[Commenting note: Please take Christianity from a Watsonian rather than a Doylist perspective (link goes to tvtropes). Antitheism is fine, but pointing out that Christianity is not ‘technically’ ‘true’ is boring. Do you go up to people arguing about the ending of Infinite Jest and tell them it is made up?]
[Content warning: Nice Jesus.]
[Epistemic warning: I am an atheist.]
[Warning warning: Warnings.]
Christian sotierology is the study of how, exactly, Jesus dying on the cross managed to cause everyone to be released from sin, given that at first blush “God gets murdered” has no obvious connection to “God forgives people’s sins”. The most popular among modern Protestants is the penal substitution theory, because– with the exception of Pentecostals– modern Protestants have no sense of aesthetics.
(Episcopalians sort of have a sense of aesthetics but they stole it from the Catholics.)
But there are other theories: this article presents an excellent explanation of the Christus Victor theory, popular among the Church Fathers.
When I was Christian, I came up with my own theory of the atonement. My argument was that, while God was all-knowing, that didn’t mean he was all-experiencing. I know everything that’s happening downstairs right now, but that doesn’t mean I have the experience of being downstairs. At the time, I didn’t have the concept of “qualia”, but that’s what I was groping for: God has the qualia of a deity.
Unfortunately, forgiveness and compassion require the ability to understand, really fundamentally. God is, quite literally, Good Itself; how can Good Itself understand temptation, the desire to choose the worse over the better? If the root of compassion is “I am human; nothing human is alien to me”, where does that leave God, the opposite of humanity?
The answer is that God chooses to become human. He experiences everything we experience: he has a mother and a father; he eats; he gets drunk; he doesn’t know things; he farts; he is tempted; he gets angry, occasionally at innocuous fig trees; he suffers; and, finally, he has the ultimate human experience, the only one all of us share– he dies.
And he understands, and so he can forgive. It isn’t the death that causes God to be able to forgive; it’s the Incarnation, the Word made flesh and dwelt among us, with the cross as a capstone.
This naturally leads to universalism— if God forgives, he forgives us all– but to be honest I never had much truck with the idea of an all-good God torturing everyone forever.
So here’s the question: it is very unlikely I am the first person to come up with this theory, given that Christianity is the world’s most popular fandom and has some of the smartest big name fans. Has anyone else heard of a theologian who came up with a similar thing? Is it already a heresy that has a name? Also, what good theories of the atonement do you know?
Thing of Things 
I’ll just say that I had the same thoughts back when I was a Christian. Also, Episcopalians get “our” aesthetics from past Catholics the same way modern Catholics do so you can’t say that one has a sense of aesthetics but the other doesn’t. 😛
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Episcopalians have a way better sense of aesthetics than Catholics, and I’m saying that as someone who has to
sufferworship in Modern Post-Vatican II Catholic Renovated or New Architecture churches. Let’s rip out the altar rails! Let’s play “Hide the Tabernacle!” “Baptismal Font or Swimming Pool? You Decide!” Statues non, felt banners si!Catholic centre or Lovecraftian Temple of Dagon? You tell me!
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… Is that the catholic church near cal? On college ave? I was raised there!
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DO NOT WANT.
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“Also, Episcopalians get “our” aesthetics from past Catholics the same way modern Catholics do so you can’t say that one has a sense of aesthetics but the other doesn’t.”
IMNSHO, Catholics in the Church of England are in fact just as much modern Catholics as those in the Church of Rome, so the idea that we stole their aesthetics is pretty ridiculous. (And certainly in the UK there’s a much stronger liturgical tradition in the higher end of the CoE than there is in most Roman parishes)
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‘Catholics in the Church of England’ is an oxymoron. The C of E is Anglican, not Catholic.
High Anglicans do do that bling tho.
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It’s possible it’s not discussed because of the obvious-to-me problem with it?? That is, in canon, Jesus never sinned, so experiencing the human condition in the way he does wouldn’t seem to give him the understanding of the important thing for forgiving sins – why we sin. The only part of humanity that’s still alien to him is the *actually sinning part*.
This requires that ‘being tempted’ be insufficient to get the understanding of sin, which seems only plausible to me, not likely, but idk maybe it’s more plausible to people who grok it more?
