[Oe List ...] 4/13/2023, Progressing Spirit: Rev. David M. Felten: Retiring Atonement (preferably with extreme prejudice); Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Apr 13 05:37:06 PDT 2023
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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv0374892446 #yiv0374892446templateBody .yiv0374892446mcnTextContent, #yiv0374892446 #yiv0374892446templateBody .yiv0374892446mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv0374892446 #yiv0374892446templateFooter .yiv0374892446mcnTextContent, #yiv0374892446 #yiv0374892446templateFooter .yiv0374892446mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Rev. David M. Felten
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Retiring Atonement (preferably with extreme prejudice)
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| Essay by Rev. David M. Felten
April 13, 2023
Well, Christians around the world have managed to endure yet another Good Friday. And who doesn’t love the obligatory wallowing in guilt at the hands of an institution hell-bent on controlling its constituents through psychological manipulation and shame, right?
Let’s be honest. Christianity has an atonement problem. “Atonement” is the theological concept of the healing of the once-estranged relationship between God and humanity through the “work” of Jesus (not his life and ministry, but his self-sacrificing death). Unfortunately, popular understandings of atonement encourage self-loathing, portray God as a blood-thirsty tyrant, and glorify brutal violence as a legitimate means by which to resolve problems.
With roots in the barbaric pre-historic practices of blood-sacrifice, atonement’s heritage can be traced through the ancient Jewish cultic Temple system and on to eventually be misinterpreted by Paul, the authors of the gospels, the book of Hebrews, and other unhelpful theologians. Add to that Augustine’s made-up guilt-soaked pass-the-buck concept of Original Sin and Anselm’s 12th-century foray into “fixing” previous atonement theories and the cavalcade of explanations go from inadequate to contemptible to worthless.
Plus, our tradition’s mishmash of atonement hypotheses effectively misdirects people’s attention away from what Jesus was really on about - his teachings and example. Think about it. Christianity is the only major religion in the world where many adherents are perfectly happy to virtually ignore the life of their founder in favor of the so-called “cosmic event” that occurred at his death.
In fact, Christianity is the only major religion where many followers believe the death of their founder is more important than his life. The deaths of the Buddha or Muhammad or Confucius or Zoroaster are all remembered with solemnity and noted as a great loss. But the focus today is on their LIVES, not their deaths.
Sadly, many Christians believe that all of Jesus’ life, ministry, and teachings turn out to be secondary to one thing: me! (well, and you, too). We’re such horrible people and God is such a blood-thirsty vengeful tyrant that Jesus needed to die in our place to satiate God’s demand for blood. Just pray the sinner’s prayer and you’re on a rocket-sled to heaven to spend eternity strumming a golden harp with Jesus. Individual salvation is the whole point for most Christians. Everybody else can (literally!) go to hell.
So yes, ditching the traditional ideas of atonement is a major challenge to the core of conventional Christian theology. But we have to take a stand against this primitive, outdated, and harmful betrayal of Jesus’ teachings. As Jack Spong urged for years, “We have to do Christology all over again.”
Consider the Vacation Bible School a few years ago at a large United Methodist church near me. The staff decided they had to nix an entire day of the published curriculum. Why? Because it was on Substitutionary Atonement. If taught, the whole day would have been dedicated to telling the children, “You’re a 3rd grader and you’re so evil, Jesus had to die a horrible, painful death to save you from the wrath of a scary, angry God.” That claim is not only manipulative but emotionally and spiritually abusive — and it’s also the primary message the church delivers every day to children and adults alike.
How did we get here? First off, the Bible is totally the problem. What it has to say about atonement is what my Aussie friends would call a “dog’s breakfast.” All by himself, Paul’s efforts are an absolute train wreck. While he claims it was all about “Adam being disobedient and Christ being obedient” (all sinners then, all righteous now), the mechanics he offers on how any of it is accomplished is a befuddling chaos of metaphors (expiation through sacrifice, ransom from captivity, redemption from slavery, victory in warfare) very few of which mean ANYTHING to most anyone today. Who expiates anymore?!? *sigh*
Over the years, Paul’s conflicting suggestions blended with the Gospels’ inconsistent takes, Hebrews’ Temple-centric imagery, and later theologians to leave a lot of room for multiple theories to emerge. Here’s a painfully brief (and totally inadequate) overview of the biggies:
Satisfaction Theory: Derived from ancient Jewish ritual practices (including
the Day of Atonement) where animals were sacrificed to satisfy God’s need for blood.
