Tag Archive - cross

Can’t God Just Forgive?

November 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 16 Comments

When people wrestle with atonement theology (i.e., how does the cross, in particular, bring about forgiveness of sins), the objection to atonement theology as a whole is sometimes voiced: why can’t God just forgive? Does God really need some sort of payment?

On the one hand, yes, God can do whatever God wants. This is possible.

On the other hand, we develop our understanding of how the cross works ex post facto. We’re not setting up parameters that have to be met, but trying to understand the biblical witness about how the death of Jesus did, in fact, function. We have books like Hebrews that say things like, “You could almost say that without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” We have the language of Jesus’ death as atoning sacrifice.

So atonement theology is our attempt to make sense of what did happen, not to set requirements on God.

But there’s another piece of the biblical puzzle as well. That piece is Luke-Acts.

Luke seems to go out of his way to mute the idea that Jesus’ death is somehow a ransom or payment for sins. You know that, “Son of Man didn’t come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” saying? It’s replaced by the son of man being among his people as one who serves the table.

Look at the sermons in Acts. Here, of all places, we should get a clear exposition of the purpose of the cross. And we do! But its focused purpose is to fulfill the scripture about Israel rejecting its own Messiah, so that Israel will see that they, as much as the Gentiles, stand in need of the forgiveness of God.

God forgives.

God isn’t paid.

Sin isn’t covered.

Blood doesn’t cleanse.

Canonically, this is not enough. There is more to be said, other developments of the significance of Jesus’ death that need to be incorporated into a fully developed understanding of the atonement.

But here’s the question: is this atonement-free forgiveness a viable starting point for us to take with people who find the idea of God needing payment to be barbaric, weird, etc.? Can we set aside the other angles on Jesus’ death and cultivate a Lukan theology of the God who forgives, and who is at work in the world through Christ and the Spirit, as the gospel with which we begin?

Discuss.

Love and Faithfulness

September 15, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 1 Comment

Today I’m at the Fuller Faculty retreat. During our time of worship this morning, a couple of things grabbed me.

First, we sang “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” Well, we sang, “Crown him the Lord of love, behold his hands and side.” I never stop wondering how different Christianity would be if we could remember that this is love. The cross is love. The self-giving of Jesus, the son-giving of God.

If we loved the world like Jesus loved us, how would we be different? How would we be differently seen?

My second moment came while singing, “Great is thy faithfulness.”

While my mouth was singing the words, “Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,” my eyes were looking at this:

And my mind was thinking, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Christianity lives in that dialectic. The faithful God is the God hidden in the cross. Great is thy faithfulness is the song we sing to the same God we confess as ours while we join our voices with Jesus’ Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.

The Task of Our Generation

March 24, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

Sitting in my living room, at the ripe old age of 35, typing on a laptop while the winds howl and the rain dances upon the metal cap of our fireplace–somehow all of this compels me to the full assurance that I know what the theological task is for this generation. (Ok, the fact that I’m and INTJ might have something to do with my confidence, but bear with me.)

In the post-conservative Christian circles in which I run, people have often experienced a shift. From an entry into Christianity that is all about Jesus dying for my sins, people later discover a Kingdom of God that demands active engagement with the world.

Within the world of Pauline studies a parallel distinction is sometimes highlighted. On the one hand, there is Jesus dying “for me,” with its concomitant substitutionary language of justification and the like. On the other hand, there is my “dying with Christ,” with its concomitant participatory language of co-crucifixion, co-glorification and the like.

And over the past century in Western Christianity, I would say that different parts of the church have held on to different halves of this story. The conservative evangelical types have grabbed hold of the atonement as the gospel, while the liberal mainline types have grabbed onto the world-changing life of Jesus as the gospel.

I see the ask of our generation to overcome this false dichotomy by (1) insisting that it’s not a dichotomy after all; and (2) articulating atonement in such a way that action and transformation are inherent to the saving story of Jesus.

There are many ways to put the question we must answer.

At the Institute for Biblical Research this year, Tom Wright put the question, “What does the Kingdom of God have to do with the cross?”

Or, as I put it in my Mark class, “What does Mark 1-8 [the wonder-working, healing, cleansing, parables, feeding, stilling] have to do with Mark 8-16 [the road to the cross, the disruption of the Temple, the prediction of coming suffering, the Supper, Garden, arrest, trial, and death]?”

It seems to me that we are going to have to step back and reconsider how we tell the story. We are going to have to find fresh ways to articulate what the death of Jesus is all about, so that it wraps up a life of transforming power.

We are going to have to find fresh ways to tell the story of Jesus’ inauguration of the Kingdom of God, so that we are not left, like Peter at the transition point in Jesus’ ministry, wondering why on earth death of the Messiah is the logical culmination.

In fact, I might suggest that until we can so tell the story of Jesus’ life that the death is not only the inevitable (from an earthly point of view) but necessary (from the divine accomplishment point of view) outcome, that we have not yet comprehended the Kingdom of God.

And, until we can so tell the story of Jesus’ death such that his life is not only an anticipation (in a preparatory sort of way–you know, like keeping Jesus free from sin and all that) but inseparable from his atoning death, that we have not yet comprehended what it is to say that Jesus died for our sins.

