[Dialogue] {Spam?} spong on crucfixion and salvation

[KroegerD at aol.com]

June 6, 2007 
The Third Fundamental:
The  Substitution by Death of Jesus on the Cross Brings Salvation, Part II  

Last week we began our analysis of the third fundamental that traditional  
Christians stated, in the Tractarian Movement in the early years of the 20th  
century, was basic to a proper understanding of Christianity. It focused on what 
 Christians came to call "the doctrine of the Atonement." In many ways it  
proclaims a barbaric understanding of God, yet through the centuries it has been 
 strangely popular and is regarded by many as the center of the gospel and 
thus  is still powerfully defended in both Catholic and Protestant circles. From 
the  doctrine of the Atonement has flowed the familiar language of sacrifice 
and the  liturgical fetish that concentrates on the cleansing power of the 
blood of  Jesus. Protestants like to be washed in it to be cleansed externally. 
Catholics  like to drink it to be cleansed internally. All of the traditional 
church  references to Jesus as "The Lamb of God," come out of this doctrine. As 
I sought  to explain last week it reflects an ancient biblical definition of 
human life as  that which was created to be perfect, to live at one with God 
inside the Garden  of Eden, but which has now become fallen, banished from 
God's presence and in  need of divine rescue. Most Christian theology has 
traditionally been organized  around these definitions, which over the centuries have 
been thoroughly  literalized in Christian circles. Library shelves in 
theological centers the  world over are lined with books about the saving act of 
atonement that took  place on the cross. That theology, however, makes no sense in 
a post-Darwinian  world that sees human origins in a dramatically different 
way, and so this  understanding of the death of Jesus has become all but 
irrelevant in our day.  That is why traditional Christianity seems so foreign to so 
many and why worship  in our churches today appears not only meaningless, but 
sometimes even  grotesque.  
If one begins, as the Bible seems to do, with an understanding of human life  
as incapable of doing anything about its fallen and evil condition, then the  
task of salvation must be seen in terms of God's intervening act to rescue 
the  fallen and to save the lost. Human beings are thus reduced to being 
helpless,  dependent supplicants who beg for salvation. It is clear, however, that 
this  constitutes the frame of reference that underlies most of the Bible.  
The Bible tells the story of God's eternal search for a way to bring the  
whole created order, now corrupted by sin, back to what God intended it to be.  
That is why, the Bible suggests, that God gave the Torah to the people at Mount 
 Sinai. If the people could only obey the Torah then perhaps their alienation 
 from God could be overcome. The demands of the law, however, proved to be 
more  than any life could achieve and so, as a means of bringing salvation, it 
failed.  God next was said to have raised up prophets to recall the wayward to 
their  original purpose. The people, however, did not or could not heed the 
prophets'  message and so drove them out of their land or killed them. Thus the 
prophets  also failed to achieve a rescue of the fallen.  
Next, the Jews sought to remove the power of their alienation by acting it  
out liturgically and so a day was born in the liturgical life of the synagogue  
known as the Day of Atonement. It was also called Yom Kippur. The way this 
day  was to be observed was described in the Book of Leviticus. In it the Jews 
were  taught not only to identify themselves as sinful people, separated from 
God, but  also to remember that they were created in God's image and must yearn 
for  restoration. Most Christians today continue to use the language of Yom 
Kippur,  but with no understanding whatsoever of either the source or the 
meaning of  their words.  
The Day of Atonement was observed on the 10th day of the month of Tishri -  
early to mid October. It was a one day act of penitence for which people  
prepared rigorously. The liturgy involved two animals chosen from the flocks  with 
care. These animals (usually a lamb and a goat) had to be males because in  a 
patriarchal society males were valued more highly than females. They also had  
to be physically perfect. The high priest would examine these animals  
scrupulously to determine that they had no disqualifying scratches, blemishes or  
evidence of a previously broken bone. If these animals were going to represent  
the perfection the people yearned to have, they must themselves possess 
physical  perfection as the first prerequisite. In time these animals also came to 
be  regarded as morally perfect. Lacking free will, the people suggested that 
these  animals could not choose to do evil. So as physically and morally 
perfect  creatures they reflected the perfection that human beings had been taught 
that  they had once possessed, but now had lost.  
