demonstrated that our relationship with God is not broken. Here’s how theology of the cross understands that truth.

Theology of the cross begins its explanation of the work of Jesus Christ with a full, enthusiastic acceptance of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. We confess that God became fully incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. When we hear Jesus say something (much of the time at least—we don’t turn off our critical faculties, and Jesus didn’t say everything the Gospels attribute to him) or see him do something (though he didn’t do all the things the Gospels say he did either), we hear or see not just him but God. In Jesus God entered fully into the experience of being human. God became one with a human being. In Jesus  God demonstrated presence and solidarity with humanity in general and with each person individually. The Gospel of Matthew calls Jesus Emmanuel, God With Us. That’s true, but in Jesus God is actually here as one of us. In Jesus as God the Son Incarnate we see how close God is to each and every one of us. We see that God is as close to us as it is possible for two beings to be. As much as we may convince ourselves that we are separate from God, God is showing us in the most direct way possible in Jesus that we truly are never separate from God.

OK, but we’re talking about theology of the cross not theology of the Incarnation. So what does the cross have to do with it? I’ll start to answer that question by asking another question. When do people feel most separated from God or even abandoned by God? It is often, I think, when they face or are in the midst of real suffering or when they know they are dying. Yes, some people have powerful experiences of God’s presence in those circumstances. My late first wife had one. I’ve had one too. But experiences like that are, I believe, uncommon. In any event, great suffering can make people believe God is nowhere to be found. Where, after all, was God in the Holocaust?[1]

The cross is central to theology of the cross because it is there that we see most clearly God’s presence and solidarity with us in the worst circumstances we can ever face. The Romans didn’t just kill Jesus.[2] They mocked him. They whipped him. Then they executed him in a particularly brutal way. They drove nails through his hands and feet to secure him to two crossed pieces of lumber. Then they stood this cross with Jesus nailed to it up where all could see it and left him there to die a slow, unspeakably horrible death. As he was suffering and dying on the cross Jesus, God Incarnate, experienced that sense of abandonment by God that so many of us humans sometimes feel. He cried out in anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[3] On the cross of Jesus even God believed that God had abandoned God.

Yes, of course that’s impossible, or rather, it is a paradox (and every truly profound truth is paradoxical). How can God feel abandoned by God? Theology of the cross embraces that paradox as one of the most profound of all truths. In Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross we hear that God has entered into the most horrific of human experiences. God isn’t separate from them. God doesn’t hold Godself above them free from their pain and anguish. God undergoes them, then God experiences the ultimate human experience. God dies. Yes, that too is a paradox, and yes, that too is one of the most profound of all truths.

For millennia Christians have tried to avoid the shocking conclusion that in Jesus God died. They’ve said Jesus’ human nature died but his divine nature didn’t. Theology of the cross will have none of that. Jürgen Moltmann, the leading modern exponent of this theology, titled his profound if difficult presentation of this theology The Crucified God. If God didn’t die in Jesus, then God has never experienced the last thing all of us humans experience, namely, death. If God didn’t die on the cross of Christ God’s experience of human life in Jesus was incomplete. Theology of the cross insists that God’s experience of human life in Jesus was and had to be complete. It had to be complete because of the foundational purpose of the Incarnation.

What is that purpose? It is to demonstrate to us in the most immediate way that God stands eternally in unshakable presence and solidarity with us in absolutely everything that happens to us. In Jesus of Nazareth as God Incarnate God shows us in a most powerful way that any sense we have of separation from God, in any aspect of our lives including suffering and death, is entirely of our own making. God shows us in Jesus that when we think God has abandoned us, we’re just wrong. God never abandons anyone. Ever. Period.

But I can hear you asking: How is theology of the cross a soteriology? What does it have to do with salvation? Well, in every soteriology salvation consists of overcoming human separation from God. An eternal, blissful life of the soul after death may be a consequence of salvation, but salvation is the overcoming of whatever it is that the soteriology believes separates people from God. For the ransom theory, salvation is our redemption from kidnapping by the devil. For the classical of atonement, salvation is God forgiving our sin because of the price Jesus paid to God on the cross. For theology of the cross, it is overcoming the notion that we are, ever were, or ever will be separate from God in the first place.

Unlike more traditional Christian soteriology, theology of the cross isn’t much concerned with our fate in an afterlife. It just says that God’s presence and solidarity with us don’t end when we die. It leaves the rest up to God. More significantly for theology of the cross, and for me, great benefits come to us in this life when we finally get it that we are never apart from God. We can be freed from whatever it is that is restricting our lives. We can have the courage to grasp the abundant life God wants all of us to have.[4] We can have the courage to be God’s representatives on earth, the courage to wage a nonviolent campaign for a world of justice, peace, and the affirmation of the value of every person that God wants for all of us. Our souls can be at peace, and our peaceful souls can help us release all the tension in our bodies that keeps us from the peace God offers us. All of that, and no doubt more, is salvation for the theology of the cross.