I don’t think we’ve done it yet.

But I believe we can.

Photo Caption Contest

March 21, 2011 in blogging, Culture with 46 Comments

It’s photo caption contest time!

I took this picture today at Mt. Davidson, in San Francisco. It is gargantuan, as you can see by the real-life children at the foot.

What I’d like from you, the loyal Storied Theology reader, is a caption. For the person who most inspires me with their cleverness, I have the prize of a brand new Common English Bible New Testament. (No need to suck up to the CEB in your captions to win–I did that for you by participating in the Lenten Blog Tour.)

So, the challenge has been set before you. Now here is the object to which to apply all your creative wonder. Go!

Each person may submit up to two entries. Please use the comment section both for your submissions and to taunt the competition!

I will select the winner on Friday.

SBL Precursor: Wright & Bird at IBR

November 20, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, SBL with 18 Comments

SBL = Society of Biblical Literature. I’m at the annual meeting in Atlanta. (If blogging gets scarce, you may want to check out my Twitter feed or Facebook status.)

Each hear a number of other societies use the opportunity of having this group gathered to put on their own meetings. Institute for Biblical Research is one of those. And last night its meeting featured N. T. Wright and Michael Bird. Wright lectured on the cross and the kingdom, and Bird responded.

Wright’s talk was nothing you haven’t heard before if you’re a Wright fan, but it was nicely put together.

He discussed opposite errors.

There is the conservative error of a cross without a kingdom. Mike Bird, in responding, told of how he picked up an N. T. Wright book once upon a time and it hammered home to him that he knew why Jesus died, but had no idea why he lived! That was my experience as well.

On the liberal side, there is a kingdom without a cross: a theology of the reign of God in which Jesus the social revolutionary meets an unfortunate end that cut his program short just as it was getting off the ground.

Wright explored some texts in John in a gesture toward holding these together.

As usual, Wright took a couple of shots at the Creedal tradition of the church, which jumps straight from the virgin birth to the suffering under Pontius Pilate. I think his complaint is apt–we do not confess anything about the life of Jesus when we confess our faith together as a church. Others were less amused.

The call to keep cross and kingdom both in view is apt–and not just for holding together Mark 1-13 with the passion narrative in Mark 14-15. When teaching Mark last year, the larger question presented itself: how does Mark 1-8, the depiction of Jesus the wonder-working Son of Man, fit with Mark 9-16, the depiction of Jesus as the cruciform Son of Man?

To ask the question of how cross and kingdom fit together is to set ourselves on a journey of reimagining our atonement theology, our Kingdom of God theology, and our understanding of the Gospels themselves.

No Better Friend, No Worse Master

June 16, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

Theology is my friend. Theology is my friend. Theology is my friend.

If I say it enough, I’m sure to believe it.

And I know it’s true. I am a theological reader of scripture. Once upon a time I thought that what I loved was theology proper, but then I discovered that what I thought of as theology was more like a biblical or exegetical theology. But I still love theology.

Ok, so why did I go into a fit of madness yesterday and post this as my Facebook status: “Dear Theology, I want to be your friend, but days like this make me want to disown you forever”?

I think it goes back to Monday’s post wherein I reflected on the impossibility of hearing things we don’t already “know.” The theology we bring with us to the Bible creates a way of “seeing” that determines what “scripture actually says.” And so, my FB friends were quick to point out that we all read the Bible with some theology, that we can’t lay that aside, etc.

They are certainly correct. Heck, I know people who think that the defining characteristic of Jesus is his command “Do not judge,” and they even think that the Sermon on the Mount proves them right! See? It’s hard to see what we don’t believe is there…

I’m currently wrapping up a course on The Cross in the New Testament. I’ve taught it twice and am about to teach it again next week. This class surveys the cross / death of Jesus in the New Testament, and then does some theological integration on the issues of discipleship and atonement theories.

Three big take-aways from both the lecture and the readings are these: (1) when the NT talks about the cross it is infinitely more concerned with how we live lives of faithful discipleship than it is with how the death of Jesus “works” to save us; (2) there are numerous models of “atonement” in the NT that address different facets of the problem of the human condition; and (3) penal substitution might be less pervasive than you think, and probably needs to be rethought in more biblical categories.

The problem with “knowing” how the death of Jesus works is that it keeps us from being able to see how the NT writers talk about it. The papers I’m grading demonstrate a fascinating reticence to embrace models other than a traditional penal substitution model; they often overtly state that we don’t have to do anything as Christians–and the cross of Christ tells us so. They then will chide scholars for not paying attention to the Bible (passages like Isa 53 in particular). *sigh*

This is why I have a love-hate relationship with theology–not because I’m not a theologian of sorts, or because theology isn’t important, but because our theological systems serve their purpose all-too-well: they give us grids for making sense of what we see in scripture, whether that’s the sense that scripture makes or not.

And this is why I’m more broadly skeptical of erecting any theological statement, howsoever so broad it may be, as the “grid” through which we read the scripture. The spiral of reading scripture and theological articulation must always allow for scripture to come back and correct the faith of both the individual and the church.

Theology: no better friend, no worse master.