HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Charting a New Reformation
Part XXII - The Sixth Thesis, Atonement Theology (continued)
Everywhere one looks in the Christian religion, one discovers the mentality of “Atonement Theology.” In the church a fetish has developed about the “cleansing power of the blood of Jesus” and its inherent ability to wash away our sins. Protestants apparently want to bathe in the blood of Christ so they sing hymns about fountains of blood in which they wish to be washed. Catholics appear to want to drink the blood of Christ to have its cleansing power work inside. Perhaps Protestants are more obsessed about the external sins of the flesh and Catholics are more concerned about the sins of the inner self. The focus of each of the four gospels is clearly on the act of the crucifixion with from twenty-five to forty percent of the content of each gospel being dedicated to the last week of Jesus’ life. The symbol of the cross in its various forms became the universally recognized sign of Christianity itself. Hymns about the cross mark all forms of Christian worship. They appear in an almost infinite variety: “In the Cross of Christ I glory,” “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” “Lift high the Cross” and “The Old Rugged Cross” just to name a few.
The crucifix, focusing as it does, on the specific and seemingly eternal suffering of Jesus, can be found hanging on the wall in the cell of almost every monk and priest in Christian history. It was the first thing he saw upon awakening each morning and the last thing he saw before closing his eyes in sleep each night. When the grotesque nature of death by crucifixion got too unbearable, the suffering of Jesus was transformed into glory, but the cross still remained central. In the form called the “Christus Rex,” the cross became a throne from which Jesus reigned in glory and the agony of his writhing body was transformed into the vestments of Jesus as the great high priest. Every place we turn in Christian history, however, we see echoes of the Jesus, who “for us and for our salvation came down from heaven” in order to be crucified for our sins on the cross of Calvary. We name our churches after the saving function of the Jesus who died for our sins: the Church of the Redeemer, the Church of our Savior, the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Jesus Church. Salvation, understood as an atoning sacrifice and marked by great suffering and pain, has never been far from the heart of traditional Christianity.
Perhaps because we have heard these words and embraced these images for so long their offensiveness has been largely removed. When the story of the cross is raised to consciousness and examined critically, however, it is hard not to see in that story cruelty, suffering and even masochism and sadism. Bulletins during Lent in many churches look like they might have been purchased in a local sado-masochism shop. They feature whips and nails and if they elicit any emotion at all, it is guilt. In some of the popular hymns of the season this guilt is overt and inescapable: “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.” That is the theology that arises from the Christian mantra, repeated so often that its meaning is supposed to be self-evident: “Jesus died for my sins.”
Think about what that means. God has required that Jesus suffer because of my sins! Can one imagine a more powerful guilt message? No wonder our liturgies are filled with pleas for God to have mercy. Will that God, who “spared not his own son,” be more kindly disposed toward us than he was toward Jesus? Is that not why we have been taught throughout the centuries that the proper posture before God in worship is the posture of a supplicant, a slave before a master, who has the ultimate power of life and death over us? Is the proper stance of a child of God before the ultimate portrait of God to be one that places us on our knees, praying for mercy? An abused child might pray for mercy, as he or she stands before an abusive parent. A convicted felon might fall on his or her knees and beg for mercy before a “hanging judge,” but is that ever a proper stance to mark the relationship with a child of God standing before the “Source” of his or her life, love or being? Have you ever known any human life to be helped by being told over and over again just how evil, how wretched, how vile and how hopeless he or she is? How did the Christian gospel ever get so distorted that it has become the primary source of self-deprecation and guilt? How has the idea of the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus devolved into this? Is religion primarily about behavior control? Is life embraced, made whole or saved by the threat of the punishment of hell or even by the promise of the rewards of heaven? If our goal in life and in religion is to escape punishment or to gain reward, have we not failed to escape our own survival driven, self-centeredness? Is this what the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel had in mind when he defined his purpose as that of bringing “abundant life” to all? Will abundant life ever be the result of a life in which guilt and fear are the primary motivators of behavior? From what sick place in Christian history does the idea emerge that God punished Jesus on the cross for my sins? Does atonement between God and me come when I realize that Jesus stepped in and absorbed from God the punishment that I was due? Yet, that is what “Atonement Theology” has come to mean and those ideas are so deep in the worship patterns of Christian history that they are reinforced in sermons, hymns and prayers in every generation. For most people, the only way to escape this theology is to give up Christianity and to walk away from the church forever. Many today are opting for that alternative.
How did such a destructive theology emerge in Christianity? It emerged I believe out of Gentile ignorance of things Jewish. It emerged because the words and forms of Jewish worship continued to be used in Christian churches long after Jews were no longer part of that worshiping community and Gentile Christians totally misunderstood and misappropriated those Jewish words and forms.
