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