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I stumbled on a similar idea about nine years ago, and immediately realized I wasn’t Christian.
Basically, it occurred to me that if Jesus was really divine, it would be impossible for him to even be tempted to sin (as all of God’s attributes are necessary and eternal, and one of them is moral perfection). Therefore, verses which explicitly say Jesus was tempted (e.g. Matthew 4:1-11) couldn’t possibly be true; and without passages like that, it’s hard to recognize anything human in Christ.
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Most Christian traditions hold the opinion that Jesus is partly divine and partly human, so he could certainly be tempted to sin. Don’t know what Monophysites say about this, though. (They are the ones coming closest to saying that Jesus was devine only)
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In the Catholic tradition I was raised in, Jesus is said to be wholly divine and wholly human simultaneously.
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And I should also say my “insight” from nine years ago had more personal significance than just overturning my belief in the simultaneous divinity and humanity of Jesus. Along with it immediately came a wholesale suspicion of the authority of the New Testament. My then-implicit reasoning went something like, “If the Gospels got something major like Jesus’ capacity to sin and be tempted so wrong, how reliable can the rest of the NT possibly be?”.
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I don’t see why moral perfection entails being unable to be tempted. Doesn’t it just entail never giving in to temptation?
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Depends on your religious views. If being angry at your brother is as bad as murdering him, or if being aroused by your neighbors wife is as bad as adultery, then feeling a temptation to punch your brother or have sex with your neighbor’s wife is a sin.
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Regarding the header: I don’t need to be warned about most warnings, but I would like to be prepared for warning warnings before I read them, so could I ask that in the future you provide “Warning warning: warning warnings warning” warnings warning of the “Warning warning: warning” warnings?
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Has anyone else heard of a theologian who came up with a similar thing?
No idea; I get all my theology out of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” 🙂
Is it already a heresy that has a name?
If it is heretical, then probably yes; the first four centuries seemed to be “Invent the craziest heresy you possibly can, and then add bells on top”, so anything that could be heretical has more or less been discovered. I get a lot of amusement from modern Episcopalians (and progressive Christians of all stripes, including Catholicism to be fair) coming up with what they think are spiffy new knock ’em on their backsides ideas, only they’re actually very old heresies.
Also, what good theories of the atonement do you know?
None? Not that bothered with parsing out the various degrees (except I will always be up for yelling at Luther about forensic justification because hell no, “dung heaps covered with snow” – matter is not intrinsically evil, as the monastery should have knocked into your head if you weren’t too busy being neurotic, having a man-crush on St Paul, and thinking you knew better than St James).
I think the root is what you say: “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”. God is dead. Yes, we commemorated that on Holy Saturday. God died; God went down into Sheol (the Harrowing of Hell), God suffered and died and the resurrection is not a metaphor, it is human flesh and a human body overcoming death.
The Fall is the key here, and I do get slightly cross with jokes about fruit and the misunderstanding that it was the knowledge of good and evil – knowledge itself – that God wanted to keep from humanity, keep humanity ignorant and servile, etc.
No. It wasn’t the knowledge, it was – as you put it – the experience. First thing we did with our big new leap in understanding? Feel ashamed, hide ourselves, and engage in a game of “pass the parcel” with blame – Adam blames Eve and God – “the woman you put with me” – and Eve blames the serpent (the serpent has no-one to push the blame onto, so it gets the thin edge of the wedge).
It is, in the technical thelogical term, a Mystery. That is why we use metaphor and parable and poetry to depict it, casting it in the form of story about a garden and a snake and a beautiful, desirable tree; because only poetry can express such things, where concrete language fails to plumb the depths. The Atonement is how, given that human nature and human destiny were so warped and bent out of their true path by the choice of disobedience by our First Parents, given that something fundamental in the nature of the universe was apparently wrenched out of true (as if a universal constant could be altered, as if we could make it that “two and two is not four”) and that something so deep, so radically wrong, such a massive disutility (if I can borrow and mangle a term) needed an equally drastic and huge correction, and that only the Incarnation could do this.
