Search

Bo Sanders: Public Theology

updating & innovating for today

Open Search
Tag

atonement

How Good Was Friday? part 3

Part 3 in a series of 4. In part 1 I asked if our focus on blood and violence has caused us to miss something vital in the Easter story. Part 2 asked if we have mistakenly celebrated the very thing that Christ came to destroy? In part 4 I will ask if we even need a cross (technically). 

We may have overdone it with the cross. It is out of proportion.  I want to I hear more about the empty tomb (resurrection) and the coming of Holy Spirit (pentecost).

It can seem like , for Protestant Evangelicals, that it is ‘all atonement theory – all the time’.

I have a friend who said “Discipleship is photo-shopping the cross into every picture and angle of my life.”  I asked him if the empty tomb wouldn’t be more appropriate. He said that you can’t have one without the other.

So is that what we are doing?

 Is ‘the cross’ shorthand for the whole story?

Is it assumed that when we say ‘Cross’ we mean also Resurrection and Pentecost?

That would make me nervous.

Here is my concern: in the resurrection God spoke a new word over the world. I would like to live into that new word and participate with God’s Spirit who was given as a gift and a seal of the promise.

To obsess on the cross and related atonement theories is to live perpetually in the old word and to camp in the final thing that God said about the old situation.

It manifests in odd ways too. When my school, Claremont, was entering into a new venture of a Multi-Faith University, new logos were drawn up for each participating school. One symbol and one color for each represented religion or tradition. It is actually a cool branding that sends a message I can really get behind.

The problem is that we, as the Christian representative, got a red logo with the Cross as our symbol. We couldn’t have gone with the Flame or the Dove or the Bible or anything else?  What is the deal with the Cross obsession? Is it really the best representative for what the whole religion is about?

It has also takes on weird colonial connotations which have compromised its essential message.

I’m just a little Crossed-out. It’s too much. It is out of proportion with the other elements of our faith and is used disproportionally to the other symbols we have.

I would like to see us move into God’s new word for the world – and move out of our perpetual lingering in God’s last word over the old world.

3

How Good Was Friday? part 1

It is almost Easter – my most conflicted time of year as a pastor.
I am smitten with the empty grave and with Pentecost. In fact, I am equally as excited about the Easter imagery as I am horrified by North American protestant’s fascination with the cross.
Initially this was a gut reaction. Then I went looking for resources I found these two books : Saved From Sacrifice by Mark Heim , The Non-Violent Atonement by Michael Hardin.
Two things seem to provide the ditch on either side of the road:
1 – Our most well attended services with the most visitors are our bloodiest in imagery.
2 – H. Richard Niebuhr’s  famous jab at ‘liberal’ christianity:
“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without
judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
This quote has bite for 3 reasons:
1) It is so true. My migration from a charismatic/evangelical context to a more mainline one revealed to me just how many people would be covered by Niehbuhr’s concern. If your don’t hang out with mainline liberal folks, you might not realize how pervasive this allergy to blood is.
2) We live in a sanitized and sterilized culture (to paraphrase Cornell West) where most people have no connection to the meat on their table. They pick it up at the grocery store in plastic wrapped styrofoam containers. Only a small percentage of the population are farmers or hunters.
Meanwhile, we live in a horrifically violent culture (both domestic and military) but so few of us are familiar with blood. We outsource our violence.
This is why a penal substitutionary view of the cross is so attractive /acceptable for so many. The vicarious nature of god pouring out ‘his’ wrath on Jesus results in a pornographic delight that can be seen in depictions like that famous scene in our movies [The Passion] and in many of our contemporary worship songs.
3) That Niehbuhr quote is thrown around too easily whenever someone wants to reexamine or revisit underlying assumptions about how we understand Easter.
Let me be clear about what I am saying and what I am not saying:
  • I am not saying that there was no cross and that there was no blood. I get both, I accept both and I proclaim both.
  • I am saying that something perverse has seeped into our understanding and our imagery.
  • What happened on that cross was real.
  • What happened on that cross mattered.
  • What happened on that cross was unjust.
  • What happened on that cross changed humanity’s relationship to God.

My concern is that we have misunderstood both how it changed and why it changed.
Let me wrap up with a constructive proposal.


When Jesus takes the bread and cup and forever changes their meaning he is saying “what they will do to me – don’t you, as my followers, do to anyone else”.

When Jesus says “forgive them, they know not what they do”, he is saying that they think they know what (and why) they are doing, but they are wrong.