One final point. Is there a way in theology of the cross to understand that Jesus died “for our sins?” In a way yes, but it is a very different way than the more traditional Christian understandings of that phrase. Theology of the cross confesses that God Incarnate in Jesus lived, suffered, and died to show us that in reality nothing separates us from God. Sin, of course, is the main thing Christianity has said separates us from God or at least from God’s grace. The classical theory of atonement says that Jesus had to suffer and die before God would or even could forgive human sin. Theology of the cross doesn’t contend that Jesus had to die to procure God’s forgiveness of our sin. Rather, as incarnate in Jesus, God shows us that God has always forgiven human sin. All of it. Always. In Jesus as God Incarnate, we discover that, while human sin always has been, is, and always will be real, it has never, doesn’t, and never will separate us from God and God’s grace. We don’t need to do anything or have anything done before God will forgive our sin. God has already done that. Theology of the cross frees us not from sin, from which God has already done, but from the fear of eternal damnation that so much traditional Christianity engenders. That is how it is, in its way, a soteriology. That’s not what Paul meant by “died for our sins, but it is a powerful message of liberation for today’s world.

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[1] This theology’s answer to that question is, on the trains, at the execution sights, in the camps, in the gas chambers. Though God is present with every person always, God is always on the side of the victims not the side of the perpetrators of great evil.

[2] The ancient Christian claim that the Jews killed him is a base canard. It is an historical falsehood. The Romans killed him not the Jews.

[3] Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46. Luke and John have Jesus saying much gentler things from the cross. Theology of the cross clings to his cry of dereliction in Mark and Matthew as more authentic and more theologically significant.

[4] John 10:10.

I Just Don't Believe It, Part Two

 

I Just Don’t Believe It, Part Two

Christ Did Not Die for Our Sins

October 19, 2022

 

© Thomas C. Sorenson, 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.

 

St. Paul says, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3 NRSV. In Part One of this two-part series I explained why I do not believe that the Hebrew scriptures predict Jesus and why we Christians must stop saying that they do. In this Part Two of this series I will explain why I don’t believe the other part of what Paul says here either. I suspect that when most Christians read the words “Christ died for our sins” they fully agree with Paul that that confession is “of first importance.” It is, after all, a traditional belief that dying for our sins is precisely what Jesus Christ did. I believe that there is a much more constructive way of understanding the saving work of Christ, but to get to an explanation of that way we must first do away with two more traditional views of soteriology, that is, of the theology of salvation. That is what I will attempt to do here.

I deny that Christ died for our sins, and that denial would probably lead most Christians to condemn me as a heretic at best and possibly even as apostate. Most of Christianity, from the faith’s very beginnings up to today, has been grounded in one understanding or another of the way that in Jesus we are saved from the deserved consequences of our sin. Christians call Jesus Christ the Savior, and they mean that he saves us from God’s wrath at our sin and that without him we would burn in hell for all eternity as the just reward for that sin. There are two major, traditional ways of understanding the saving work of Christ. Here I will explain why I reject both of them. In another essay to follow I will explain a third soteriology that I accept. Stay tuned.

 

A. Ransom Theory

 

Although most western Christians today think that the New Testament expresses what is called either the classical theory of atonement or substitutionary sacrificial atonement, it actually doesn’t. The most common New Testament soteriology is the ransom theory, also called the Christus Viktor theory. All soteriologies are about salvation. That means that they all understand that there is something from which we need to be saved. The ransom theory of salvation asserts that we humans do as much evil as we do, that we sin as much as we do, because the devil has kidnapped us away from God. We are in thrall to the devil. The devil holds us captive and causes us to do all the bad things we do. Back in the 1960s the comedian Flip Wilson created a character he portrayed named Geraldine. When faced with something she did wrong, which happened a lot, she would often say, “The devil made me do it!” Wilson meant this line as a joke, and Geraldine was indeed very funny. But “the devil made me do it,” or better, “the devil makes us do it,” is not a bad shorthand for one of the basic assumptions of the ransom theory of salvation.

For followers of the ransom theory of salvation, what we are all most fundamentally dealing with in life is a case of kidnapping. Kidnapping is of course a human crime we all know about. Some evil actor takes someone captive, often a child of wealthy parents. The kidnapper then demands that someone, usually the kidnapped child’s parents, pay money to secure the release of the kidnapped person. We call that money a ransom. The ransom theory of salvation uses the term ransom in essentially the same way. The devil has kidnapped all of humanity, and he’s not going to let us loose without first receiving an enormous payment, an enormous ransom. But here we have big problem. We can’t pay our own ransom any more than a kidnapped child can pay their own ransom. We have no resources remotely adequate to pay off the devil. All we can do is suffer human suffering and die human death. But that’s what the devil wants us to do in the first place. They are the consequences of our kidnapping not payments to the devil to end it. There is nothing we can do to end our own kidnapping. Perhaps you’d think that God could just overpower the devil and free us from out captivity, but that’s not how the ransom theory understands the matter.

The ransom theory says the devil has to be bought off, but no human can do it. Someone infinitely more than a mere human must do it. God, it seems, wants us released from our kidnapping because God loves us despite the evil we do. Enter Jesus Christ. The ransom theory accepts the idea that God incarnates Godself in the person Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is a human being. But we confess that he is also nothing less than God Incarnate. In the New Testament he is at least a human being with a relationship so close to God that he is indeed God’s Son. The Gospel of John proclaims him to be nothing less than God become human. Because Jesus is both human and much more than human, he can pay the ransom to the devil that has to be paid before the devil will set us free from sin but which we cannot pay ourselves.

