Nearly all fundamentalists and Evangelicals believe in a model of atonement whereby Jesus made an exchange with God for us. The exchange looks something like this. God has to punish us because retributive justice is God’s nature, but God also wants to forgive us because God loves us. in order to satisfy the conditions of God’s love and of God’s justice, God orchestrates the death of Jesus—the one for the many. God pours his wrath upon Jesus, who acts as a guilt offering. When we become Christians, then, are sins are forgiven because they have already been punished God’s punishment of Jesus.
This should raise many concerns. First of all, God is divided amidst God’s self. Does God want to forgive or punish? It can’t be both ways. If we forgive, we don’t punish. If a transgression is punished it is not forgiven. If we do adopt this model, we can’t say that God forgives sin. What we say instead is that Jesus made satisfaction for the sins of humanity. But how can we say that God is love if this is the case. Certainly love entails forgiveness, the scriptures state this clearly. but if penal models of atonement are true, then God does not forgive sin.
There are also ontological problems with the model. It leads to an unforgiving Father God demanding “justice” and a forgiving son pleading for mercy for his friends. How does that work with the Trinity? God is of one will, not a divided will. Either father and Son both want forgiveness or they both want punishment. You can’t have it both ways; the result is nonsense.
The problem is that an obscure passage from Leviticus is read into the passion story. It states that there is no forgiveness apart from the shedding of blood. However, Jesus explicitly forgave twp people in the NT apart from the shedding of blood! John the Baptist also baptized with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins? Wait, what’s that? repentance is the condition of forgiveness? But that undercuts all the metaphysical nonsense that makes the Incarnation necessary. A God/man had to die to forgive sins! No. In fact no one had to die, God simply had to proclaim forgiveness. That’s it. Of course, we have to do what’s right and make amends with those we’ve wronged. But there are no ontological magic tricks that make us “in” and others “out.”
Jesus didn’t die to make it possible for God to forgive sins. Such logic is a farce. Jesus died because he challenged the religious and political structures of his day. This made him dangerous. He knew that. He knew the people would revolt and make him king if he let them, and then the Romans would crush the revolt, as they did in 70 CE and again in 135 CE. Jesus dies because he proclaimed a radical and liberating kingdom that exists independent of institutions or borders or earthly kings. This certainly would have angered the earthly kings enough to have him done away with. God did not orchestrate Jesus death, but gave Jesus the courage to pursue his mission, to proclaim God’s kingdom. It is in this sense, and this sense only, that God desired that Jesus die. The mission required it. Not because of ontology, but because of the risks of peacefully challenging violent enemies.
When we understand Jesus’ life within a framework of non-violence, it takes on new depth. True love requires non-violence. If we love neighbors and enemies, there is no one to hate. And if there is no one to hate, there is no one to kill. The embodiment of such love is at-one-ment. When we seek to love all, just as God loves all, then we are at one with God. Otherwise, we are liars. For whoever does not love his brothers and sisters, whom we can see, cannot love God, whom we cannot see.
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