The high priest then took the lamb, called in this liturgy "the Lamb of God," 
 and slaughtered it. Next, following an elaborate cleansing ritual performed 
on  the High Priest, he went behind the veil in the Temple that separated the 
Holy  Place, in which the people could gather, from the Holy of Holies, where 
God  alone was thought to dwell. Into the Holy of Holies the High Priest could 
enter  only on the Day of Atonement. Arriving at what the Jews called "the 
Mercy Seat,"  which they believed was God's throne, the high priest proceeded to 
smear it with  the blood of this "Lamb of God." The sinful people were then 
said to be able to  return to God by journeying through this sacrificial blood. 
Access to God had  been opened by the blood of the perfect Lamb. They could, 
thereby, celebrate, at  least liturgically, their pre-fallen status as those 
who were created in God's  image to be at one with God forever.  
Emerging from the Holy of Holies, the High Priest faced the people still  
waiting expectantly in the Holy Place. He then proceeded to sprinkle the blood  
of the Lamb of God on these people. They were thus "washed in the blood of the  
Lamb." Atonement had been achieved liturgically, if not literally, but it 
served  to remind the people that behind their "fallen ness," there still 
remained the  unforgotten perfection for which they had been originally intended.  
The Yom Kippur liturgy continued as the second perfect animal, normally a  
goat, was brought to the high priest. With the people gathered in a circle, the  
high priest, his hands holding the horns of the goat, began the rhythmic 
prayers  confessing the people's sinfulness. In these prayers, it was said, all of 
the  sins of the people came out leaving them cleansed, no longer separated 
from God  by evil. When these sins left the people they landed, the liturgy 
suggested, on  the head and back of the goat, who was now called "the sin 
bearer." The goat,  burdened by the weight of these sins, then became the object of 
the people's  wrath. Curses rang out as people called for the goat's death 
since one so evil  should not be allowed to live. The goat, however, was not 
killed; he was rather  run out of the assembly of the people and driven into the 
wilderness carrying  the sins of the people with it. The cleansed people were 
left to reclaim, at  least in that liturgical moment, the sinlessness that 
marked human life before  the fall. The Lamb of God had thus died for the sins of 
the people and the  sin-bearing goat had taken the sins of the people away. 
Everyone knew that this  was a great liturgical drama. Everyone knew that it was 
symbolic and had to be  repeated annually, but all understood what it meant. 
Human beings are not what  they were meant to be, this liturgy was saying. 
Created in God's image, designed  to be one with God, they had become separated 
and sinful. Yom Kippur called this  to their minds and created in them a 
yearning to recover their essential nature.   
This Day of Atonement, so deeply a part of the worship of the Jewish people,  
then became the lens through which the Jewish disciples of Jesus understood 
and  talked about salvation. Far more than Christians today seem to know or  
acknowledge, the liturgy of Yom Kippur also shaped the way these disciples  
processed their experience of Jesus and his crucifixion. That is why Jesus came  
to be called "The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." That is 
why  Paul could assert that Jesus "died for our sins." That is why the first 
gospel,  Mark, could refer to the death of Jesus as a "ransom." That is why in 
the  crucifixion narrative story none of Jesus' bones were broken so that this  
identification with the Lamb of Yom Kippur could be kept in tact. That is why  
the gospels portray the crowds as heaping curses on Jesus and crying for his  
death (crucify him crucify him). They wanted to make sure that the people  
understood that, like the goat of Yom Kippur, he was the bearer of their sins  
and had taken them away. That is why later Christians would interpret the  
Eucharist as a liturgical reenactment of the meaning of the crucifixion. Every  
Jewish reader of these essentially Jewish gospels would recognize the use of  
these Yom Kippur interpretive symbols. They would also have known better than to 
 view these narratives literally. What was for the Jewish disciples an  
interpretive liturgy became for the Gentile Christians of the 2nd century and  
beyond a legalistic and literal way to view the death of Jesus. In that scenario  
God became a punishing parent, a capricious ogre whose sensitivities had been  
compromised by human sin. Unable to forgive, this deity demanded punishment. 