That ransom is Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. In allowing God’s Son to suffer and die the way God did, God allowed the devil to inflict the worst the devil can do not just on another human being but on the Son of God. Ransom soteriology says that inflicting horrendous suffering on the Son of God has satisfied the devil. Anything the devil could do to us mortal humans would be a mere shadow of what he was able to do to the Son of God. Yes, Jesus’ suffering was human; but, unlike our suffering, it was also divine. So why would the devil bother with the comparatively minor evil he could inflict on us? Ransom theory says he wouldn’t. It says that Jesus paid the price. He paid the ransom that was necessary to free us from the sin the devil causes us to do. To whom did he pay that price? Not to God. He paid the price of our salvation to the devil.

I do not accept ransom soteriology. I do not accept it first of all because it is too literalistic. I do not believe that there is any such being as the devil. The devil is not properly understood as some being with forked tongue and tail who dwells beneath the earth in a place of anguish and torment called hell. The concept of the devil is useful, it if is useful at all, as a symbol of the evil in the world that seems so powerful and so pervasive. It seems clear that humanity does indeed have a big problem with evil, but  a literalistic ascribing of our propensity for evil to the devil is simplistic and superficial. I believe that it gets us nowhere in our search for an explanation of evil. The ransom theory of salvation simply misunderstands the human existential dilemma.

Beyond that, the ransom theory sees its central figure, the devil, as a power for evil that exists completely independently from God. Indeed, the devil’s power in this theory even surpasses the power of God. This soteriology has God forced to kowtow to the devil to accomplish a goal God wishes to accomplish. In this theory the devil not God calls the shots. The devil has the power to say to God, “Pay up, or I’ll never let your people go!” And God has to comply. Yet God is the sole Creator of all that is, and God is purely good. God would never create a power for evil, then turn it over to some anti-God to use to enthrall God’s world. The ransom theory of salvation just makes no sense. So, brother Paul, I do not understand Christ having died for our sins the way ransom soteriology does.

 

B. The Classical Theory of Atonement

 

There is another soteriology we must consider that is substantially more widely believed than is the ransom theory. It’s called either the classical theory of atonement (which is what I will call it here) or the theory of substitutionary, sacrificial atonement. This soteriology has in effect swallowed the entire Christian faith whole. It is what most people, Christians and non-Christians alike, think Christianity is. Most Christians believe that it is the soteriology of the New Testament. This (erroneous) belief leads many Christians to misread biblical statements of the ransom theory as statements of the classical theory of atonement. We see that misreading of scripture in the way Christians call Christ their Redeemer. Redemption is what you get when you turn in soda bottles to get your deposit back, which I understand is still the practice in some states. Redemption is what happens when you pay off a kidnapper and get your kidnapped child back. In the classical theory of atonement, however, Jesus isn’t a Redeemer who frees us from the devil. He is something quite different from that.

The classical theory of atonement starts with an understanding of the human existential condition different from the one the ransom theory starts with. It doesn’t understand human sin as a consequence of enslavement by the devil. Rather, it understands human sin as our willful failure or refusal to conform our lives to God’s will. No human being (except Jesus Christ in some Christologies) ever conformed her or his life perfectly to the will of God. Most adherents of the classical theory of atonement attribute our sin in this sense to original sin, but for our purposes the important point is just that we all sin because none of us complies completely with God’s will and ways. The classical theory of atonement asserts that human sin in this sense is an enormous affront to God. Human sin isn’t just wrong, it is damnably wrong. We are all such sinners that we deserve to spend eternity in the unspeakable torments of hell. The biggest question we all face is how we avoid that fully deserved consequence of our sin.

The classical atonement theory’s answer to that question is that we avoid hell only if God forgives our sin. We might think OK, can’t God just forgive our sin because God is a God of forgiveness? Classical atonement theory answers that question with a resounding “No!” It says a price has to be paid before God will or even can forgive human sin. The difference here between ransom theory and classical atonement theory is that in ransom theory the payment is made to the devil, but in classical atonement theory the price is paid to God. Classical atonement soteriology says that God has to be bought off before God will or can forgive human sin.

So the key questions in classical atonement theory become what is the price that has to be paid and who pays it. This theory’s answers to those questions begin with the question of who pays it. Since it is the price of forgiveness for human sin that is being paid, you’d think that it would have to be humans who paid it. In classical atonement theory, however, that’s only part of the answer. This theory says that human sin so affronts and angers God that there is nothing we mere humans can do to pay a price high enough to procure God’s forgiveness of our sin. All we can do is beg God’s forgiveness and repent as best we can by striving not to sin in the future. But, this theory says, not sinning is just what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. So just not sinning in the future, which none of us can really do anyway, is not the price that must be paid for our past sin. Also, though some adherents to this theory say, with Paul, that death is what sin earns us (Romans 6:23), no one seems to believe that our dying pays a price to God. So how is the necessary price of divine forgiveness to be paid?

