RethinkingOurStory

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We saw last week, that through our Christian history, there have been many ways we have understood the words “Jesus died for our sins.”

As is true of all reality when we encroach on the territory of God, the Divine, the Transcendent, we have trouble talking about things clearly. The doctrine of the ineffability of God tells us that God is a reality beyond our ability to formulate in thought or word, so when we do talk about God (essential to the human experience), we are always talking about that that can’t be talked about. Consequently, it makes sense that the people who experienced the Jesus-event, the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and the category-blowing experiences after his death had trouble talking about it, had trouble assigning meaning to it. They tried their best to suggest several ways to give meaning to their experience of life overcoming death, of sin being defeated by love and truth, but over the years, the many ways were reduced to one. Especially since 1895, the most common way conservative Christians have tried to make meaning out of this moment in history has been called the substitutionary theory of the atonement.

At a bible conference in Niagara, NY in the years approaching the new century, a group of Christians articulated 14 points of belief. As often happens when a fundamental shift is occurring in a society, the rise of science and biblical criticism was causing many Christians to feel they were losing their roots. Responding to what they saw as an attack on the basics of their faith, the Niagara Bible Conference posited 14 core points; “fundamentals,” they called them. The first 5 of these core doctrines have been called the Magna Carta of fundamentalism.

One of those five core fundamentals reduced the many historical ways Christians have talking about Jesus saving us from our sins to just one, Christ’s vicarious, blood-atoning death as fulfillment of the Old Testament offering system for the forgiveness of sin.

We saw last week, that this “substitutionary theory of the atonement” is problematic. It has some often unconsidered implications that merit some rethinking. Last week, I said we’d begin that rethinking by considering what sin is. Hopefully, if we can deepen our understanding of “sin,” we can deepen our understanding of the words “Jesus died for our sins.”

We began this section looking at the core motivation behind all religion:  how to deal with the reality that we humans carry two natures, nobility, virtue, goodness, the very image of God nature on the one hand, and ignobility, wickedness, badness, the very image of a depraved nature. The latter, we said, is not the deepest reality about ourselves, but it is a very real part of us, a part we must deal with every day. Our religion demands we address this dilemma which we have come to call “sin.”

Over the years, we’ve come to make a distinction between lower case “s,” “sins,” and upper case “S,” Sin Nature. Sin Nature, we’ve said, is what truly separates us from God.  That phrase “separation from God,” has become a mantra of sorts for us; one, I suggest, we should keep. Of course we have to think clearly about what “separation from God” means, but in the end, I believe we’ll want to keep it.

As we consider the two meanings of “sin,” it is obvious that lower case “sins” were not deal-breakers for Jesus. People who did sex and drugs and rock and roll; liars, cheaters, thieves; these were the people he associated with. Frailty, failure, adultery, betrayal, these were just not big things to Jesus or even to Paul. To be sure, the writings of Paul discourage us from doing bad acts. Almost every letter, he’s encouraging virtue, discouraging vice. However, he couldn’t have been clearer, that God is full of grace for all kinds of sins, all kinds of failures, all kinds, all the time.

No, the truly problematic Sin, we’ve been taught, is the “Sin Nature;” something inside us that separates us from God, something inside us that separates us from God-Love, from GoWd-Life, from God-Thoughts, and from God-Instincts.

Here’s how we’ve told the story. God made you with the capacity to sin, and the knowledge that you would sin, and then when you did sin, he turned his back on you, requiring a stiff punishment for you, or for an innocent man in your place. A severe penalty had to be exacted in order to make you acceptable; death. This severe penalty had to be meted out, because God requires death when sin happens.  And this was not just death to our bodies, but spiritual death, eternal death, death we call separation from God. You’ve done bad, and the law of the universe is that bad must be punished. The wages of sin, after all, is death, and so you’re in for it. Because you have sinned, you must be punished by separation from God.