When Jesus says “it is finished”, he is proclaiming the end of this type of scapegoating and violence by those who think they are doing it on God’s behalf.

2 Corinthians 5:18-21, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. [The one] who had no sin [was made] to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
We are to be about peace. We are to be a people of reconciliation. In Christ, God absorbed the hatred and violence of the world. The one who knew no sin – an innocent man – was proclaimed guilty and God responds by proclaiming that we who are guilty of doing that are now innocent and our sins are forgiven.
This is the good news of gospel! This is the hope for human-kind. No one needs to be sacrificed any more. No one needs to die because God is angry – Christ’s unjust death is to be the last. In the empty grave we see the vindication of the victim. God took humanity’s wrong judgement of Jesus and now judges us right with God. We who are guilty are proclaimed innocent because the innocent one was found guilty.
Easter is the great reversal and the vindication of the victimized. It is finished. We can’t afford to keep missing this and repeating the mistake. We who follow Jesus must be about peace and reconciliation. Too many have been scapegoated, placed on crosses and victimized by violence … in Jesus’ name.
God forgive us – we know not what we are doing.
Let it be finished.
In Jesus’ name.
You can read part 2, part 3, and part 4 in this series.

Continue reading “How Good Was Friday? part 1” →

3

Atonement and Adiaphora

Today we begin a Summer Series on the A B C’s of Theology.

Atonement is one of those rare words that actually works in English: people often utilize the at-one-ment memory device.

At its most basic, atonement simply means the re-pair of something that was broken or separated. Specifically here, we are saying that something had come between humanity and God – this is usually called ‘sin’ ( or separation). ?Something was wrong. Whether you talk about humanity having lost its way, or being lost, falling into sin, or under a curse … atonement is that work of God in Christ that changed-fixed-repaired-healed-forgave the problem. Wooden Cross

This is where it gets more complicated. Neither the Bible nor the early churches’ creeds state or take a stance on an atonement theory. For as important a topic as atonement is, it is significant that no definitive stance is required.

The above situation has led to two historical developments:

1) Many varieties of atonement theories have emerged, and subsequently evolved, throughout church history.

The theories all use different word pictures. Depending on what you paint the problem as, the work of God in Christ will take on different metaphors. Some use a courtroom, some a battlefield, others a dungeon (prison) and still others an exemplar motif.

The earliest theories are labeled ‘Ransom Theories’. My favorite is the ‘Fish Hook’ where God lures Satan – who has captured humanity – by offering the human Jesus as ‘bait’. The devil takes the bait and Jesus is killed … but the devil is surprised that inside the ‘worm’ of Jesus’ humanity is the ‘hook’ of Christ’s divinity and the devil is caught! Easter morning is thus the undoing of both Satan and death itself.
This kind of motif can also be in C.S. Lewis’ the Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe.

Later generations (and European ones) did not like that God would have to ‘trick’ or bargain with the devil. This lead to a developing of some other theories that had been around. Christus Victor and Substitutionary theories are two examples that remain popular to this day.
Substitionary models are a particularly interesting example because in the second millennia of church history you can see a profound evolution of different models which line up (and are born out of) out of. You can watch the Feudal (honor) era change with the rise of legal, economic, and civil developments during the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation.

The past century has seen the rise of two alternative (and very different) theories. One is called Moral Influence theory. Jesus models for us (exemplar) and life lived for others and to God. Moral Influence has the added attraction (to many) of not being so bloody. It is the favorite theory of many within the liberal or mainline branches of the church for this reason.

My favorite group of theories are the Anti-Violence branch. Jesus is killed unjustly and willingly submits to this fate in order to unmask the ‘powers the be’ and expose the fraudulent structures of sacrifice and scape-goating that both nations/empires and religions utilize in order to preserve their position of power. Recent books like ‘Saved from Sacrifice’ and ‘The NonViolent Atonement’ have helped make a new generation aware of alternatives to those that make God seem like a weakling or which paint God as a child-abusing monster with split-personality disorder.

2) Some groups have become so fond of one theory over another that they begin to say that theory is the the only adequate way to understand the work of Christ. Some ‘Reformed’ camps have done this with the Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) theory. This has led to some evangelical camps claiming that PSA is THE gospel.

The above points are why we need to introduce another ‘A’ word: adiaphora.

Adiaphora is a very old concept (ancient Greeks) that came center stage during the Reformation. Initially it meant ‘non-essentials’ and refers to practices that are neither forbidden NOR commanded in Scripture. Now it more generally refers to topics that are not specified in scripture.