O felix culpa! says the Easter antiphon, “Oh happy fault, oh necessary sin!” for this very reason – that God should become Man. We say (and we don’t understand while we say it) that God is Just, God is Love. This does not mean that God acts justly or that God is loving; God is Justice, the thing itself, the concept (that God is Love is the very essence of the Holy Spirit; the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father is not a feeling, it is not a thing, it is a Person, the Third Person of the Trinity).
The theory I find satisfying, and which I don’t know the formal name for, or who proposed it (I read a lot more than my dreadful memory for names can keep up with) is this:
It was necessary for Justice to be satisfied, because this was not merely a crime or fault against another being, but against the entire universe, our entire race, against Being and the Ground of Being itself. But how could humans ever make up for this? It was not in our power to return or mend or make good, so deep did the fault line go. Only God could perfectly make satisfaction*. But how is it just to punish the innocent? Therefore the Word became flesh, God became Man, and the guilt and the cure were combined in one person.
The sacrifice of Isaac foreshadows this; if it is terrible to think of a parent killing a child, yet (as the line from this episode in The Mysteries has God the Father say), “Yet mine own son I shall not spare”. The harm was so great, the damage so vast, that only that kind of desperate sacrifice could repair it (I’m thinking of the images in art corresponding to the Pieta, where depictions of the Trinity, as in this painting by El Greco, show God the Father holding the dead body of the crucified Christ).
(*You’re formerly Catholic, you’re familiar with the idea from Confession of making reparation or making satisfaction).
Sorry for the length; apparently if you give me an inch, I’ll give you ten miles of bad Catholicism in return 🙂
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I think the reason this isn’t one of the orthodox theories is that it assumes that God did things mainly to increase his own understanding about things he previously was wrong about. It seems more Gnostic than anything.
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… all those warnings, and no warning that the first link is to TvTropes? You could HURT someone like that, Ozy!
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I am a (bad, hella heretical) Christian… And this has always been my understanding after I turned from my wholly antitheist phase? Iirc what theologist say this explicitly. Among the modern ones, I think Rachel Held Evans and Peter Rollins do!!
Peter Rollins is cool, a bit Zizekian/commie-leaning. I like him.
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Oh, and I am almost certain that Alexander Men, the most proeminent Russian Orthodox theologian of the postwar era, developedthis argum too. The Orthodox are not big on all the freaky crime/punishment/penal judgment things generally.
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*developed this argument
(phone lol)
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Huh, I somehow gathered a lot of “GOD HATES YOU AND YOU WILL SUFFER IN A GODLESS VOID THAT IS HELL EVENTUALLY” from the Orthodox church I grew up in.
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I’m sorry that I don’t know what it’s called, but I know for a fact that I’ve heard this before.
I never thought it made much sense though, to be honest. It doesn’t explain why forgiveness was necessary in the first place. It assumes a sort of background cosmology in which there is some sort of objective morality, and the default thing for a good and powerful being to do is enforce that morality by hurting those who don’t meet it. Which is everyone. Since God is held by definition to be good, there’s nothing wrong with this. Forgiveness is at best superogatory, or maybe even morally neutral. Because otherwise God, in his prior-to-Jesus form, was less than perfect. Or if you adopt the idea that God is beyond time so from his perspective the resurrection experience has always been a part of him, it means that Gods moral perfection was causally dependent upon the existence of humanity.
Or heck, if it is just intrinsically good to be capable if forgiveness, and this implies that God is not intrinsically capable of forgiveness… you see the issue.
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A god which can forgive our sins without killing his son in a brutal, painful fashion is greater than one that needs to do such a thing. Anselm, suck my cock.
(is there any doctrine about what happens to those who threaten saints with fellatio?)
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Threatening Anselm with fellatio would mean threatening to suck his cock.
What you are probably thinking of is threatening him with irrumatio.
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It’s we who did the brutality; flogging and crucifixion are human things. It was also not inevitable; had the people believed and not cried out for Jesus to be killed (due to the political swings and roundabouts of the time), then obviously the death on the cross would not have been necessary.
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Martha- if that’s the case, then every Christian explanation I’m aware of for the crucifixion and resurrection fails.
