The Minority Report of Faith and the Father's Subversive Goodness

Hello All,

When you view God, the Father of Jesus, as a god who, because of his nature, demands sacrifice, it puts you in a very precarious position. A god who requires a sacrifice is a god who must be appeased. Failure to do so can only end in a negative way: an afterlife that you will want to avoid as much as possible. Fear is a powerful motivator.

One way out of this is to create an atonement theory that pits the loving Jesus against his angry Father. Jesus sacrifices himself for you to satiate his blood-thirsty Father. Afterall, we see all those scary passages in Scripture as warnings, right? But along side of them, we also see a thread of goodness, grace, and mercy. What if we were to understand this double story in Scripture differently? Perhaps, that God himself has actually worked into Scripture not a yin and yang we need to somehow find a logic to intermingle together, but rather the very clear, yet minority report of his mercy.

Could it be there by design to show us a real Father God who is Love Itself so that we can by faith refuse the chaos of voices screaming at us otherwise?

The message that God is Love and therefore ultimately restores ALL is the thread of a subversive faith deliberately intended to counter our need for violence and a violent God.

The following two paragraphs are from Brad Jersak's newest text, "A More Christlike Word":

"The broken voice of sacrificial religion demands retributive justice, and so do its gods. By contrast, the Bible also reveals the surprising and counterintuitive response to our spiritual and social malady: humanity redeemed in Christ, the true image of God. God-in-Christ counters retribution with restoration, justice-as-punishment with justice-as-mercy, wrath with forgiveness, and death anxiety with resurrection life. Jesus’s messianic victory is not through military conquest but through radical, kenotic (self-emptying) service. Thus, the voice of Christ forever abolishes sacrificial religion through the supreme act of self-giving love.

The Bible preserves God’s revelation of fallen humanity not because it harmonizes with the voice of self-giving love, but because the former revelation begs for and points to the latter. It is therefore nonnegotiable that we read particular texts in the context of the whole story, so we don’t mistake specific retributive invectives or religious injunctions as “the word of the Lord” to followers of the voice of Jesus."

Which voice in Scripture will you listen to and obey:

The accuser, who believes someone to be guilty and demands violence and wrath?

The victim, who believes the violence against them was undeserved and therefore demands vengeance?

The Law, which believes only retributive justice and sacred/political violence will work?

Or to the voice of the Lamb, which calls for mercy, forgiveness, and self-giving love?

As Jersak states:

"We will need to render due diligence to the often difficult work of distinguishing between the image of God portrayed by sacrificial religion and the image of the Father revealed by the self-offering Lamb.

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy

The End of Violent Sacrifice Caused by Mimesis, not Nature

Hello All,

Many of you may be unfamiliar with René Girard, a 20th Century theologian whose atonement theory has found more and more voice in Christian circles. In short, Girard postulated that the self-sacrifice of Christ on the Roman cross of execution was done to expose the violent nature of humanity. God, who never delighted in sacrifice in the first place, entered into our need for sacrifice caused by a deep covetous desire to be God ourselves. Girard equates this desire with mimesis, the desire to imitate. For example, two children commonly fight over one toy, but only after the first child begins to play with it; the second becomes jealous and wants to possess it for his own. Add more children who want the same toy, and chaos ensues. In Girard's view, this has further implications for Christianity because we become violent in our mimetic jealousy and therefore need to find a scapegoat to unleash our violence rather than upon the community.  Therefore, a victim "saves" society. For example, Cain kills Abel because God was more pleased with Abel; or, Caiaphas' advice concerning the crucifixion of Christ: "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” (John 11:50)

Below are more enlightening remarks by Girard:

The suffering of Christ "is the underside of scapegoating sacrifice; it reveals everything. In other words, it brings to perfection what is already there in the Hebrew Bible. It is the revelation of sacrifice as false worship: it is nothing more than the result of a false accusation against the victim. [...] Christ is in the place of all victims since the foundation of the world, all sacrificial victims, revealing their accomplice--a willing accomplice--of the violence of humanity with divine permission, as it were, to enable us to reach the point where we become able to understand that."

In other words, God divinely consents to be sacrificed as Christ by humanity's violence in order to expose its violent, mimetic jealousy and thus end the need for sacrifice forever, including its use by humanity as a unifying method. And yet, at the same time, through this sacrifice humanity is saved through Christ, for there could be no humanity without Christ's self-sacrifice--we would have eventually destroyed each other. Therefore, when you celebrate communion, you're actually celebrating Christ having ended the system of violent sacrifice, and through communion, drinking the wine and bread, you actually obtain what you were desiring from the beginning: to be united with God.

Lastly, I'd like to submit that the whole system of violence erected as sacrifice was brought about not by an evil human nature, but rather by blindness, by deception, and human *minds* hostile toward God. Even after the slaying of Abel, humanity remained in the image of God. It was Paul who clearly saw that Christ was in him and in the Gentiles, and who prayed that a person's heart and mind would be open to the reality that they were in fact objects of Christ's salvation, even while they continued to sin.

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy

Brightening God by Darkening Humanity?