I would put ‘Atonement Theories’ in this category. Admitedly that is a difficult and odd thing to do! One would think that the Cross of Christ and the implications of Easter – which are so central to the Christian faith – would cause it to matter deeply what one believed about its structure and effectiveness.
Unfortunately, as much a folks are willing (and eager) to argue about different theories (I am one of them), neither the Bible nor Creeds specify a particular theory and with the historical evolution of so many elaborate options … it looks like this will continue to be a lively conversation for a long time to come.

Further Resources:
Changing Signs of Truth by Crystal Downing ($10 on Kindle)
The Jesus Driven Life by Michael Hardin ($9 on Kindle)
A Better Atonement (e-book) by Tony Jones ($3 on Kindle)

You can also listen to my interview with Michael Hardin from this past Easter.

5

Concerns About ‘The’ Cross

I have received lots of feedback via email, FaceBook and text on Blood: Easter, the Cross and that quote about Liberals. 

It seems that most people get the main thrust of the article but have one doubt/hesitation they can’t shake/make sense of. I was asked to write a response at a non-grad school level (which I love to do).

I have two requests:

  1. If you are looking for something more academic please read Heim’s Saved From Sacrifice. It is wonderful.
  2. If you are a big fan of a penal substitution theory of atonement, understand that I am not. I’m willing to talk about it – just understand that it would be unhelpful for you to simply repeat that view as a defense of that view.

So let’s get started!

  • You said that we focus too much on the cross, but I love the cross and think we don’t focus on it enough! Jesus said to take up our crosses – we are a resurrection people and resurrection only happens after crucifixion. 

There are several problems here. cross-150x150
First, there was more than one cross. There were three just in our Easter story (but not in most of our pictures – like the one to the right). So you can’t say ‘the’ cross. You can say ‘that’ cross. It is vital to get just how many crosses there were. Roman use of crosses was systemic. Jesus’ cross was not an exception in that way.

Second, you are using ‘the cross’ as a shorthand for the whole story. The incarnation, crucifixion, empty grave and pentecost provide a much better snapshot. To try and sum them up in ‘the cross’ is too limited.

Third, we are people of the resurrection. That does not mean that ‘the cross’ is a good thing. What happened there was unjust. That God redeemed it and brought something good out of it … does not change that it was tragic.

 

  • How do we engage the cross still as people who follow Jesus?

It seems like most of the things that we say about the cross are the first half of what should be a longer sentence.

“We preach the cross and Christ crucified” … yes but what do we preach about the cross?  That is was unjust? That ‘it is finished’ (the sacrificial system)?

“Jesus died our sins” …  yes but also because of our sin? And to what end? To move us away from the scapegoating impulse? To expose and unmask our unjust propensity toward violence?

Here is the problem: if we are not careful, we miss the radical reversal that Jesus’ cross is supposed to provide and we end up simply absorbing it into the system that it was meant to expose. This is a tragedy that ends up normalizing the violence Jesus unmasks and continues the cycle of victimization Jesus was trying to break.

Because of the way talk about the cross in half-sentences and short-hand phrases, we end up siding with the Romans’ use of power and violence and miss the fact that on Good Friday, God was not on the side of the Romans but that God was with Jesus on that cross.

 

  • What do we do with the sacrificial lamb imagery? 

 I will withhold my real answer (that it was contextual and historically located) and will instead present what I think is a more helpful response!

We see a trajectory in our canon. God moves Abraham from human sacrifice to animal & grain … later God moves on from that system ( you see this in passages like Psalm 40:6 “sacrifice and offering you did not desire” and Hosea 6:6 “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice”)

People will often quote Hebrews 9:22 “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”. The half they leave out is that it actually says “under the law …”

You see what has happened? By not saying the first half (under the law) and only saying the second half, we actually miss the entire point of Jesus’ sacrifice and end up reinforcing the system Jesus came to move us on from!  We live and think as if we are still under the law!

The way talk and think about the cross of Christ actually undoes the very thing that Jesus came to do.

The rest of Hebrews 9 says that Jesus died once of all. So we don’t need to kill ‘them’ – they are ‘us’. We are all them – the all. Jesus died once for all so that we could stop this us-them thinking and stop victimizing and scapegoating. We miss this and then absorb ‘the cross of Christ‘ into the very system of power and violence that Jesus came to destroy.