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@ Fubarobfusco:
I never did get which way round fellatio was.
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“Fellatio” = “I suck you off.” “Irrumatio” = “I fuck your mouth.”
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Hah!
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Former Catholic here. It doesn’t look like it’s been brought up that the death on the cross is supposed to be in the same category as animal sacrifice in Old Testament times. The idea is that the animal takes on the burden of your sins and dies in your place. This is (possibly) where we get the term “scapegoat.” It’s also why we refer to Jesus as the “Lamb of God.”
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Oh my non existent God there are a lot of us.
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I’m amazed but somehow not surprised 🙂
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That’s penal substitution, no?
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I thought “Scapegoat” comes from earlier, from the goat sent to Azazel in Leviticus:
http://www.sefaria.org/Leviticus.16.7-10?lang=he-en&layout=heLeft&sidebarLang=all
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!!!
I never knew this was a thing! That had a name! And multiple ideas! (I was going to say I’d only heard the penal substitution one, but above commentator made me remember I’d actually heard the scapegoat one, and I’m not actually sure those are the same one.)
Also, I’ve never run into anyone else doing/wanting to do theology type things with faiths that are not actually their faiths, and this makes me !!
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I remember reading a passage where CS Lewis compares humans to toy soldiers that God wants to turn into real people. Then, the idea of the incarnation was that God had to undergo the process himself to learn what it’s like from the inside so he could help other people do the same thing. This seems to be similar to what you’re going for, but now I can’t find the passage where I read it. Book 4, Chapter 5 of Mere Christianity uses the toy soldier metaphor, but doesn’t mention that soteriology. I know Lewis often recycled metaphors, so it might be somewhere else, or I might just be misremembering.
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I think the fandom you’re thinking about originated with Paul:
> For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
— Hebrews 4:15
which implies that God is able to sympathize with our weaknesses because Jesus ran the full gauntlet of humanity.
(also i totally didn’t realize until just now that paul is the ur example of ascended fanon, seeing as all his headcanons made it into the literal Canon)
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I knew this one from slacktivist:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/11/29/proggod-why-an-incarnation/
But no idea regarding its derivation
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Another former Catholic here. My favorite conception of atonement—which probably hasn’t been taken seriously for centuries—is the “ransom theory.”
Basically, it states that in The Fall, Adam and Eve ceded the rights to ownership of humanity’s souls to Satan. In dying, Jesus offered himself to the devil, in exchange for the salvation of humankind. Satan accepted the deal, apparently thinking he would be able to keep Christ all to his infernal self for eternity. However, the divine Christ could not be confined in hell, and escaped after three days. Satan, presumably having let humanity go or lost whatever power he had over it, ended up with nothing.
My favorite part of this is the fact that God was giving a pretense of bargaining, instead of just acting by omnipotent fiat. Satan didn’t just miscalculate, he was actively deceived by YHWH. This all makes for a more complex, more interesting deity than the straight-laced God you hear about in Sunday school. He’s almost a trickster god!
It also reminds me of times in which God bargained and deceived in the Torah, like at Sodom and Gomorrah, and before the “sacrifice” of Isaac. Making God a wheeler-and-dealer in the story of atonement makes his character more consistent across the Old and New Testaments.
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Mm, all the bargaining over Sodom and Gomorrah is initiated by Abraham (“What if you find 50 good people? Or 40, or 30, or 20, or 10? Would you please not destroy the towns in that case?”) or Lot (“Can I run to the little town of Zoar instead of the mountains please? Zoar is super little, and the mountains are too far away.”). It’s not so much that God likes bargaining as that God can be talked down if you’re a really competent prophet. I think Moses also does some of this during the wandering-in-the-desert period.
The one bargain I know of God offering in the OT (I haven’t read the whole thing) is where he lets David choose his punishment for holding a census.
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I was not aware of that stories about David, and didn’t remember that passage of the Lot story; however, I did know Abraham initiated the bargaining in Genesis. However, I consider engaging in “bargaining down” or accepting a haggled offer to be bargaining, since it is a reciprocal activity. Under this sense of the word “bargaining,” OT God engaged in bargaining.