Classical atonement theory says that the required price must be paid by one who is, at the same time, both fully human and fully divine. That one, of course, is Jesus Christ as God Incarnate. In Jesus a human being is involved in making the necessary payment to God, but far more importantly God makes the required payment to Godself. A price has to be paid, no mere human can pay it, so God becomes human to pay it. Classical atonement theory has no problem with the notion of God buying Godself off. That, this theory says, is what God did as incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

That’s who this theory says pays the price, but what is that price? Classical atonement theory’s answer to that question is grounded in and arises from ancient Judaism’s practice of animal sacrifice. Before the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, Jewish faith was centered around sacrificial worship in that temple. Torah law required the people to offer animal sacrifices in the temple for a variety of offenses. Some, though not all, of those sacrifices were to procure God’s forgiveness of sin. We probably don’t visualize it this way, but the Jerusalem temple was a big slaughterhouse. That’s why people were selling doves in the forecourt of the temple when Jesus came and drove them out. See Mark 12:15-17 for the oldest version of this story, about which I’ll say more below. To this way of thinking, animal sacrifices are necessary for the maintenance of proper relationships between God and humans. Classical atonement theory in a way echoes that ancient Jewish way of thinking. The difference is that in classical atonement theory it isn’t an animal sacrifice that maintains, or better restores, that relationship. It is the sacrifice of the God-man Jesus of Nazareth.

Classical atonement theory has weak biblical support, but we do find a notion of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin in the New Testament book of Hebrews. In my book Liberating the Bible, I discuss Hebrews’ notion of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin this way:

 

[I]n Hebrews Jesus is not only the high priest [who offers sacrifices], he is also the sacrifice the high priest offers to God. He sacrificed his life, which Hebrews calls a once for all sacrifice for sin that made temple sacrifice unnecessary. Thus in Hebrews we read:

 

And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifice that can never take away sin. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, ‘he sat down at the right hand of God’….For by a single sacrifice he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. Hebrews 10:11-12, 14.

 

Jesus is the last sacrifice because his sacrifice of himself has procured the forgiveness of sin.

 

Hebrews points mainly to Jesus’ death as the sacrifice that procured God’s forgiveness of human sin. Adherents of the classical theory of atonement, however, usually place as much emphasis on Jesus’ suffering at the hands of the Romans and on the cross as they do on his death. For example, Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ, a presentation of classical atonement theology if ever there were one, was marketed under the slogan, “Dying was his reason for living.” The movie itself, however, seem to glory in a detailed, gory presentation not only of Jesus death but of the immense suffering he endured before he died. Conservative Christian churches promoted this movie as a great tool for evangelism. They did so because classical atonement theory insists that it is only Jesus’ suffering and death that have procured God’s forgiveness of human sin.

Is classical atonement soteriology the sum and substance of Christianity that so many people seem to think that it is? Absolutely not! There is so about the classical theory of atonement that is theologically unsound that one hardly knows where to begin a discussion of its failings. For one thing, it says nothing about Jesus’ moral example and teachings during his life. Though most of the text of the Gospels deals with Jesus’ teaching, that teaching is completely irrelevant to the classical theory of atonement. That theory leaves you wondering why all that stuff is even in the Bible in the first place. Here are some of the other things that are wrong with it.

The classical theory of atonement posits that God began to forgive human sin only once a certain event had taken place, namely, the Passion of Jesus Christ, as the ransom theory does as well. It necessarily implies that before that time in what we call first century CE God did not and could not forgive sin. Yet the great, ancient Jewish faith tradition out of which Christianity grew knew God as a God of forgiveness centuries before that event took place. At Jeremiah 31:34 we read that God will “forgive [the people’s] iniquity and remember their sin no more.” At Numbers 14:19-20 Yahweh answers Moses’ prayer that He forgive the iniquity of the people by declaring, “I do forgive, just as you have asked.” Psalm 65:3 reads, “When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions.” None of these ancient passages suggests or implies that some great sacrifice had to take place before God forgave human sin. So why does so much of Christianity say a great sacrifice was a condition precedent of God’s forgiveness? I’m sure I don’t know.

Moreover, it simply makes no sense to say that at one time God did what was necessary for God to forgive sin but before that time God didn’t. I, for one, can’t imagine God sitting around through millennia of human sin not forgiving it, then one day saying something like, “I’ve been damning all those people for their sin all this time. Maybe I should do something so I can forgive them. I know, I’ll become incarnate in a human being, suffer, and die a miserable, unjust death. Then I’ll be willing and able to forgive them.” Yet classical atonement theory necessarily implies that God did something much like that. It says that Christ’s Passion was necessary before God forgave sin, and Christ’s Passion is an historical event that happened at a specific time. What was so special about the time we call the first part of the first century CE that it prompted God to do something of cosmic significance that God hadn’t done before? I’m sure I don’t know.

There are at least three other major flaws in the classical theory of atonement that I will address here. First, this theory addresses only one possible human existential dilemma. The legitimate function of any religion is to connect people with God and God with people. Religion functions to overcome something that it believes separates people from God. We suffer some sort of existential angst that religion works to relieve. Along with most of Christianity, the classical theory of atonement says that which separates us from God and that about which we are anxious is sin. Yet great modern theologians like Paul Tillich, Douglas John Hall, and many others assert that sin is not primarily what people worry about today. Sin and its supposed consequences are not what keep people awake at night in our time. Tillich said that the primary existential dilemma for most contemporary people is not sin but meaninglessness. I believe that he was right about that. People today are far more likely to despair of finding meaning in their lives than they are to despair of finding forgiveness for their sins.

