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.
[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.
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