However, I understand that my original comment could be misleading, if someone is bringing to the table another understanding of “bargaining” (e.g. if they think the word is only appropriate for someone “bargaining up” or initiating a haggle). Sorry if I confused, though if I did, I’m the one who looks dumb and it’s my problem 😛
Also, thanks for bringing in your superior knowledge of the OT!
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Got it. It is interesting to note that God is amenable to being bargained with in these stories; I wouldn’t have assumed that from “all-powerful perfect being”.
David story is 1 Chronicles 21. I remember it because it’s confusing, mostly because it assumes that counting people is obviously evil. (My best theory is that the count is a prelude to a draft, and that would be evil, but there’s clearly some cultural context I’m missing.)
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I like it. Now, what’s your theory of what Jesus wrote on the ground in the parable of the woman taken in adultery? Terra terram accusat always seemed a little snide.
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Commentators are all over the map on that one. Some say it was the Ten Commandments, and others say it was something about mercy. My favorite idea is that he was just doodling, as an excuse to keep from staring at the woman, who having been caught in the act was probably only half-dressed and feeling ashamed.
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It’s an interesting one. The question is, Who was the intended audience? It doesn’t say the crowd could read it (it also doesn’t say they couldn’t, but most people would have been illiterate in those days), and the fact that he was writing on the ground implies he didn’t intend it to last. Canon leads me to assume Jesus never did anything without a reason, so I don’t think I like the “doodle” explanation.
Perhaps he was writing a message to God — one that he didn’t, for whatever reason, want the crowd to understand. I’m at a loss as to what it could have been, though.
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Current Catholic Anglican here – my understanding of atonement is very similar to that which you describe, although whether I came up with it myself, read it somewhere, or synthesised it from various other bits and pieces I’m not entirely sure.
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My interpretation is that the crucifixion was necessary to give god the RIGHT to forgive sins. If I do something cruel and horrible to you, and god decides to forgive me and let me go scott free, I’d say you had a fair reason to feel miffed. It’s only by stepping in and taking the rightful punishment for the world’s sins on himself that Jesus can fairly ask us to forgive one another.
Which I guess boils down to penal substitution.
Ps to stillnotking – I always liked the theory that Jesus was writing the names of particular women, and that his comment about being without sin was specifically referring to adultery – that is, that all the men there were hypocrites and he was calling them out on it.
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Current weird heretical non-denominational Christian here, while we’re all coming out of our, um, confessional booths. I’ve never come across a formal term for this, either, but like others I have certainly come across related thoughts being blogged, preached, etc.
A very big (maybe biggest?) chunk of my own current soteriology extends this idea, but in a way that the crucifixion and resurrection are still critical. I am not currently the right sort of crazy to really expound on it they way I’d like, but I’ll take a crack anyway.
You might call it Vulnerability Soteriology. A critical but tricky foundation to true closeness in relationships, in a nasty world like this one at least, is vulnerability – the reciprocal process of two parties opening themselves up to one another, such that it necessarily is painful if there is a subsequent withdrawal or rejection.
With God and humanity, mutual vulnerability is fundamentally and utterly impossible. There is maximal asymmetry between how trustworthy, moral, susceptible to pain, etc we are. So we are missing a vital piece of what’s needed for a relationship with God… which is kidna sucky given God created the entire universe mostly to have such a relationship, maybe.
The incarnation is the squaring of this circle. God experiences the horrors of the human condition, to the point of human death. This gives Them access to a qualia They need to fully relate to us, yes, but it does something equally or more important in the other direction. God’s claims to judge us fairly for what’s in our hearts, to know our pain and be working toward its end, etc, become believable – in a salient and emotional sense, beyond a “belief in belief” commitment to an inherently abstract and impersonal God’s goodness. Or to put it another way; it’s impossible to fulfil the greatest commandment, and fully love God with heart and soul and mind, until we have been shown God, like anyone else we might seek to love, is letting down Their guard to be close to us.
Getting more Trinitarian (ugh confusing) and Gospel-ey: Christ makes himself vulnerable to humankind. He, like the Father throughout much of the relationship with Israel, is ultimately rejected. But this time we can really see how much this rejection matters, because it culminates in us hurting Him, and indeed killing Him.
