SUBSTITUTING FOR THE SUBSTITUTIONARY [Sun, 8-16-26]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Theological Redactions of An Old Man—SUBSTITUTING FOR THE SUBSTITUTIONARY [Sun, 8-16-26]

 

[This is a “long grass” effort at theology, 400 words beyond my usual 500, so beware…but it’s Sunday, and my brain is grooved to talk about the mysteries of God on Sundays…]

I do not believe in the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement. I believe in the mystery of the substitutionary atonement.

Jesus is my savior. He died in my place. He died for my sins, to put me back into right relationship with God. All that good stuff.

It’s meaningful. As long as it’s a mystery. When it becomes a doctrine, all the meaning is gone.

The substitutionary atonement theory says that Jesus died for our sins, to put us back into right relationship with God.

I believe in 1/3 of that theory.

I would believe in 2/3 if I were a first century Jew, and 3/3 if I were a fourth century Roman. Or a third century Greek

As was Jesus, the first Christians were Jews, the people of religious sacrifice. Their earliest religious story centered on sacrifice, the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Issac, to God. [Genesis 22:1-19] God counted Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son as righteousness. It restored their relationship. That idea became the linchpin of Hebrew religious beliefs. A propitiation, a sacrifice, is necessary to get into right relationship with God.

As the original Jewish Christians tried to understand the meaning of the resurrection, the meaning of Jesus as the Christ, they naturally turned to the language of sacrifice.

In early [and continuing] Christian theology, God sacrifices, on the cross, his only son. That is a direct retelling of the Abraham story, father willing to sacrifice his only son. [One of the ancient-culture reasons why Jesus is called God’s only son.]

In Hebrew sacrifices, it was a lamb without blemish that was the perfect sacrifice, so Jesus became “the lamb of God,” and we were saved by “the blood of the lamb.”

But if God is Love, as Christians claim, no propitiation is necessary

The Romans, who ruled the land of the Jews, didn’t believe in that sacrifice stuff. They thought Jews were quite primitive. They believed in Law. [The Jews did, too, but it was a different Law, the Torah, a lot of which had to do with the proper way to sacrifice.]

Early Christian thinkers, especially Augustine [354-430], realized Christians would never be accepted in Rome if their theology was not acceptable to the Roman legal system. So Augustine interpreted the Christ story in legal terms…

…people [Adam and Eve] sinned. That first sin, the original sin, humans trying to take the place of God, was inherited all the way along, passed down through sexual intercourse, Augustine said, since there had to be a legalistic way to account for everyone being born with original sin. [One of the main reasons Christians have always been so conflicted and queasy about sex.]

Sin abrogated the justice of God. It was a legal matter. Humans deserved punishment for sin. [Law always requires punishment. It’s called justification, putting things right, an eye for an eye.] So Christ took the necessary and deserved punishment for everybody by dying on the cross. We say that we know God accepted the death of Jesus as adequate punishment for the whole world because of the Resurrection.

One of my University of Iowa profs, the great George Forrell, explained it thus in The Protestant Faith: An isolated African tribe is declining because everyone is drunk all the time. The king declares that anyone who brews booze will receive fifty lashes. Everything straightens up for a while, and then one morning, everybody is drunk again. He demands to know who made the booze. It was his own mother! Justice demands that the fifty lashes be administered. But he loves his mother, and the lashes will probably kill her. So, he commands the villagers to lash him instead.

Wonderful story. I thought it was perfect when I read it. But it’s a metaphor [analogy?], not reality. Punishment doesn’t make any sense if there was no law abrogated, if God gives and demands mercy instead of sacrifice, instead of punishment, to make things right, to make them whole. Christians say God is Love, not Law. “Crime and punishment” is not the way of Christ. Christian faith starts with forgiveness.

In the third century, in an effort to make Christianity acceptable to Greek philosophy, Plotinus divided the body and soul. That’s been a problem for Christians ever since.

The Hebrews were sacrificers, the Greeks were philosophers, the Romans were lawyers. “The surest way to be irrelevant tomorrow is to be too relevant today,” even if “today” takes in a millenium or two. What was relevant for those old Hebrews and Greeks and Romans is not relevant today.

The substitutionary atonement made sense in first century Israel, in second century Greece, in fourth century Rome. Ever since, adherents of those different approaches to God have argued so effusively with one another about whose view of the substitutionary atonement is right that we haven’t noticed that it makes no sense today, that it doesn’t answer any of the questions being asked now, in the 21^st century.

I don’t know what to do about that. Christian tradition is so full of the substitutionary atonement, especially in our hymns. We do need, though, to understand that we are not bad Christians if we trust in the love of God and the community with Christ without going through some propitiation like the substitutionary atonement.

John Robert McFarland