The classical theory of atonement has nothing to say about any existential dilemma other than sin. It describes a way in which God is supposed to have forgiven sin, but that’s all it does. Perhaps that is why conservative Christian churches for whom Christianity is essentially identical to the classical theory of atonement insist that forgiveness of sin is what everyone really needs. To use a cliché that is actually true, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If all you have is an answer for sin, forgiveness of sin must be what everyone needs. That, however, simply isn’t true today, and for people whose primary anxiety is something other than sin, the classical theory of atonement is irrelevant. It fails to address the existential issues we need to address today. That failure is almost certainly one of the reasons for the decline in church attendance we’re experiencing. There’s no reason for a person to attend a church that does not address her existential needs.

Second, the classical theory of atonement betrays Jesus Christ, the one in and through whom we Christians know God. Jesus, you see, rejected the whole notion of sacrifice as necessary for a proper relationship between God and humanity. A famous though usually misunderstood story from the Gospels that I mentioned briefly above makes the point. It is usually, and wrongly, called the cleansing of the temple. The oldest version of the story is at Mark 11:15-19. In this famous story Jesus enters the forecourt of the temple in Jerusalem called the Court of the Gentiles, the part of the temple non-Jews were permitted to enter. There he finds people who are selling doves and people who are exchanging money. Mark doesn’t say so, but scholars know that the people selling doves were selling birds that were sufficiently perfect to be accepted for animal sacrifice, something ordinary people would not usually have. The moneychangers were changing ritually unclean Roman money the temple could not accept for ritually clean money the temple could accept. (Roman money was ritually unclean because it had on it an image of the emperor and called the emperor “the son of the divine one. It was, in other words, idolatrous.) Jesus proceeds to drive these dove sellers and moneychangers out of the temple. We’re usually told that in doing so Jesus “cleanses” the temple. That, however, is absolutely not what he was doing. The sellers of doves and the moneychangers were not defiling the temple. They were providing services that were essential for the temple to operate the way the Jewish faith of that time specified that it should operate.

So if Jesus wasn’t cleansing the temple of something that soiled it, what was he doing? He was engaging in a powerful prophetic act. The ancient Hebrew prophets sometimes performed acts rather than speak words to convey their message. Most famously, Jeremiah walked around Jerusalem with an ox yoke over his shoulders to symbolize the coming subjugation of Judah to Babylon. Jesus’ action in the temple is this kind of act. By disrupting the proper function of the temple, Jesus symbolically overthrew the temple. In driving out those who sold birds for sacrifice he was saying that sacrifice is not what God wants from us. Jesus taught that God wants justice and mercy from us not animal sacrifice. Classical atonement theory does nothing less than turn Jesus into the ultimate animal sacrifice. It turns Jesus into precisely that which he vehemently rejected. It does nothing less than betray Jesus.

Third, the classical theory of atonement paints a picture of God that betrays God. I once read of a Christian preacher who stood in front of a congregation holding an innocent infant in his arms. He stretched out one of the infant’s arms and held the child’s hand open. He then said something like: “Who among you would love another so much that you would drive a nail through this hand? We wouldn’t, but God did. God drove nails through the body of His Son to save you.” This preacher thought he was preaching salvation the way the classical theory of atonement presents it, but what was he really saying? He wasn't saying that God is more loving than we are, which is certainly true. He was saying that God is more sadistic than we are, which is certainly not true. Perhaps the greatest sin of the classical theory of atonement is that it makes a monster of God. In that theory Christ’s Passion becomes nothing less than a case of cosmic child abuse with God as the abuser. Yet of course God is nothing like a child abuser. The classical theory of atonement just gets God wrong.

I trust that I have demonstrated here, however briefly, that the classical theory of atonement, for all its nearly universal acceptance among Christians, is utterly unacceptable theology. If Christianity is to survive far into the future, which these days is not a given, we simply must jettison it. We must stop proclaiming it. We must stop telling our people that it is what God has done and that somehow this act of child abuse was necessary before God could forgive your sin. Folks, the classical theory of atonement just isn’t true. I don’t believe it. I hope you don’t either.

So, brother Paul, no, Jesus did not die “for our sins.” At least he didn’t do it in the ways Christians usually think that he did. It’s way past time for us to move on from that assertion and to find another way of understanding the saving work of Christ. Finding that other way is what I will try to do in a post that, I hope not too long from now, follows this one on this blog. Stay tuned.

I Just Don't Believe It, Part One

 

I Just Don’t Believe It, Part One

October 18, 2022

© Thomas C. Sorenson 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.

Introduction

St. Paul says, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3 NRSV. I suspect that when most Christians read the word “Christ died for our sins” they fully agree with Paul that that confession is “of first importance.” It is, after all, a traditional belief that for Christianity dying for our sins is precisely what Jesus Christ did. Paul’s statement that he did it “in accordance with the scriptures” probably means less to most Christians that the idea that Christ died for our sins, but it is a major contention of many of the New Testament writings. “The scriptures” means of course the Hebrew scriptures, for there were no specifically Christian scriptures when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. Many of those writings believe that predicting Jesus was precisely those scriptures’ major purpose. The Gospel of Matthew in particular insists that much of what Jesus did he did to fulfill something in the Hebrew scriptures.

