Was Jesus Necessary?

 

Was Jesus Necessary?

December 18, 2023

As I was driving to church for worship this past Sunday morning, a question occurred to me. See, I have been troubled by a question recently. Christians, and I claim to be one, call Jesus Savior. They say God sent God’s Son in the person of Jesus to pay the price for human sin and make it possible to God to save humans. I rejected that classical theory of atonement at long time ago. I have said that in Jesus Christ, and especially in Jesus on the cross, we see God entering into even the worst aspects of human life and demonstrating God’s presence with us in whatever happens in our lives and, indeed, even in our deaths. Substituting that theology of the cross solves many of the manifold problems with the classical theory of atonement, which, problematic as it is, is what most people think Christianity is. It does not, however, change the truth that, when considered as fact, the Christ event occurred at one particular time in the millennia long existence of us homo sapiens on earth. I completely reject the notion, which the classical theory makes unavoidable, that God saved no one before Jesus suffered and died to pay the price for sin. Yet once the nonsense that there was no salvation before Jesus is cleared away, one big question remains. Does theology of the cross as a soteriology mean that God’s love for humanity, while perhaps present, wasn’t discernable to us mere mortals before Jesus suffered and died? These days I am finding it nearly as impossible to believe that that is so. What sense does it make to say that God left human beings clueless for millennia, damned them for when they lived, and then decided to do something about it at a point in time we call the early first century CE? These days, to me, it makes no sense at all.

Which raises the crucial question. If we adopt a soteriology that says that Jesus is a demonstration of God’s love for us, and if we say that somehow that divine love must have been discernable before Jesus, was Jesus necessary? It is certainly possible, easy even, to answer that question no, Jesus was not necessary. We humans had all the evidence of God’s love that we need before Jesus. Paul says as much. In the first chapter of Romans he writes:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and senseless minds were darkened. Romans 1:18-21.

Paul speaks here of God’s wrath and people’s ungodliness, wickedness, and darkened minds, but that’s not what’s important for my purposes in what he says. What is important is the idea that humanity had available to it access to knowledge about God before the Christ event. It is, I suppose, true that not many people took advantage of that access, but clearly at least some did. (And it is still true that not many take advantage of the available means of access to God, but that’s a different issue.) All of the world’s ancient faith traditions, including Christianity’s mother faith Judaism, knew profound truths about God centuries before Jesus. Perhaps they discerned those truths in ways other than the one Paul mentions in Romans, but discern them they did.

So was Jesus necessary? We have to consider what we mean by “necessary” if we are to answer that question. Was Jesus necessary to make it possible for God to forgive human sin and bring salvation to us?, No. And yes. I know of course how heretical it is to answer that question no, but hear me out. How can it be that God did not save anyone until after a certain point in time and after certain events had taken place on earth? After all, countless millions of people lived before Jesus, and it wasn’t their fault that they lived when they lived. If God is universal, unconditional love, and God is, God would never do that. God would never structure salvation that way. Rather, precisely because God is universal, unconditional love, God would always have saved everyone. No Christ event was needed before God could or would forgive human sin and save human beings (whatever we mean by “save”), the classical theory of atonement to the contrary notwithstanding. So I am in this sense a Christian heretic. So be it. The heart cannot love what the mind cannot accept, and my mind cannot accept the proposition that God had to become human, suffer, and die before God would forgive human sin, nor can I accept this theory’s necessary correlation that no one was saved before Jesus.

So was Jesus necessary for anything else? Is there any way that it makes sense that God decided to act for the benefit of humanity at a certain point in time in a way God had never acted before? In a sense no, but there may be a sense in which the answer is yes. We begin with Paul’s assertion that true knowledge about God had always been available to everyone. We add our awareness that true knowledge about God did not begin with Christianity. Much of that truth had been around for a very long time before Christianity came into being. Yet it was true in the first century CE, and it is true today, that a great many human beings never come to any true knowledge of God. Perhaps God decided that God had given humans long enough to wise up to God with what was available to them, and too few of them had done it. So God decided to give humanity the most explicit and powerful demonstration of God’s true nature as love for all humans and God’s presence with every human in everything that happens to them. That, it seems to me, is a somewhat acceptable explanation for the Christ event happening at a specific point in time.

So was Jesus necessary? If so, necessary for what? Here’s another way of answering those questions that I find quite persuasive. I believe that Jesus was necessary because God wanted to give God’s people another powerful, profoundly true way to establish a saving connection with God. That is what we Christians find in the Christ event. We confess that we know God through what Jesus said, through what he did, and through what happened to him. We know that, when properly understood, Christianity does indeed save us. It saves from lives of meaninglessness and despair. It saves us from not knowing right from wrong. It may even save our eternal souls, assuming that we have eternal souls. It is not, however, the only path to any of those things. It is one way that God gave us some two thousand years ago. One way. Not the only way.