 

  • I thought that the blood shed on the cross provides the forgiveness of sin?

Jesus forgave sins before the crucifixion. Part of the problem with saying ‘the cross’ as a form of shorthand for the whole story is that we skip both the life and teaching of Jesus. Jesus got in trouble for forgiving sins. How could he do that if what you are saying is true?

See? God forgives sin. How can God do that? Well if the debt that is owed is to God … then God can forgive them. The problem with they way we have been taught to think and talk about ‘the cross’ is that God is not free to forgive. God has to play by some external rules and ‘with out the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness’. But remember that the law is that way. God is not.  Jesus, and this true wether you think Jesus was a messenger of God or God incarnate, forgave sins before the shedding of blood. How did he do that if they way were taught is true?

God forgives sins. Thank God! And we need to repent. We have made God into something Jesus was meant to destroy. We have placed God on the side of the powers and violence that God was trying to combat. We have returned to the very thing God was attempting to redeem us from and release us from. We have absorbed Jesus’ cross into the very system Jesus was attempting to unmask and expose. We have missed the very lesson that Easter is supposed to teach us.

I will contend that God was with Jesus on that cross and that the empty grave is the vindication of the victim so that we might be freed from the cycle of violence and victimization … once for all.

 

I look forward to your ongoing feedback and I will try to respond throughout the day to any honest questions that come up.

3

Blood: Easter, the Cross & that quote about Liberals

It is almost Easter – my most conflicted time of year as a pastor.

I am smitten with the empty grave. In fact, I am almost as excited about the Easter imagery as I am horrified by N. American Protestant’s fascination with the cross.
I have written and talked about this disturbing trend in the past so I won’t take the time to elaborate on it here.

This whole subject has been intensified for me this year. I have been leading a discussion at my church through Lent about historic atonement theories. The hope in doing so has been twofold.

  • We wanted to look at how the churches’ understand of the cross has changed over time.
  • I wanted to suggest a way to move past those previous and limited views.

We have been working through this in conversation with several resources: Saved From Sacrifice, The Non-Violent Atonement and the work of Michael Hardin.
It has been a powerful excersise and I have learned a great deal in the process. It is the week before Palm Sunday and I have two things in the back of my mind:lamb

  1. It bothers me that our most well attended services with the most visitors are our bloodiest (in imagery).
  2. That damn H. Richard Niehbuhr quote.

His famous jab at ‘liberal’ christianity:

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

This quote gets under my skin so much. Here are 3 reasons why:
1) It is so true. I suspected it when I migrated out West and it is has only been confirmed as I have emerged from an charismatic/evangelical context to a more mainline one. I can not tell you how many people would be covered by Niehbuhr’s concern.

2) We live in a sanitized and sterilized culture (to paraphrase Cornell West) where most people have no connection to the meat on their table. They pick it up at the grocery store in plastic wrapped styrofoam containers. I say this as an avid hunter descended from farmers. We live in a horrifically violent culture (both domestic and military) but so few of us are familiar with blood. We outsource our violence.
This is why a penal substitutionary view of the cross is so attractive /acceptable for so many. The vicarious nature of god pouring out ‘his’ wrath on Jesus results in a pornographic delight that can be seen in depictions like that famous scene in The Passion and in many of our contemporary worship songs.

3) That Niehbuhr quote is thrown around too easily whenever someone wants to reexamine or revisit underlying assumptions about what happened (or how we understand) Easter.

Let me be clear about what I am saying and what I am not saying:
I am not saying that there was no cross and that there was no blood. I get both, I accept both and I proclaim both.
I am saying that something perverse has seeped into our understanding and our imagery.

  • What happened on that cross was real.
  • What happened on that cross mattered.
  • What happened on that cross was unjust.
  • What happened on that cross changed humanity’s relationship to God.

My concern is that we have misunderstood both how it changed and why it changed.
Let me end the critique there and wrap up with a constructive proposal.

When Jesus takes the bread and cup and forever changes their meaning he is saying “what they will do to me – don’t you, as my followers, do to anyone else”.
When Jesus says “forgive them, they know not what they do”, he is saying that they think they know what (and why) they are doing, but they are wrong.
When Jesus says “it is finished”, he is proclaiming the end of this type of scapegoating and violence by those who think they are doing it on God’s behalf.

2 Corinthians 5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 [The one] who had no sin [was made] to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.*

We are to be about peace. We are to be a people of reconciliation. In Christ, God absorbed the hatred and violence of the world. The one who knew no sin – an innocent man – was proclaimed guilty and God responds by proclaiming that we who are guilty of doing that are now innocent and our sins are forgiven.