But Christ *also* feels, momentarily at the point of death (and descent into Hell, if you like), the same rejection by the Father humans implicitly feel, the same total absence of eternal and unconditional love.
“Eloi eloi lama sabachthani?”
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Also:
“The most popular among modern Protestants is the penal substitution theory, because– with the exception of Pentecostals– modern Protestants have no sense of aesthetics.”
Yesssssssssssssss.
But thanks, now I am going to have to resist the temptation to just drop this line on Protestants I know.
Also also, yes, before anyone asks, I might have been influenced by problems dealing with vulnerability and rejection in my own theorizing 😛
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Okay, but how do alien zombie cyborg death robots figure in it?
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I’m not especially clear to me if Jesus has saved all intelligent life in creation, or if the Borg need their own Borg Christ.
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Persistence is futile, you will be transubstantiated?
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Yeah no, that was an Evangelion reference!
I was guessing that you were trying to find a way to put a Christian spin on Evangelion’s idea/ethos (everything you’ve just said about vulnerability, seriously!), given that Evangelion has many surface-level Christian/Jewish trappings just because it looks cool to Japanese people, but actually has an atheistic/humanist premise (souls are real but strictly material and scientifically understood, not “supernatural”; life and consciousness were created by a precursor alien race and not by God, etc).
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Don’t forget Jesus saves all the unintelligent sapient life too! And a good thing, considering how bad we are at logic!
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Okay, but how do alien zombie cyborg death robots figure in it?
Let’s break that one down, multiheaded 🙂
(1) Alien – okay, are they ensouled? For the purposes of this question, we’re going to assume they are (they could be rational creatures without souls, but that means questions of salvation and damnation don’t apply to them). Aliens don’t have to be humanoid to be ensouled, they simply have to have an intellectual nature:
(2) Zombie – well, zombie means organic life-form, and zombie means dead reanimated organic life-form, which means mortal, so we’re doing well so far. They are not creatures of spirit, like angels and devils, but mortal beings like ourselves.
So this far, we’ve got ensouled and mortal.
(3) Cyborg – that’s an organic life-form that has mechanical augmentations. Depending on how much augmentation, and what organs have been replaced, we’re still talking “originally organic, not machine”.
(4) Death robots – okay, now if they’re robots, then they’re machines, and again that means that questions of salvation and damnation don’t apply to them (unless they’re sufficiently advanced to achieve true consciousness, and I’ll let the Thomists argue if that means they also become ensouled or not).
But the Zombie and Cyborg elements argue that they are, in fact, mortal organic ensouled life-forms that have been roboticised and (presumably) turned into killing-machines.
If they’re turning people into killing-machines, that takes care of the question “are they fallen and therefore in need of salvation?” I think we can pretty much answer that one “yes”.
The question we must then contemplate is: was the redeeming death of Christ sufficient for universal salvation, or does this require a new Incarnation?
And again – that’s above my pay-grade, I’m leaving that one to the Dominicans and the Jesuits to argue about 🙂
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“Yeah no, that was an Evangelion reference!”
Huh, interesting.
I’ve seen about 35 seconds of Evangelion (I was never an anime nerd, although I’ve been friends quite a few), and know close to nothing about it beyond “robots” and that “borrows some Judeo-Christianity imagery for its mythos” bit.
Relatively materialist and humanist readings of the Gospel abound among Christians I know – which isn’t even an especially large group – although I’d admit probably few take it as far as I do.
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There is a very similar idea in Mormonism. Basically that Jesus through the atonement experienced the entire human condition, and not just sin and death. If you’re interested you should google Alma chapter 7.
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Just few days ago: https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/forsaken/
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You should probably read the Borges short story “Three Versions of Judas.” Borges has a few stories that touch on The Jesus Problem, but that’s the one that includes, I think, your childhood theory.
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A very old (1850s?) scottish pastor named George MacDonald (also known as the grandfather of fairy tales) was excommunicated from the church for a lot of the ideas you are sharing.
Paul Young wrote a book called “The Shack” that echoes a lot of these ideas. I’ve met him and heard him speak, his own life story is one that absolutely refutes penal substitution.