Here's the thing though. I’m a Christian. I’m even an ordained Christian minister, and I don’t believe either of those things. I am convinced that Hebrew scripture does not and was never intended to predict Jesus either by those scriptures’ authors or by God. Neither do I believe that Jesus died for our sins. At least, I don’t believe that assertion in the way most Christians today understand it. I want here to explain, if only briefly, why I don’t believe either of Paul’s assertions here and to state in briefly what I replace them with. In this Part One I will deal with the issue of the Hebrew scriptures predicting Jesus. I’ll deal with the issue of Jesus dying for our sins in a later Part Two.

 

Part One: Not in Accordance with the Scriptures

 

Despite all the New Testament assertions that they do, the Hebrew scriptures simply do not predict or foretell Jesus. I will explain how we know they do not and why we must stop saying that they do in this essay. It is true, however, that as soon as I utter contention that texts do not do something I run into a problem. It is always difficult, and indeed, usually impossible, to prove a negative. I can say that nothing in the Old Testament predicts Jesus and that Jesus doesn’t fulfill anything in the Old Testament; but unless I go through every verse in the Old Testament to show that none of them has anything to do with Jesus, my contention remains just that, a mere contention. I’m not going to go through every verse in the Old Testament here. According to one source at least that’s 23,145 verses, which of course is far too many to consider individually even in a work much longer than this one.[1] Instead of doing that I’m going to look at what the Hebrew scriptures actually are and why it is wildly inappropriate for Christians to try to force them into a Christian mold.

What we Christians call the Old Testament is in fact the Jewish Bible.[2] It consists of numerous writings originally written in Hebrew that span close to a millennium in time. Some of the material in them comes from as far back as the late second millennium BCE. Some of the Old Testament books have a complex editorial history which makes it impossible to date the material in them as a whole. Judaism arranges the books under three headings, the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. For Jews, the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, is particularly sacred, but all of the Old Testament writings are sacred scripture for the Jews. The Torah and the Prophets were already considered sacred scripture in Jesus’ time. The Writings became part of the Hebrew Bible later, but they too are sacred to the great Jewish faith with which our faith shares so much.

All of the Old Testament writings are ancient. They were all written at least a couple of centuries before Jesus. Daniel is the most recent of them, and it dates from the second century BCE. Most of the Old Testament writings are substantially older than that. Deuteronomy, or at least the core of it, for example, dates from the late seventh century BCE. The book of the prophet Isaiah, the Old Testament book to which Christians most often point as predicting Jesus, consists of three parts written at different times. The writings legitimately attributed to the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, which scholars call First Isaiah, roughly chapters 1 to 39 of the book, date from the eighth century BCE. The part scholars call Second Isaiah, roughly chapters 40 to 55, date from the mid-sixth century BCE. The writings scholars call Third Isaiah, roughly chapters 56-66, date from the late sixth or early fifth century BCE. Clearly, all of the book of Isaiah is really, really old. Most importantly for my purposes here, all of the Old Testament writings were written a long time before Jesus.

All of the writings of the Old Testament were written in the language of the Hebrew people in fully Hebrew contexts for wholly Hebrew purposes. The writings called Second Isaiah are the writings people most often say predict Jesus, but they were not written for Christian purposes. They were written to proclaim Yahweh, the traditional tribal god of the Hebrews, as the one and only true, universal God and to promise the Hebrew exiles in Babylon that restoration to Judah was coming. None of that has anything to do with predicting Jesus. Other Old Testament authors wrote at different ancient times, but they all wrote for a Jewish audience not a Christian one. They wrote in a Jewish context, not a Christian one. They wrote for a Jewish purpose not a Christian one.

Whenever I read or hear someone say that the Old Testament predicts Jesus I want to say, “Really? People back then knew what would happen centuries after their deaths? I don’t think so.” At which point my Christian interlocutor is likely to respond that, while most people can’t do that, at least some of the Old Testament authors could because they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. I suppose you can believe that if you want, but I am convinced that it isn’t true.[3] Both testaments of the Christian Bible are so full of factual errors, contradictions (Matthew: Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Luke: Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth and traveled to Bethlehem when Jesus was born), and theologically untenable assertions (God told King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites) that on their face they contradict the contention that they were divinely inspired. But if some of the Old Testament authors were divinely inspired, why would God inspire them to predict Jesus, then wait hundreds of years before making the prediction come true? Surely, if God were going to inspire Hebrew men (sadly, all of the biblical authors were men) writing for a Hebrew audience in a Hebrew context, God would inspire them with truths that their audience needed to hear not with something that wouldn’t happen for centuries after those authors’ deaths.

Now, it is true that some passages in the Old Testament describe people who sound an awful lot like Jesus. This is particularly true of the passages in Second Isaiah called the Suffering Servant songs. You’ll find them at Isaiah 42:1-4, Isaiah 49:1-6, Isaiah 50:4-8, and Isaiah 52:13-53:12. These passages speak of a mysterious character they refer to as “my servant.” The verses about him say that he does things like suffer abuse in silence and that his physical appearance was not attractive. Most significantly they say:

 

He was despised and rejected by

               others

     a man of suffering and acquainted

               with infirmity…;

     he was despised, and we held him of no account.

 

Surely he has borne our infirmities

     and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken,

     struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our

               transgressions,

     crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that

               made us whole;

     and by his bruises we are healed….

[T]he Lord has laid on him

     the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:3-6.

