AC/DC

AC/DC is an Australian hard rock band popular for songs like "Highway to Hell" and "Hell's Bells." 

Such song names led to speculation that the band might be Satanic and that AC/DC stood for "Anti-Christ/Devil's Child." 

One of my professors in school grew up with Malcolm and Angus, the brother's who founded the band. He then toured with them for a number of years as their sound tech. 

He told us the name AC/DC actually came from a sticker on an Australian vacuum cleaner that read AC NOT DC. He also explained that the song title "Hell's Bells" came from a bell hop at a London hotel who always said, "Oh Hell's Bells!" every time something went wrong.

The idea is you can't believe everything you hear. We all walk in varying shades of ignorance depending on the subject matter, so it's probably best to go straight to the source when confronted with things that concern us. And if you can't get to the source? Suspend judgment.

Moral Improvement

Fundamental to the Christian faith is the idea that Jesus died for sins (1 Cor 15.3). But what does that mean?

We have looked at the Ransom and Substitution models and in this post we'll check out the Moral Influence Theory (MIT). 

The MIT suggests that the purpose of Jesus life, death, and resurrection was to bring about positive moral change. To change the world by spreading love from one person to the next (cf. Mt 28.19; Jn 15.13).

This view was held by almost all early church writers including Clement, Ignatius, Origen, Irenaeus, and Augustine. It was reformulated in the 12th century by Peter Abelard in reaction to Anselm's Substitution theory.

It is a "subjective" model where Christ changes humanity vs. an "objective" model, like Substitutionary Atonement, where God is changed by Christ. In the MIT, God does not require Christ's death to satisfy divine justice and so no change in God is effected by the cross.

Instead in the MIT, God is primarily concerned with whether a person's inner character is good or evil. We are to follow Christ's example of selfless love (cf. 1 Pt 2.21), even if as with him, it costs us our lives.

The MIT has many strong points, including its recognition of the numerous passages in the NT that speak of God's final judgment according to moral conduct, as well as those that speak of the life change Jesus came to motivate (cf 1 Cor 3, Mt 25). 

It has been critiqued for not taking sin or God's wrath seriously enough, as well as promoting salvation by works.

The majority of the critiques, though, come from a lens that has been clouded by the Substitution model, where the focus is primarily on Jesus' death. Instead, the MIT focuses on the whole story, including the movement that was birthed out of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and its trans-formative impact on the world. 

As with all the models, the MIT should not be seen as the only way to view the Christ event, but rather another piece in the beautiful mosaic God created two-thousand years ago. 

Next Post in the Series: the Christus Victor Model

Producing Life

Jesus is approached by a dad with a serious problem: his twelve-year-old daughter is dying. So he asks Jesus to come and touch her, hoping this will make her well (Mk 5).

Jesus agrees and sets off towards the man's house, but he's not alone. A large crowd is following him and in that crowd is a woman who also has a serious problem: she has been bleeding for twelve years. 

This condition leaves her ceremonially unclean (Lev 15) and cuts her off from full participation in her community. In the ancient world things like sex, birth, and death were mysterious and powerful, and thus taboo, so any association with them made a person unclean. 

Because of this she wasn't supposed to touch anyone, but she touches Jesus. This act miraculously heals her.

Unfortunately her healing took time and during this delay the twelve-year-old dies. Jesus continues toward her home anyway, and when he arrives he finds her family mourning.

He asks the family why they are making so much commotion and tells them "the girl is only sleeping." They laugh at him, but then he touches her, telling her to wake up, and she is restored to life.

The woman bleeding for twelve years and the twelve-year-old who is brought back to life, symbolize Jesus' restoration of Israel. Israel was made of twelve tribes and in healing these women, he is restoring life to the "life producers" of Israel.