Jesus becomes the ultimate sacrifice to appease this God who is so offended by
human sin that only the spilling of his own son’s blood will bring satisfaction.
Incidentally, Canaanite religions were not the only ones to sacrifice their children
to appease Baal and other gods. There are a number of Biblical examples of Judean
kings and leaders who also ritually sacrificed their children, much to Yahweh’s
displeasure.
Substitution Theory: The death of Jesus is NOT a sacrifice, but a pay-off
to God. Human beings are so sinful that each of us deserves a horrible, lingering
and bloody death sentence. However, Jesus loves us so much that he was willing
to step in and be our substitute. God would just as soon kill us for our sins, but the
slaughter of the innocent satiates the divine’s blood lust.
Ransom Theory: If through sin, humanity is now stuck in and operating
on the Devil’s “turf,” God had to pay off Satan in order to win our freedom.
How? By paying with Jesus’ death.
Victory Theory: NOT a payment to the devil (which is the equivalent
of giving in to terrorists), but a defeat-in-principle of the power of evil.
Through Jesus’ “obedience unto death,” he showed he could take anything
that the devil could dish out.
Moral Theory: The real point of Jesus’ obedience and death was to provide
an example for humanity to follow: to stay faithful to one’s convictions even
in the face of injustice, brutality, and ignorance.
Did you notice? These theories offer VASTLY different “cosmic” dynamics: The first two are directed toward God by appeasing or compensating God for humanity’s trespasses. The second two are aimed at Satan and mark the end of “demonic control” through two diametrically opposed methods (did God “pay off” or “punch out” the Devil?). Only the last “moral” theory suggests atonement as a change of disposition of humanity (not of God or Satan).
Overall, the Satisfaction/Substitution Theories have tended to be the most popular. They’re reflected in Campus Crusade’s “Four Spiritual Laws,” the Roman Catholic’s sacrifice of the Lamb of God on the altar, and in the hymns of American Protestantism (“There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” and “What Can Wash Away My Sins? Nothing But the Blood of Jesus.”) The Moral theory has been the least popular among orthodox theologians because it suggests that, if humanity needed only an example to follow, humanity must not have been so sinful after all.
I’m still recovering from the ideological pandemonium of the church of my youth and am relieved to know that the lack of any uniform understanding of what has come to be called Jesus’ “saving work” is due to an unclear Biblical witness, centuries of theological wranglings, and a mishmash of imagery in each of our own religious upbringings.
I’m also reassured to know that calling prevailing ideas of atonement into question is nothing new. Even in the 12th Century, French theologian Peter Abelard (1079-1142 CE) wrote:
“Christ died neither because a ransom had to be paid to the devil, nor
because the blood of an innocent victim was needed to appease the wrath
of God, but that a supreme exhibition of love may kindle a corresponding
love in the hearts of [humanity] and inspire them with the true freedom of
[children] of God.”
Ahhhhh! Jesus died as “a supreme exhibition of love!” Now we’re talking. Whatever the crucifixion comes to mean going forward, it makes so much more sense for the 21st century being about love and integrity — not suffering, substitution, satisfaction and all the other archaic explanations. Jesus didn’t die in some cosmic pay-off to an angry God or anthropomorphic Satan. He died as a result of the normal operating procedure of fearful, unjust, oppressive, and insecure human beings. And he did so in “a supreme exhibition of love” in order to “kindle a corresponding love” in OUR hearts.
Diana Butler Bass has suggested that a major advantage of breaking our addiction to the old school atonement theories is that we can start to see how the teachings of Jesus brings a person to be “at one” (an at-one-ment) with the Divine so we can then live the way that God intended and the way that Jesus taught. Being faithful to convictions like non-violence, justice, and the needs of the poor and the downtrodden are ways to take atonement out of arcane theological categories and make it real in the world.
So, if you look forward every year to being told that you’re a horrible worm, unworthy of living, and that you deserve a horrible death (that Jesus suffers in your place on Good Friday), go ahead. But may your tribe decrease.
As for me and my house, we have some heavy lifting to do: We need to reject the anti-Semitism rife in our Holy Week stories. We need to repudiate a God modeled on a blood-thirsty Middle-Eastern potentate demanding blood sacrifice for made-up doctrines like Original Sin.