God is pure and perfect and cannot abide to be in the presence of sin, therefore God cannot abide you, for you are sinful. Your sin has earned for you, the rejection, the alienation, and the eternal separation from God. You made our bed, and now you have no choice but to lie in it. All have sinned, and all must pay the piper.

And that’s the sequence of events that comes to our mind when we think about our story of sin. The human race did a bad thing and must suffer separation from God for doing it.

This way of thinking about sin demands we somehow become different from our fundamental nature before we can be acceptable to God. As long as we hold this view of sin, however we tell the story of Jesus saving us, it must include doing something to change our essential state of being. We must be morphed from our unacceptable state, to an acceptable state; a change in our fundamental essence.

It is this demand that necessitates the magic embodied in the substitutionary atonement. God, by punishing Jesus, changes our fundamental nature. And with this way of giving Jesus’ death meaning, comes the unspoken implications of God’s heartlessness, and the depiction of a God who treats people like we wouldn’t treat a dog.

So maybe there’s an assumption about sin that triggers this line of thinking in our story, that if changed, would allow us to come at the story differently. What if Sin (capital “S”) is not an extension of sins (lower case “s”)?  Even though we say they’re different, we have an unspoken assumption that they’re intimately related. They’re bad acts, bad thoughts, bad motives. The lower case version is when we act them out, the upper case version is an infection of that badness inside us that can’t help but leak out.

But what if lower case sin and upper case Sin Nature are not simply extensions of one another? What if they are fundamentally different in nature, not even apples and oranges, but apples and rocket-ships? What if upper case Sin, is any illusory belief that separates us from God, like the belief that I am not loved by God, or the belief that because I’ve sinned, God cannot accept me, or the belief that I am not love-worthy?  What if Sin Nature is the shame that lies at the core of these mis-beliefs?  What if Sin Nature is a collection of compensatory strategies we employ to make ourselves OK in the face of this debilitating, existential shame? Like the strategy to maintain control of people, things, and circumstances to fool myself into thinking I’m OK? Or the strategy of making everyone pleased with me, to prove to myself that I’m OK? Or the strategy of creating security for myself by gathering enough money, enough insulation, enough of anything, so I feel safe?

What if Sin nature, is in fact, illusion and not the innate proclivity to do bad?  Even more specifically, what if Sin Nature is the compilation of illusions that separate me from the energizing power of Divine Life, separates me from the wisdom of the Indwelling Spirit of God, separates me from the indwelling presence of Divine peace and joy and  goodness and virtue? What if this is the Sin from which I need to be saved?

Instead of seeing badness causing God to separate himself from me, we could see illusion and false belief about The Way Things Are as the thing that separates us from God.

This is not the most common way Christian people see things, but consider this. Our tendency not to see things this way, can be directly traced to our visceral sense that ours is an anthropomorphic God, a God created in the image of humanity.

As we’ve discussed in earlier sections, this is not our religion’s story, but it creeps into our instincts, even our scriptures, at every turn. God is like us, God is made in man’s image, so of course, we imagine God rejecting us for sinfulness. It is, after all, how we treat one another. It is how we feel when somebody sins against us. So, if God is a projection of ourselves, of course that’s what God will do.

But again and again, our saints and prophets and sages and saints have all said it is not so. Our God cannot be contained in the metaphor of being a human. Sure, we use the metaphor of king, ruler, father, mother, and lover, but these cannot contain the vastness and different-ness of God.

So when the scriptures teach us, not that God loves us, but that God is, by God’s very nature, made up of Love, and when our scriptures teach us, not that God parses out mercy, but that God is by God’s very nature made of mercy… and forgiveness, and grace, and goodness, and kindness, if we drop our human images of God, a very different story begins to unfold.

