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.