And regardless of what the Fundamentalists and most of the rest of the church says, we need to “kindle a corresponding love” and retire our toxic and obsolete atonement schemes. No pressure.~ Rev. David M. Felten
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings. Visit his website here. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
Why do some churches have difficulty fully embracing LGBTQ+ people of faith?
A: By Rev. Irene Monroe
Dear Reader,LGBTQ+ people of faith love Jesus as much as straight people, and we are not children of a lesser God. Churches' unwelcoming of us as part of the body of Christ is a pox on the universal message of hospitality to all people. The homo/transphobic spewings from pulpits as the word of God is deleterious to the LGBTQ+ worshipping communities on many levels, contributing to violence, anti- LGBTQ+ legislation, suicide, and homelessness, to name a few.
As a child of the Black Church, I commonly heard the message about LGBTQ+ people, like myself, that Christians are to "love the sinner but hate the sin." I depict this statement as a condescending and theological qualifier that says to love the "sinner" (us) but to hate the "sin" (our sexual orientation). Our connections and contributions to the larger black religious cosmos are desecrated every time homo/transphobic pronouncements go unchecked in these holy places of worship.
While the Black Church will argue that it stands on the literal "word of God" and therefore has justification to erect its homo/transphobic stance based on biblical passages, the church's argument about the "authority of Scripture" doesn't hold weight because historically the Black Church literally discarded all damning and damaging racial references. For example, the Curse of Ham (Genesis 9:18-27) and Apostle Paul's edict to enslaved people (Ephesians 6:5-8) served as the scientific and Christian legitimation for enslaving people of African ancestry.
Another reason some black churches demonize members of the LGBTQ+ community is that they do not accept sexual orientation as a civil rights minority group. Many still think the comparison between the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and black civil rights is, at best, "a stretch," and at worst, the white LGBTQ+ community "pimping" the history of black racial suffering to push a "homosexual" agenda to gain "special rights." Also, because of the persistent nature of racism in the lives of African Americans and the relatively small gains accomplished supposedly on behalf of racial equality, many African Americans see civil rights gains have come faster for white LGBTQ+ middle to upper-class Americans in several decades - from the Stonewall Riots of 1969 to the legalization of same-sex marriage - than it has for them in a lifetime.
Every church, however, has its way of making LGBTQ+ people feel unwelcome. Last month, Pope Francis told the Associated Press, during an exclusive interview, that "homosexuality is not a crime. It's a sin." The pontiff statement hurts the global LGBTQ+ community by calling homosexuality a sin, although the goal was to create a movement to decriminalize homosexuality. Nearly 70 countries have criminalized their LGBTQ+ populations.
Another example was in 2021, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's orthodoxy office, issued a formal statement instructing its priests not to offer blessings to same-sex couples. The church's reason: God cannot bless sin. To the shock of LGBTQ+ Catholics and allies globally, Pope Francis approved the decree. His approval of the decree was a betrayal despite the many liberal-leaning LGBTQ+ optimistic pronouncements heard during his papacy. However, Francis stating that "Homosexuality is a sin" leaves in place his characterization and the church's belief of us as being "intrinsically disordered" and contrary to natural law.
