Substitute

Medal of Honor

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

Yesterday we looked at the Classic (Ransom) theory, and today we'll tackle the Satisfaction (Substitution) model. This theory started around 1000ce with a monk named Anselm.

Anselm didn't like the Ransom view because it gave the Devil too much power. He had a hard time believing God could owe Satan anything and instead argued that it was we who owed God something: honor. 

Sin had robbed God of honor, but the problem was that humans were incapable of the obedience required to restore that honor, and so only a special being he calls the God-man (Jesus), could save the day. 

In Anselm's day, living rightly stored up honor, almost like a piggy bank. He saw Jesus' perfect life, culminating in his innocent death, as the ultimate piggy bank, able to pay the world's debt to God because of sin. Christ's piggy bank was then substituted on behalf of ours, making God a happy camper again.

But what if the problem wasn't God's lost honor? What if it was God's justice that sin called into question? This idea was developed by people like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, who felt that Christ's death did not repay God for lost honor, but rather paid the penalty of death that had been the consequence for sin all along (Gen 2.17, Rom 6.23). This view is known as the Penal-Substitution theory.

The Penal-Substitution theory argues that justice required God to punish humanity for sin, but God sent Jesus to bear the penalty. Jesus was even convicted as a criminal and sentenced to death, which made him the perfect substitute for us and satisfied God's wrath.

But even Aquinas and Calvin disagreed. Aquinas believed that Christ's death paid the penalty for all humanity, whereas Calvin felt it was limited only to those whom God had picked to be saved.

Next Post: Penal Problems

Ransom

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

Christians have been debating the significance of the Christ event for 2000 years and over that period at least three major theories have surfaced: the Classic (Ransom), the Satisfaction (Substitution), and the Moral Influence (Idealistic).

Over the next few posts I want to look at these three views and ask what it might mean for us that the church has been wrestling with this for 2000 years and continues to do so.

First the Classic or Ransom theory. This theory is the earliest of all and uses passages like Mark 10.45, to argue that Christ was given as a ransom for humanity. The texts do not specify to whom the ransom was paid, although most early Christian writers argued it was to Satan.

According to this theory, Adam and Eve sold humanity to the Devil when they sinned and justice required a ransom be paid to the Devil for our release. God then tricked Satan into taking Christ as a ransom, and justice was satisfied. Poor Devil gets hosed though, because Jesus resurrects, leaving him to play all by himself. 

Before you write this this theory off as absurd, you must know that it was the dominant way of understanding Jesus' death for close to 1000 years, and is still held by some traditions today. 

One of the problems with it is the fact that nowhere does the Bible speak about the ransom being paid to Satan (or God for that matter), so any elaboration on those passages is destined to be conjecture.

It is interesting though, that the majority of Christians found it a valuable way to speak about Jesus for more than a millenia. It may not be how you understand things, but such an observation leads me to ask: I wonder which ideas I have about God will one day been seen as disconnected and inaccurate?

Next Post: The Satisfaction or Substitution Theory

Deus Ex Machina

Deus ex machina is Latin for "God out of the machine." It refers to cheesy Greek plays that used a crane (Gk. mekhane) to lower actors that played gods onto the stage.

The "gods" would then bring resolution to seemingly inextricable problems in the plot and bring the play to a close. 

The Greek tragedian Euripides (ca. 480 BC – 406 BC) used the "crane" in more than half of his plays. Aristotle criticized the use of the Deus and argued that the resolutions of a plot should arise from the previous actions in the play.

A more accurate translation of idea into English might be "God from our hands" or "God that we make." The "God of the gaps" idea seems to unapologetically take advantage of this. Instead of seeing God in every detail of the physical world, God is used to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge.

The result of this thinking, is the more we discover, the more God is relegated to domain of the useless. I wonder how often we employ a Deus ex machina?

When we only wheel God into the narrative to fill the gaps of our understanding, we aren't engaging the Creator of the cosmos, but rather a "God that we make." May we instead embrace the tension and the beauty of seeing God as an intrinsic part of every area of our world.

Shine

Head In A Hole

I have always struggled answering the question, "What is your most embarrassing moment?" Mainly because I have lived my entire life quite free of embarrassment. That all changed tonight. 

I had a brief speaking part in our 5 and 7 o'clock Good Friday services. I had memorized my couple minutes of material and the 5 o'clock service went off without a hitch. 

But after effortlessly pronouncing my first few lines in the 7 o'clock service, my public speaking nightmare came true: a sheer meltdown of my cognitive abilities. I couldn't for the life of me remember my lines. 

After painfully ad libbing for a moment, I fessed up and told the audience I needed to get my notes. So I strolled off stage, grabbed my notes and walked back on the stage. 

I regained my composure, threw the notes on the stage, and set into my part only to freeze up again and have to grab the notes a second time. This may have happened a third time - I'm not sure. Was there a hole anywhere I could crawl into? 

Finally, I got into a little bit of a rhythm and was able to end well. 

I have been public speaking for over ten years and have never had anything like this happen. People's support of me was incredible and I acknowledge the value these character forming experiences have for me as a person.  

I grew leaps and bounds tonight in the areas of mercy, empathy, and humility, and while I hope to go my whole life without ever having something like this happen again, I highly doubt I'll have that luxury. In the end it's experiences like these that make us better people.  

I Deny the Resurrection

Filling Space

Jesus tells a parable: "An unclean spirit goes out of a person, and it wanders through the desert looking for a place to rest, but it finds none. So it says, 'I will return to my house (the formerly possessed person) from which I came.' 

It comes, finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the person is worse off than before."

In the ancient world things were "unclean" that conflicted with the god one served. The Israelites for instance, considered other nations unclean because of their opposition to Israel's values.

Israel even had a whole slew of rituals in place to help a person become "clean" who had forfeited his or her purity by associating with things not "of God." 

The person in Jesus' parable did well by "evciting" the thing that was contradictory to the heart of God. But they didn't fill their life with anything else, and so they were incredibly susceptible to the things that drug them down in the first place. 

How many of us have seen this, either in our own lives or that of others? We give up something, become better for it, but don't take action to replace the vice with virtue and end up falling even further than before.

Here's to ridding ourselves of things that run contrary to the heart of God, and then filling those spaces with things that make us more who we are supposed to be.