So much of the language of Judaism is still found in Christian worship, but we do not recognize it as such. We say: “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” without any awareness that we are identifying Jesus with the lamb of Passover whose blood was said to have repelled the angel of death from killing the first-born sons in Jewish households. We sing the “Agnus Dei:” “O Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world,” without being aware that those words have been taken almost verbatim from the Jewish day known as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.” On that Jewish liturgical holy day, a lamb was once slaughtered and its blood was smeared on the Mercy Seat, which was thought to be the Throne of God, located in the Temple in the Holy of Holies. People were then taught to think of themselves as coming into oneness with God because they were able to come “through the blood of the lamb.” In Jewish worship, however, the lamb was a symbol, not of a sacrifice that an angry God required, but of the human yearning to achieve the fullness of our human potential. The lamb, chosen for the sacrifice, represented our longing to be all that God created us to be. That was why the lamb had to be physically perfect, with no scratches, broken bones or bruises. Since the lamb also lived beneath the level of human freedom, it also came to represent moral perfection. Thus the lamb of Yom Kippur was a symbol of our recognition that we had not become all that God had wanted us to be. Human life, compromised as it was, did not share in God’s perfection. So Jewish worshipers, on this one great day of penitence each year, acted out liturgically a means by which they could participate in God’s oneness. They came to God under the symbol of the physically and morally perfect lamb. Gentiles took that symbol and read into it the ancient animal sacrificial practices that once had even included human sacrifice. Under this limited understanding, God became the angry judge who had been offended by sinful people and for which this God in an act of divine wrath, deemed us worthy to be punished. The punishment we deserved, however, was greater than we could ever absorb. The wrath of God, it was said, nonetheless, had to be served. This God apparently did not know how to forgive. This God required the proverbial “pound of flesh.” So, in order to satisfy the demands of this God, Jesus was made to take our place and to endure the wrath of this punishing deity. That was what happened, we have been told, on the cross. Jesus took my punishment from the hand of God for me. Jesus “died for my sins.” Does that make any of us feel better? Of course not! It destroys the goodness of God. It turns God into a monster, it turns Jesus into a masochistic victim and it turns you and me into grieving buckets of trembling, guilt-filled jelly. This was not originally, is not now and can never be the meaning of Christianity. “Atonement Theology” must be escaped totally if there is to be a Christian future,
We now know that this entire theological superstructure is built on a false premise. We are not fallen sinners, indelibly infected with “original sin.’ We are rather incomplete people yearning to be made whole. We do not need to be saved from a fall that never happened. We need to be loved and empowered to be all that we are capable of being. “Atonement theology” will never get us to this new goal. Jesus, perceived of as “savior”, “redeemer” or “rescuer,” will never bring us wholeness. Jesus as the “Life of God” calling us to live fully, the “Love of God” freeing us to love wastefully and the “Being of God” giving us the courage to be all that we can be, will. If Christianity is to have a future, the paradigm must shift from being saved from our sins to being called into a new wholeness from our sense of incompleteness. There can be no “substitutionary atonement” in the Christianity of tomorrow. The call to a new reformation is real, necessary and acute.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Porir Johannsson from Reykjavik, Iceland, writes:
Question:
I have been able to enjoy your work for approximately three years now and have found so many answers to so many questions and this has transformed my beliefs/faith. I thank you for that.
One point you made is that Jesus never “died for our sins” and you have explained how his death was made to correspond with the Day of Atonement in the Jewish tradition. Jesus “dying for my sins” is what I was taught and this is what to me the whole thing was about. That taken away, I begin to wonder whether it matters all that much if Jesus actually existed or not. Many have come out with that theory. Would the myth suffice?
Answer:
Dear Porir,
I think you are my first correspondent from Iceland, so thank you for writing.
My response to your question is, in a word, yes! Yes, it matters greatly! I do not think a myth without the person will suffice and I do not agree with those who think Jesus was a carefully constructed myth. There are many mythological elements that have been wrapped around him to be sure from the virgin birth to the cosmic ascension. There is clearly, however, a person of history around whom the myths have been wrapped.
Atonement theology (Jesus died for my sins) was born in a complete misunderstanding of the Jewish Day of Atonement on the part of Gentile Christians. I find that concept appalling, almost revolting. What kind of God is it who would punish the divine son to pay the price of your sins and mine? That makes God an ogre and Jesus a masochistic victim and you and me guilt-filled creatures.
Why does God not simply forgive us? Why does God require a victim? Who told you that you were fallen and could not save yourself? I do not start theology with original sin. I see that as a gross 4th Century CE misunderstanding of the story of the Garden of Eden. I see life as incomplete, not as fallen and I see Jesus as a call into a new human wholeness, not as the divinely sent rescuer of the evil ones.
As post-Darwinians, we know that life did not begin in perfection only to fall into a state of sinfulness from which we cannot rescue ourselves. Instead life began as a single cell and over billions of years has evolved into self-conscious complexity. What we have yet to evolve into, I do not know, but I await with joy the journey. I spell this understanding out much more thoroughly than I can manage to do in the limited space of a question and answer format, in a chapter on “Atonement Theology,” found in my recently published book, entitled Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy. I commend that chapter to you if you wish to look at a more substantive response.
A belated thank you to your country for receiving all the planes bound for New York City on 9/11/01. I have many friends who deeply appreciated your nation’s hospitality.
John Shelby Spong
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Announcements
Bishop John Shelby Spong to speak at and receive the Religious Liberty Award at the American Humanist Society's 75th Anniversary Conference, May 26th - 29th in Chicago, IL.