Being LGBTQ+ is not a crime. Being LGBTQ+ is not a sin. However, the church's stance about us is a sin upon itself and a crime against humanity. These churches do not embrace the world — as it is today — from an engaged and committed stance that does justice. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Irene Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist, her columns appear in the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe states her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist, I try to inform the public of religion’s role in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. |
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| Don't miss the next Episode of PC.org's Executive Directors Mark and Caleb on:
The Moonshine Jesus Show
- every Monday at 4:30pm Eastern Time – watch live on Facebook,, YouTube, Twitter, Podbean |
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| This Week's Featured Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey
Discovering Fire: Spiritual Practices That Transform Lives
Igniting a spiritual expansion that bridges religious and non-religious sensibilities, this is a deep and intimate dive into a profusion of spiritual practices. Promoting diversity, respect, and a deeper connection with the Divine, Roger explores the intersections of Christianity with shadow-work, dream work, the Enneagram, yoga, astrology, tarot cards, shamanism, ecstatic dance, psychedelic plants, and more. With passion, cultural sensitivity, grounding in tradition, and the heart of an explorer Roger offers a go-to guide for the 21st century seeker, be they religious, spiritual, or anywhere along the spectrum of that human experience of longing for healing encounters with the Mystery some call God. Read More ... |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Part XI Matthew: Proof Texting the Birth Narratives
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 16, 2014Matthew never allows us to forget that he is a learned scribe in charge of a synagogue made up of Jewish people who are the followers of Jesus. He is writing at a time in history when a battle is being waged for the soul of Judaism. The issues were clear in his mind. Will Judaism turn in his direction and incorporate Jesus into the ongoing Jewish story, just as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos had been incorporated in the past? Would Judaism be able to see and to admit what was so clear to Matthew, namely that Jesus fulfilled the prophets and met all of the concepts of messiah that had long intrigued the Jewish people? In the mind of Matthew the alternative to his proposal was to go in the direction represented by the Pharisees who, at that moment in Jewish history, were the dominant school of thought in Judaism. The primary emphasis of the Pharisees was first to recover the meaning and the power of the Torah by reinterpreting it in a more open direction, and then to install that newly cast Torah, as the central meaning of Judaism. The Pharisees were not eager, however, to incorporate Jesus into their future because he appeared to them to minimize the centrality of the Law. The tension between these two Jewish groups, the Pharisees on one hand and the followers of Jesus on the other, was palpable. One catches a glimpse of the depth of this mutual hostility when one reads what Matthew has to say about the Pharisees. These were the things operating in Matthew’s mind when he completed his story of Jesus’ birth prior to turning to his narrative of the adult Jesus.
In this final column on Matthew’s birth narrative we look at what are the striking, recurring and dominant themes of what this author believes are the messianic claims for Jesus. Every episode in his groundbreaking birth narrative was written to demonstrate that Jesus’ entry into human history was both planned and executed “in accordance with the scriptures.” Today we conclude this first unit by looking at Matthew’s key argument, namely that the entire sacred history of the Jews pointed directly to the life of Jesus.
Matthew was not a fundamentalist, but, he was both a convinced follower of Jesus and an avid student of the Jewish scriptures. In his gospel’s introductory narrative on Jesus’ birth he revealed how he was using these scriptures to document his thesis. By our standards of scholarship, the texts he employed do not come close to saying what he claimed that they said, but studies in first century Judaism help us to understand the mind of Matthew. So our task is to enter his mind and to embrace the way it operated.
In the first section of the birth narrative Matthew chose a text from Isaiah (7:14) on which to build his story of the virgin birth. Next he used a text from Micah to assert a Bethlehem birth place for Jesus. Then he picked a text from Jeremiah to explain the murder of the boy babies of Bethlehem by King Herod. He followed this with a text he plucked from Hosea on which to hang his account of Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath. Finally, he quoted a text, the source of which we cannot locate in the Bible, through which to explain how it was that Jesus happened to have been raised in the Galilean town of Nazareth. None of these texts, we can safely assert, had been originally written to be prophesies anticipating the birth of the messiah. All of them were rather narratives through which Matthew tried to show that all of Jewish scripture ultimately found its fulfillment in Jesus. To treat any of those verses as if they had been written as predictions that Jesus had to fulfill is patently absurd. To stand where Matthew stood and to believe that all Jewish messianic hopes found their completion in Jesus required of him only a masterful and impressive ability to create a memorable story. To understand how he used scripture, one needs only to step away from our modern notions regarding fundamentalism by which the Jewish scriptures have been so deeply violated and read them from a very different perspective. In the words that have almost become a regular theme in this series we must proceed to free the Jewish scriptures from what I have called their “Gentile Captivity.” Let me try now to put these verses into the context of Matthew’s mind.