This is the good news of gospel! This is the hope for human-kind. No one needs to be sacrificed any more. No one needs to die because God is angry – Christ’s unjust death is to be the last. In the empty grave we see the vindication of the victim. God took humanity’s wrong judgement of Jesus and now judges us right with God. We who are guilty are proclaimed innocent because the innocent one was found guilty.

Easter is the great reversal and the vindication of the victimized. It is finished. We can’t afford to keep missing this and repeating the mistake. We who follow Jesus must be about peace and reconciliation. Too many have been scapegoated, placed on crosses and victimized by violence … in Jesus’ name.

God forgive us – we know not what we are doing.
Let it be finished.
In Jesus’ name.

 

 

* If that final verse reads a little different than you are used to hearing it, you should listen to the podcast with Michael Hardin.

1

Charismatics, Evangelicals, Singing & the unamed ‘You’

by Bo Sanders

Three interesting conversations have recently merged in my little corner of the interwebs:

  • The Republican presidential primaries have brought to the limelight some very complex subjects like race, economics, and religion that are handled with stereotypical banter, generally at increased volume.

Santorum is an uber-Catholic, Romney is Mormon, Newt wants the Evangelical vote and all of this is contrasted to Obama’s social-justice-Jeremiah-Wright past. The religion aspect of this election year is going to be fascinating.

I point out that in our national militarism mentality and our cultural myth of redemptive violence, that PSA is playing a role in our religious silo that is spilling over in unhelpful and even harmful ways.

The author calls them evangelical – in contrast to pentecostals who speak in tongues – even though I am not sure that the Vineyard (which both of her congregations are) are wholly representative off all the different camps that come under that tent.

 

Last week I posted that I was ‘worried about worship’ and one of my concerns dealt with the epistemology behind the band-centered worship experience. I said

“ Is this situation inflamed by an epistemology employed by evangelical and charismatic churches? I don’t know how else to say it but …. if you think that you are singing to God (vs. about God) and the God is actually listening to you and evaluating what is going on, then are you more critical of both the sour-notes and distracting ‘self’ behavior or overly elaborate performances?”

As I read the review of Luhrmann’s new book in the New Yorker magazine (“Seeing is Believing” by Joan Acocella) I was amazed at the obvious parallels to what I had attempted to address. Unfortunaly, the New Yorker requires that you subscribe to the magazine in order to read the article… so I can’t just link there for you. If, however you get the chance to pick up the magazine or copy it at the library, it is well worth your time.

Without the article to link to I will just offer a couple of related thoughts:

The three step plan to Hearing the Voice of God (the Father) is exactly – 100% – my experience of being raised evangelical. So many people that I talk to who were/are charismatic or evangelical have this exact same experience [she also mentions there lack of social service, lack of political involvement, and lack of theology]. The thing I still find shocking is that so many of those outside those groups do not know that is what it is like inside, and how often those inside don’t know that this is not everyone else’s experience of the christian faith.

David Bebbington in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1989) did a masterful job of find some common theme that ran through evangelical history. This was a tough job (not always obvious) and has resulted in much debate about if these can even be called one grouping in any coherent sense. I am leaning more and more toward saying that Evangelicalism is not an official membership but is rather a dynamic relation between experience and expression. These two things are facilitated by an epistemology that is more central than any doctrinal or theological markers. Over the last 400 years what has been defining is not the political involvement (it has changed) or what was believed (it has adapted) but the experiential component (enthusiasm) that manifests is a distinct expression.

I have been out of the worship-band culture (Hillsong, Matt Redman, etc) for 2 years. I recently preached at a church with a worship band. What stood out to me so forcibly was the word “You”. I didn’t know why at first but as the service progressed I was struck by how many (all) the songs were addressed to ‘You’. You are holy, you are famous, I need you, etc. It stands in stark contrast to songs sung to God or about God like: a mighty fortress is our God, Oh God our help is ages past, and even Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

I often get to hear Mainliners talk about the alien experience of stumbling upon a christian music station on the radio. I also get to hear visitors to our pipe-organ-hymns-only church wonder about the lack of intimacy and excitement. I think it has less to do with the music style and more to do with the epistemology of singing songs to a ‘You’ and all the assumptions that would accompany that subtle change.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this – agree or disagree

[originally posted at Homebrewed Christianity]

2

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