 Hello All,

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), in argument against the low views of humanity propagated in and before his time by mainline Christianity (and being horrified specifically by slavery and the apathy of some Christians toward it), eventually wrote the following:

“There can be no spirit of brotherhood, no true peace, any farther than men come to understand their affinity with and relation to God and the infinite purpose for which he gave them life. As yet these ideas are treated as a kind of spiritual romance: and the teacher who really expects men to see in themselves and one another the children of God, is smiled at as a visionary. The reception of this plainest truth of Christianity would revolutionize society, and create relations among men not dreamed of at the present day. A union would spring up, compared with which our present friendships would seem estrangements. Men would know the import of the word Brother, as yet nothing but a word to multitudes. None of us can conceive the change of manners, the new courtesy and sweetness, the mutual kindness, deference, and sympathy, the life and energy of efforts for social melioration, which are to spring up, in proportion as man shall penetrate beneath the body to the spirit, and shall learn what the lowest human being is. Then insults, wrongs, and oppressions, now hardly thought of, will give a deeper shock than we receive from crimes, which the laws punish with death. Then man will be sacred in man's sight: and to injure him will be regarded as open hostility towards God.” 

Channing profoundly suggests the above would only have been possible had religion not, in its effort glorify God's splendor, negated humanity's worth; had it not sought to "brighten" God's goodness by emphasizing humanity's "darkness." Imagine how the world would be different if the dominating Christian conceptions of God and people had been different for the last 200 years.

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy

Sulphur is for Pure Praise

 Hello All,

Both the prophet Jeremiah and Jesus himself warned Israel about the coming destruction by Babylon and Rome, respectively. Faith placed in military might is not well founded and this was the problem of Jews in the times of Jeremiah and Jesus and it is also one of our problems today. All too quickly we assume that God is on our side, and this belief is part of a vicious cycle that also creates an "us versus them" mentality. It also feeds and is fed by our desire that evil doers and unbelievers would be punished and ultimately rejected by God (of course, we're never included in *that* number, are we, because we'll *always* be faithful, right???). However, for those with faith in God's goodness and peace toward all humanity, there is a subversive undercurrent of promise throughout Scripture that all humanity will be healed, redeemed, and restored. Isaiah announces it, and Paul later expounds upon it.  Isaiah (45:22-26) writes:

22 Turn to me and be safe,

    all you ends of the earth,

    for I am God; there is no other!

23 By myself I swear,

    uttering my just decree,

    a word that will not return:

To me every knee shall bend;

    by me every tongue shall swear,

24 Saying, “Only in the Lord

    are just deeds and power.

Before him in shame shall come

    all who vent their anger against him.

25 In the Lord all the descendants of Israel

    shall have vindication and glory.”

Paul writes later (Phil. 2:10-11):

10 that at the name of Jesus

    every knee should bend,

    of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11 and every tongue [joyfully] confess that

    Jesus Christ is Lord,

    to the glory of God the Father.

Of course, now you're going to say to me "Ha! It says that people must turn first in order to be safe. What if someone doesn't turn?"

To which I would respond, "And it also reveals that his word WILL be true, since ALL will come before him, even those who come in shame. Moreover, every knee will bow and every tongue will JOYFULLY confess (exomologeō)."

And what's more, some will come in shame, but that is not the same as saying they'll be condemned and cast into eternal damnation.

Something strange happens in Paul's reference in Philippians. Paul, who is obviously quoting from the Isaiah passage, blatantly omits the part about Israel being vindicated and instead writes that EVERYONE will JOYFULLY confess Jesus' Lordship (isn't that how one is "saved" according to Romans???) and this all is not to Israel's glory, an ethnic group, but rather to the glory of the Father.

When we see the Father we'll realize that he has been working to redeem and restore EVERYONE.

EVERYONE, even Christians, will need to be salted with fire (sulphur is used for purification, not damnation). It's just that some will come having believed, and some not. But ALL WILL JOYFULLY confess Jesus is Lord and give the Father glory.

I didn't say it; Paul did--and it's completely fine and normal for Paul to modify an Old Testament prophet's understanding of God, as he so often does.

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy

Fear vs. Love

 Hello All,

Why should the Church teach the concept of post-mortem Eternal Conscious Torment (ETC)?  Quite simply put, it is a teaching that leads most quickly and most effectively to moral behavior. Fear of punishment is a powerful motivator.  Even some of the early Church fathers who did not believe in ETC realized this and went the easy route to modify the behaviors of others, while they themselves knew better. In the following paragraph, historian George Marsden quotes from a more recent preacher, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), and reveals Beecher's thoughts on this topic, which I find very honest.

The idea of eternal punishment for all who do not know Christ, accordingly, makes us "shiver and tremble with sensibility." Such sensibilities accounted for the move away from the "medieval literalization" of the doctrine. Nevertheless, Beecher did not shock his audience and deny this doctrine. "I must preach it," he says with apparent sincerity, even though "it makes me sick." It is a "great element of moral government." No one else, however, he hastens to add, need accept this view. "We are to be utterly tolerant of those who have adopted other theories; . . . we are neither to disown them as Christians, nor to discipline them for believing as they do—the day has gone by when a man is to be disciplined for his honest belief. . . ."

Beecher and I may not agree on every point in other areas of his doctrine, and he may not have lived the most exemplary life, but his point is solid.  Again, fear of punishment is a powerful motivator and as others have said, has been seen as necessary to produce a society that is moral in both civil- and self-governance. Fair enough. But to see that as an *absolute* necessity is short-sighted. Fear is a powerful motivator, but Love is more so by far. What would happen if Christians unanimously demonstrated love toward those who are not Christians, and, of course, even to their own? The world would change within one generation. Love seeks to build bridges (which is what the Pharisees were *supposed* to do). Fear, instead, creates unhealthy and destructive borders.

May Holy Spirit convince your heart that you are loved so that you can be love to another person.

Grace=Peace,

Jeremy