First, we need to understand the historical context in which this gospel was composed. The Jewish nation was in dire distress. A war against the Romans had begun in Galilee by a group of Jews called “the Zealots” in the year 66 CE. This war, which had been encouraged by the Sadducees and the Temple authorities, ended in the tragedy of total defeat at a place called Masada in the year 73. In the middle of that war, namely in the year 70, Roman legions had conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, banished the Sadducees and the Temple priesthood and began a massive suppression of all things Jewish that would last well beyond the time that Matthew’s gospel was written. The Sadducees had been replaced by the Pharisees as the group that controlled the destiny of carrying Judaism into a Jewish future. Matthew countered their claim with the Jesus movement, which, he believed, was the only possibility of guaranteeing a Jewish future. Matthew’s vision was, however, of a far more universal religion than most Jews, and especially the Pharisees, could then imagine. To build his case, Matthew looked at the scriptures of his people in new ways. In Isaiah he found a scriptural justification to use for the supernatural birth, which he planned to describe. This birth was of God not of humanity, he argued. The Holy Spirit, not a human being, has fathered this child. This birth had nothing to do with biology. It was in his Jewish mind, the second great act of creation. In the book of Genesis the Holy Spirit had hovered over the original chaos in order to bring forth the gift of life in the first great act of creation. So now he quoted an Isaiah text that seems to him to make the claim that the Holy Spirit hovered over the womb of a virgin named Mary to bring about this new act of creation. It was in fact a huge literal stretch, but Matthew was willing to make that stretch, unaware perhaps that the word “virgin” never appeared in this Isaiah text in the Hebrew language in which this text was originally written.
Another claim made by the Jews for their messiah was that he must be heir to the throne of David. Paul had first made this claim in his epistle to the Romans (1:1-4) written about the year 58, or 15-20 years before Matthew would incorporate that claim into his story by giving Jesus a Bethlehem birth place. Bethlehem was the city of David’s birth and for Jesus to be born there would solidify his messianic credentials. Micah, an 8th century BCE prophet, had written that the messiah must replicate David’s life. Being born in David’s city was just one part of that. In the power of Matthew’s writing style Jesus’ Bethlehem birth place became part of his story.
In Matthew’s creation of Joseph, the author leaned on the Genesis narrative of the first Joseph in order to tell the story of his Joseph. Since Joseph the patriarch had saved the covenant people from death by taking them down to Egypt, so Matthew’s Joseph must also save the messiah from death by taking him down to Egypt. Then Matthew remembered that the messiah must also relive the history of the Jewish people whom God had long ago called out of Egypt. So without apology he quoted Hosea, who was talking about the Exodus, but Matthew applied it to Jesus as one more sign of messianic fulfillment: “Out of Egypt” God must call God’s “son.”
Having borrowed his story from the Moses cycle in Exodus about the Pharaoh trying to destroy Moses, God’s promised deliverer, in his infancy, so Matthew now moved to replicate it in the life of Jesus. Reflecting the gift in Matthew’s quill, Herod became the new Pharaoh and sought to destroy God’s promised deliverer by killing all the boy babies in Bethlehem. The new Moses escaped, but the dastardly deed was done. Matthew then likened that experience to the destruction of the Jewish people at the hands of the Assyrians. The maternal ancestor of the Northern Kingdom was Rachel, the wife of Jacob and thus the mother of Joseph. So Matthew now quoted Jeremiah portraying Rachel as mourning for her children who “were not” for the Assyrian conquest had destroyed them. This then opened him to develop another messianic claim. Messiah must heal the historic Jewish division between the Joseph tribes of the North and the Judah tribe of the South. Only then would the tears of Rachel be washed away. Matthew did that by making Joseph the protector of the heir to Judah’s King David.
Matthew then made another bold leap, but this time into messianic fantasy. He was aware that Jesus was a citizen of the town of Nazareth and thus a Galilean. In his development of the birth tradition he had maintained that Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child resided in a house in Bethlehem, about six miles from Jerusalem. To uphold his Nazareth and Galilean origins, he now sought a text to help him move Jesus from his place of birth in Bethlehem to Nazareth where Matthew understood that he had grown up. So he quoted an unknown prophet who said: “He (the messiah) will be called a Nazarene.” The only problem with this text was that no prophets that we know of ever said that. We are left to speculate. Did Matthew get it out of the Samson story where Samson was called a “Nazirite,” that is one who lived under vows not to drink wine or to cut one’s hair? That kind of Nazirite, however, had nothing to do with growing up in Nazareth. Or did Matthew find this crucial text in another quote from Isaiah that said: Out of the “root of Jesse,” the messiah will come. The Hebrew word for root is naser or nazir. We will never know. This text in Matthew’s birth narrative only reveals his eagerness to find in Jesus the fulfillment of all of the prophetic expectations.
On that note, the first birth narrative of Jesus concludes and for the first time in Matthew’s gospel, the adult Jesus began to come into view. He is introduced by a figure we call John the Baptist. To his story we will turn when this series resumes.~ John Shelby Spong |
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