 

Sure sounds a lot like how most Christians think of Jesus, doesn’t it? It sure sounds like a prediction of Jesus, doesn’t it? Well, the scholars say no one knows who Second Isaiah’s Suffering Servant was supposed to be. Some think it is an image of Israel itself, which makes a certain amount of sense. In any event, however much these verses may sound like Jesus to us, they are not about Jesus. They do not predict Jesus. They were written in the mid-sixth century BCE by a Jew for Jews not by a Jew for Christians. There would, after all, be no Christians for nearly six hundred years after these verses were written. Something else is going on here that explains why these verses sound like Jesus but aren’t about Jesus.

When Jesus was crucified by the Romans (not the Jews), and when his followers experienced him as risen from the grave, they had a big problem. They thought he was the Messiah, but the Messiah wasn’t supposed to get executed by the secular authorities. He was supposed to conquer those authorities. Yet the disciples’ experience of Jesus was so powerful that they could not let it go. So they searched their scriptures, that is, the Hebrew scriptures, for language to explain how they had experienced Jesus and what he had meant to them. Among the things they found were the Suffering Servant songs of Isaiah. Those verses were sacred scripture to them, and they gave them images they could apply to Jesus in a way that made sense to them. They used those images to speak of Jesus. Those images were familiar to the Jews of their time. They resonated with the people to whom the disciples spoke and for whom the evangelists wrote, but that doesn’t make them ancient predictions of Jesus. What’s going on here isn’t prediction forward from the sixth century BCE, it is discovery and application backward from the first century CE. That’s why some passages in the Old Testament sound like Jesus when they really aren’t about Jesus at all.

There is one more vital consideration I must raise as part of my argument that we must stop trying to make the Hebrew scriptures predict Jesus. That reason is the horrendous, sinful, violent, hate-filled history of how Christians have spoken about and treated Jews for as long as there have been Christians. Far too many contemporary Christians don’t know that history. They’ve probably heard of the Holocaust, the systematic slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis, though some of them inexplicably deny that that even happened. They have read or heard the attacks on Jews in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels of Matthew and John, though they’ve probably never heard a scholarly explanation of those passages and why they’re there. They probably don’t know that Christian armies going on crusades to the Holy Land stopped on their way at Jewish communities in Europe to massacre Jews, but they did. They surely know that “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” They surely do not know that in that same year Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who sent Columbus on his fateful voyages, expelled from Spain all Jews who would not convert to Christianity. They have probably heard of the Spanish Inquisition, but they surely do not know that the main targets of the Inquisition were Jews who had converted to Christianity but whom the authorities suspected of continuing to practice Jewish religious rituals.

They certainly have heard of Martin Luther. They almost certainly do not know that he hated the Jews vehemently, as did many other leading Christian theologians of times past. They most probably do not know that in 1791 Empress Catherine the Great of Russia created something called the Pale of Settlement. The Pale was a region of the western and southwestern parts of the Russian Empire, including much of what today is Ukraine. Eventually all the Jews of the empire were forced to live there, and they lived almost exclusively in abject poverty because the Russians would not permit them to do anything at which they could make any significant amount of money. Our Christians may have seen Fiddler on the Roof, a Broadway musical and a film set in the Pale, but they probably don’t know how horrific the pogroms there by Christians against Jews really were. Unless they’ve seen Ken Burns’ recent documentary series about the US and the Holocaust they certainly do not know that in the 1930s this country refused to accept Jews fleeing the Nazis simply because they were Jews. Our great Christian faith has an enormous amount of sin in the way we have treated God’s people the Jews for which we must atone.

One easy if small thing we can do as part of that atonement is at long last to let Jewish scripture be Jewish. Yes, Hebrew scripture is our scripture too; but it is our scripture only because it is first of all Jewish scripture. We really do need to stop trying to force it into a Christian mold that it does not and never was intended to fit. So no, brother Paul, for whatever reason Jesus died, he did not do it in accordance with the scriptures. We simply must stop insisting that he did.

---

[1] I found this number by googling “number of Old Testament verses.” It was the first response to that inquiry that came up.

[2] At least the Protestant Old Testament is. The Roman Catholic Church considers all of the books of the Protestant Bible to be canonical, that is, to be part of the Bible; and it also considers several writings that are in neither the Protestant Old Testament nor the Jewish Bible to be canonical. When I say Old Testament here I mean the Protestant Old Testament.

[3] For a discussion of the human nature of the Bible see Stop 11, “Inspired?” of Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating the Bible: A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Volume One, “Approaching the Bible,” pp. 247 ff.

On Discovering Who We Are

 

On Discovering Who We Are

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

for

Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ

Shoreline, Washington

October 16, 2022

 

Scripture: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Genesis 32:22-31

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

Your church is in a time of transition. Of course, I don’t know anywhere near all of the details of your life as a congregation in recent times. I used to be a member here a long time ago, but I left in about 1996 for reasons actually having more to do with what was happening in my life at the time than for I reason I gave, though at the time I didn’t know it. More about that anon. I know that Paul’s pastorate here was not a success, but I don’t know much about why it wasn’t. For my purposes here this morning I don’t need to know why it wasn’t, though I’m sure you do need to know why. All I know, and all I need to know, is that you are in a time of transition from what was to what will be for RBCC.