There’s a theologian named Baxter Kruger (who is friends with Paul Young) who has spent a lot of time working on a theology like this.
http://baxterkruger.blogspot.com/
A pastor named Brian Zahnd, wrote a blog entry a few weeks ago about this.
http://brianzahnd.com/2015/04/jesus-died-us-god/ (this website is having technical issues. Working now, but may not later)
I know a Methodist pastor, Adam Hamilton, who also refutes penal substitution and I’ve heard him talk about different interpretations of what the crucifixion is about. I’m not sure if these are ideas are in any of his books. I haven’t read his books.
I can’t say that I’ve heard anyone give your idea exactly, but there are many voices out there that, I think, offer ideas that you would be much more in agreement with.
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Raised evangelical, former pelagian/universalist heretic here.
For the idea you raised in this post, it sounds familiar although the only version I can find my way to right now claims to be unique.
For a nonexhaustive list of atonement theories (btw “salvation” need not be about Jesus’s *death*), here’s a post from what used to be my favorite blog: http://theogeek.blogspot.tw/2007/06/atonement-again.html
For completeness, there’s also what I think is usually called the scapegoat theory.
My own favorite atonement theory is moral exemplar, and the one I would take to be true if I still believed God existed and this Jesus guy had come back to life after being killed. Christ’s sacrifice was a gift to us, not God. Christus Victor is poetic, but any sort of literal storming of Hell and fighting the Devil is not something I could take seriously. Recapitulation/Theosis is pretty too in that I love the idea that “God became a man so that Man might become divine” but the idea of participating in divine essence strikes me as even more ridiculously nonsensical than the idea that God is morally obligated to punish slights to His honor, or that justice simultaneously requires that all sin be punished and allows that punishment to be transferred to someone else.
When it comes to soteriology more generally, though (the question of what “salvation” means, not what dying on the cross accomplished; they’re not always the same thing), it’s pretty obvious that salvation, at least for the vast majority of us, hasn’t already been accomplished and won’t in this lifetime, so I’m less interested in the atonement than in the rest of God’s interaction with us, and my favorite writer on the subject is Marilyn McCord Adams. Her book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God is beautiful and hard to summarize, but the gist of it is that it doesn’t make sense for any good God to have designed this universe unless everyone whose life involved unspeakable suffering will someday be compensated not just with eternal happiness but with the ability to find meaning in the suffering itself.
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“(Episcopalians sort of have a sense of aesthetics but they stole it from the Catholics.)”
Ahem. We always had it, going back to when we were Catholics.
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” If the root of compassion is “I am human; nothing human is alien to me”, where does that leave God, the opposite of humanity?”
This is a non-Christian assertion. It sounds more Jewish or Islamic in fact, a la “the distance between the Creator and his creatures.”
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(Christian, raised evangelical, went over to the Episcopal Dark Side a few years ago. They literally had cookies, okay?)
Ozy: This soteriology is pretty common in the circles where I run (which are not very big circles; we’re geeks, we live in the shadow of society, you know how it is). For whatever reason everyone seems to think they’ve come up with it independently; I suspect there are some big obvious tracks in the Christian tradition pointing to this idea, but no church actually teaches it.
For a big-name theologian who backs it: Jurgen Moltmann explores an idea like this in The Crucified God, but he’s not that big a name. You won’t find it in Aquinas or Calvin or any other Big Systematic Theology.
You might also take a look at the last chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday.
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Not a theologian, but as a teenager I dated a guy who identified as Catholic but whose idea of what Jesus’s sacrifice meant was decidedly heretical: God was vengeful and judgemental as seen in the Old Testament until Jesus taught him how to love. In other words, he saw Jesus as a separate entity, Son of God in a more literal sense, whose willingness to suffer and die for all of humanity moved God the Father to give humanity a second chance. Effectively, in this interpretation, Jesus’s death on the cross was a way of convincing God of how far he’d go to save all these people even when they were the ones torturing and murdering him, and as God saw it he understood what it meant to love unconditionally and changed his ways.
I’ve always been an atheist, but I really liked that interpretation, where God is able to change, and the whole scenario is pretty human and emotionally resonant. Way contradicts other theology, though.
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