Now, that explanation of why Jesus was necessary rests upon a couple of foundational assumptions. It assumes that God operates on human time. It assumes that when it appears to us that God did something at a particular time it appears that way to God too. Yet it probably doesn’t appear that way to God. Time is a category of created existence. We humans, and indeed the whole universe, exist through what we experience as time. To us, the year 1 CE was a very long time ago. God, however, does not subsist within the categories of created existence. God transcends those categories absolutely (while at the same time being always present in creation). The concept of existing beyond time may be difficult, but some of us have had the experience we call “losing time.” That’s an experience in which a significant amount of time, many minutes at least, has passed, but we have had no awareness of its passing. I have had such an experience. Only once, but I’ve had it. Perhaps you have too. It seems to me that God must subsist in something like our experience of losing time. God, of course, is complex. God is present with us as we experience time, but at the same time God utterly transcends time. If God transcends time, and God does, then for God the Christ event didn’t happen at a particular time because for God. In God’s transcendent nature there is no time. For God, perhaps, the Christ event is something that is always happening and always has. Hard as that notion is to grasp, it at least solves the problem of it making no sense that something happened at a specific time and that God didn’t forgive human sin before that time.

Here's another way of looking at it, one that I find even more convincing. It is the way of looking at the Christ event not  as an historical, physical event that actually happened. It is rather to look at the Christ event as a myth. By a myth I don’t mean something people think is true that is not true. That is the popular meaning of myth, but it is not the technical, theological meaning of myth. A myth is, rather, a human story that points beyond itself to truths too deep for human words to express directly. It is a story that connects us to God and God to us. It is a story of something that never happened and always happens. It is a story that speaks in human categories, including time. It is, however a story that points beyond those categories to transcendent reality, that is, to God.

A myth isn’t so much something you believe as it is something you live into, or live under. You enter into it. You suspend your disbelief. That doesn’t mean you pretend to believe that the myth is factually correct. It doesn’t matter whether a myth is factually correct or not. You enter into the myth without worrying whether it is factually correct or not. You enter it in the state Marcus Borg called postcritical naivete. You listen to the story. You open your heart to the story. You let the story work its magic in you, because a true myth properly approached always will work magic in you. The power of the story of Jesus Christ isn’t that it is an account of something that happened as a matter of fact. It is, rather, the way the story brings us close to God. It is the way the story tells us truth about God. It tells us the eternal truth that God loves humanity more than we can possibly imagine. It tells us of God’s yearning for the world to reflect God’s priorities of peace and justice so much more than it actually does. It tells us that no matter how Godforsaken we feel, we are never Godforsaken. Those things are true. They have always been true. They didn’t become true at some particular point in time. They have been true from the very beginning of existence. They are true not because God did something on earth in the early first century CE. They are true because God is God and always has been.

Christians have long badly misunderstood the Christ event. God didn’t need some horrific price to be paid before God could or would forgive human sin as the classical theory of atonement asserts. God didn’t need anything to happen before God could or would forgive human sin. God has always forgiven human sin. That is one of the truths to which the Christ myth points. God has always loved each and every human being. That’s another truth to which the story points. God has always longed for peace and justice through nonviolent transformation of every person and of the world itself. That’s another truth to which it points. The birth story in Matthew tells us that Jesus is good news for the whole world not just for the Jews. The birth story in Luke tells us that Jesus is, first of all, good news for the poor. Jesus didn’t create those truths. Jesus points us toward those truths. Jesus invites, indeed calls, us to enter into those truths and to do the work of making them more real on earth.

So was Jesus necessary? No, not really. At least no, not to create anything new as far as God was concerned. But yes, necessary if God wanted to give God’s people one new way of understanding eternal truths about God. One new way of entering into those truths. One new way of loving God and knowing that God loves us. God gives us all of those things through the myth of Jesus Christ, but God has always given those things to all people whether people were willing or able to receive them or not. God gives us those things whether we are willing and able to receive them or not.

So this Christmas season and always, let us not be concerned with whether or not the stories of Jesus Christ, including the stories of his birth, ever happened as a matter of historical fact. Some of them may have. Some of them probably didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. Those stories can still touch us at deep levels of our being. Those stories can still move us toward being more fully the people God calls us to be. Let us let the stories be stories, and for those stories let us all thank God with our whole hearts. May it be so.