One of the crucial issues for any person or organization in transition is the issue of identity. Both of the scripture lessons this morning can be read, I think, as speaking about that issue of identity. Jeremiah has God say that God will put God’s law within the people and write it on their hearts. I don’t think anyone has had all 613 laws of Moses put within them or written on their hearts. I am convinced, however, that God has put something within each of us and has written something on our hearts. Whatever else it may also be, that something is our identity. Our identity is who God calls each one of us to be. It is who we really are.

In our passage this morning from Genesis the patriarch Jacob wrestles in the night with a man who turns out be none other then God Godself. This man/God changes Jacob’s name. He says you shall no longer be called Jacob but shall be called Israel, which means “struggles with God.” We might think, what’s in a name? As rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as Shakespeare has Juliet say about Romeo. In the ancient Jewish world, however, that’s not how they thought about names. To the people of that world a person’s name and the person’s identity were essentially the same thing. Name was seen as inseparable from being. When God changed Jacob’s name from Jacob to Israel, God gave the man formerly known as Jacob not just a new name but a new Identity. Jacob/Israel became a new being who was now not what he had been before.

Each of us has such an identity, such a being, such an essence that is who we really are. That identity is who God has created each of us to be, and God calls each of us to discover and live into that identity. I know from my own personal experience how hard it can be for us to discover who we really are. I think that’s as true of an institution like a church as it is for us as individuals, and perhaps a shortened version of my own story of discovering who I really am will illustrate the point.

Some of you who were here when I was a member back in the 1990s may remember that at that time I wasn’t a minister, I was a lawyer. While I was a member here, in 1992, I left a job with a downtown Seattle law firm and opened my own law office in Edmonds. At first having my own solo law practice went well enough. But by 1994, while I was still a member here, I started to run into big trouble with my attempt to be a lawyer, something I had been doing since 1981. Some of you may remember the Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes, who was this church’s interim pastor after Pastor Steve left. I was Moderator of this church at that time and worked closely with Dennis. Dennis would eventually become a great friend and mentor of mine in ministry. Dennis was a Presbyterian minister, but he was also a Jungian psychologist. One day, probably because I had shared with him some of my struggles with my profession, he gave me a book that introduced me to a psychological exercise called Active Imagination. It’s something you can do to help you with whatever it is that you are struggling with at the time. One day as I sat in my law office being quite thoroughly unhappy, I did that exercise. I sat down, cleared my mind, and asked myself, “Why am I having so much trouble practicing law?” Instantaneously, with no time having passed in which I could have thought of an answer to my question, an answer came booming up out of my unconscious mind: “You’re not a lawyer!” I was stunned. I argued with the answer: “Of course I’m a lawyer! I'm sitting here in my law office with at least some law work to do! My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977. There’s a sign on my office door that says Thomas C. Sorenson, Attorney at Law. Of course I’m a lawyer!” Once again the answer came instantaneously, loud and clear: “You’re not a lawyer!” I thought, well, that’s ridiculous, but the answer wasn’t going to change, so I said, “OK. The what am I?” Again, with no time having passed, an answer from deep within me came booming up, “You’re a preacher!” Again, I was stunned. A preacher? You’ve got to be kidding! That’s not even a word I use. I’ll call some one a minister or a pastor but not a preacher. I was sure the answer “You’re a preacher” was nonsense, but I could tell there was no point in arguing with whatever or whoever it was that was giving me those ridiculous answers. So I ended the exercise and went on trying, quite unsuccessfully, to practice law.

And here I am standing before you as a preacher, as an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the United Church of Christ. Not long before she died of cancer my wife Francie (of blessed memory) said to me, “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.” She was right. It had taken me 55 years to get there, but I finally was who I really am. Thanks be to God!

This church has some identity, some way of being, some mission, that is who you really are. I believe that your task in this time of transition is to discern what that identity is and how you are going to live into it. I understand that you have already done some of that work. Good. Let me just suggest one thing for you to keep in mind as you continue your discernment. Don’t make the big mistakes I made as I struggles with my identity. Don’t refuse to look intentionally and seriously at the question of identity. It took me three years from “You’re not a lawyer” before I looked at myself seriously in an attempt to figure out who I really am. Don’t be afraid to consider any of the answers to the question of your identity that any of you may suggest. What at first may seem a ridiculous suggestion of who you are or are not, like “You’re not a lawyer,” may turn out to be exactly what you need to hear. Don’t suppress any possible answers. Talk to each other. Listen to one another. Each of you has a role to play in discovering who this church really is.

Of course, if you already know who this church really is you can ignore most of what I’ve said this morning. Yet identity is a question to which we must each return again and again. As the circumstances of our lives change, so can our identity. Nothing in life is really static, and that includes how we are called to express in the world the core identity God has placed within each one of us and within this church. And don’t make another mistake I made. Don’t neglect your prayer life as you do your work. As Paul says, pray without ceasing. Tending your connection with God can only produce good results for you, and it is what we Christians should be doing anyway.

God has put an identity within you. God has written it on your heart. God wants you to know what that identity is. God wants you to discern how you are to live out that identity in the world as faithful followers of Jesus Christ. I know that God will hold, guide, and bless you as you continue the sacred journey of discovering and living into that identity and discerning what it means for your life together and for your life in God’s world. May it be so. Amen.