The  crime was so heinous that the punishment was more than human beings could 
 endure. So the divine Son absorbed the wrath of God for us. Jesus died for 
my  sins. The cross was seen as the place where the sacrifice of Jesus 
satisfied the  wrath of God. Atonement was the name of the doctrine to which these 
interpretive  symbols pointed. It is gruesome, barbaric theology in which God is 
portrayed as  a divine child abuser, Jesus as the ultimate victim and 
worshipers become  saddled with the guilt of being responsible for the death of Jesus. 
If that is  the gospel, I want no part of it. If belief in this third 
fundamental is  required to be a Christian, then I have come to the end of my 
Christian  commitment.  
Obviously, I do not believe that this interpretation of the cross is the  
meaning of Christianity. So to begin to develop a new theology of the cross I  
will turn next week.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Donna Percy, via the Internet, writes:  
The idea of calling God "He" bothers me. Although I had a loving father, in  
my 28 years of teaching I have come in contact with many who were abusive. One 
 year, a grandmother came in for a parent conference and revealed that her  
granddaughter's father, under the guise of saying goodnight prayers with his  
daughter, sexually abused her for years. I wonder how this girl will be able to 
 receive God's message when she continually hears God referred to as "He"? 
Even  the hymns are filled with references to "Him." Fortunately, our current 
pastors  use "God" — not the pronoun — and few in the church have noticed. I 
write on  behalf of all the girls of this world who, like my beloved student, 
have been  hurt deeply by their fathers.  
Dear Donna,  
I share your concern but we have to overcome perhaps 10,000 years of training 
 in the maleness of God. An enormous start on this consciousness raising 
activity  has been achieved, but to erase the influence of the ages will literally 
take  ages. Liturgies change, but ever so slowly, and most of them even now 
are rooted  in the 13th century. The gospels reflect the patriarchal prejudice 
of the first  century Jewish world in which they were created. Even the Ten 
Commandments  assume that women are the property of men (thou shalt not covet 
thy neighbor's  wife, nor his ox).  
Polygamy is present in the Bible because women were defined as property hence 
 the richer the man was, the more wives he could possess, as well as more 
sheep  and cattle. My guess is that it will take another 100-200 years to remove 
the  prejudice and stain of patriarchy from our patterns of worship. That is 
not said  to be discouraging since that is very rapid in terms of how long 
sexism has been  around. The fact remains that for those who are victimized by 
this prejudice,  every day is one day too long.  
This concern only dawned on me well into my adult life. I recall that when I  
wrote in 1973 and published in 1974 my second book, "This Hebrew Lord," I was 
 unknowingly still completely insensitive to male-oriented, non-inclusive  
language. That was also no problem for my publisher, Harper Collins. Even their  
style sheet was not sensitive to the need for inclusive language. When  
HarperCollins asked me to revise this book for a new edition in 1986, both of us  
were in a new place. I made approximately 3500 changes in the text of this 180  
page book, 90% of which were to remove sexist language, like the references 
to  God that referred to God as "father, he, him or his." A wonderful early 
feminist  woman in my congregation in Richmond, Virginia, named Holt Carlton, had 
begun  very lovingly, but very persistently to raise my awareness to my 
closed-minded,  unconscious, sexist prejudices. I was amazed that in the space of 
12 years  things about which I had no sensitivity at all had actually become 
offensive to  me. All of us are caught up in this change whether we recognize it 
or not. The  rate of change accelerates every year as the flow of information 
becomes almost  instantaneous, but for sexism to be completely removed will 
still take three or  four more generations. One reason for the slow pace is 
that both fundamentalist  Protestant churches and Roman Catholic churches spend 
enormous energy opposing  these changes. Those efforts will fail, but they do 
keep us from moving as  rapidly as we might otherwise move. It is also one more 
sign of both the  irrelevance and even the death of institutional religion, 
which always seems to  be on the wrong side of history.  
I do not urge you to be patient. I urge you, rather, to be loud in your  
complaints until the consciousness of all people becomes aware of the power of  
language.  
God is not a father or a mother. Patriarchy has defined God for thousands of  
years, but patriarchy is now dying.  
Thanks are due to people like you for being part of its death.  
John Shelby Spong 



************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070606/4bc4fb9d/attachment-0001.html