In this telling of the Story, we are not separated from God because God has just had it up to here with our sin.  We are not separated from God as punishment for being bad.  Instead, separation from God is a function of us being sold a bill of goods, deceptions that tell us up is down, black is white, in is out. We’ve been deceived into thinking we are not made in God’s image, we’ve been deceived into believing that we must earn our love, that we are not intrinsically love-worthy. We believe it is not true that we, simply because we exist, are the apple of the eye of God, the apple of the eye of All That Is, the eye of The Ground of All Being. We believe that the very universe does not sing forth our love-worthiness, that the very atoms do not pulsate with our worth and preciousness before God. And behind this mask of deception, this mask of illusion, this mask of erroneous belief that separates us from God, this Sin Nature, we learn to cope with reality Not As It Truly Is. And of course, that just doesn’t work.

We live our lives trying to make up down, in out, and white black, so of course we are frustrated, of course we become afraid, of course we feel shame, of course we have to compensate, of course we create strategies to make life work, and of course those strategies don’t work. In our frustration, our fear, our shame, we hurt others, we have hurtful thoughts toward others, we do hurtful acts toward others, and we do sins.

Out of the illusion of Sin Nature, emanates the bad words, thoughts, and acts that we call “sins.” But, it is the illusion itself that is the culprit, it is the illusion itself that separates us from God, and it is the illusion itself that is the Sin. It is the illusion itself that Jesus dies to save us from.

Now, next week we’ll talk about some other historical ways Christians have told the story of Jesus saving us; ways that do not require God to have been repulsed by the sin he created us with the capacity to commit; ways that never required an innocent man to suffer so that God’s honor could be salvaged, or the penalty of death be paid.

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In this section of our Rethinking Our Story Project, we’re looking at how our religion’s narrative unfolds. “What happened?” that’s the question we’re asking, and more pointedly, we’re asking how it came to be that we human beings grapple with two natures inside ourselves. George Bernard Shaw recounted an ancient parable from Native Americans:

“Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he said….’whichever dog I feed’.”

In our Judeo-Christian tradition, the word we’ve used to talk about this universal human dilemma is “sin.” We’re asking the question; “what happened that made us this way?,” and “what happened that can help us out of this pickle we’re in?”  As you might expect given how our project has unfolded thus far, we’ll see that the way we tell the story of sin and redemption has been conditioned by the history of it’s formation.

The way we tell the story today hasn’t always been how we’ve told it. The two doctrines of “original sin” and “total depravity” we talked about in part four of our project have not always been the way we Christians have talked about ourselves. The doctrine of Jesus being a sacrificial lamb isn’t the only way we have told the Story.

One thing is clear from scripture and from extra-scriptural documents; whatever happened after the death of Jesus blew people’s categories of normalcy. In the movie The Passion of the Christ a common view of the resurrection is portrayed. Jesus, in a body just like he had before dying, walked out of the tomb. As commonly held as this mental image is, it doesn’t jive well with the accounts in scripture.  In the scriptures, when Jesus appeared to people after his death, they didn’t always recognize him. He walked and ate with two disciples, but only after he was gone did they know that it had been him. After his death, Jesus showed up, but did so in unseen ways.

The accounts are confusing, I suspect, because the people who gave the accounts were confused. Something happened, and they struggled for words to talk about it. Something happened, and they struggled for ideas to explain it. Something happened, something that changed the ground rules of living, but they didn’t have mental concepts to put it all together and assign it meaning. They knew it was big, they knew it was important, they knew it profoundly changed their perception of life, but they didn’t know how to explain it.

So naturally, they did what you and I would have done. They tried to make meaning out of it. They tried to form buckets in their brains into which to put the experience. They tried to say “this is what it means,” or “ that is what it means.”  Consequently, in the scriptures, we see many ways of talking about the 2-nature condition in which we find ourselves, many ways of thinking about having both darkness and light residing within us, both good and evil within us, a mean dog and a good dog fighting within us.

We also see many ways of talking about how this Jesus event changed the way we live in these two natures. We hear those early authors almost universally saying that Jesus saved them from the dark side of their humanity, but they use all kinds of different metaphors to do so. As we’ll discuss in coming weeks, they talked about a soul being kidnapped, and Jesus paying a ransom. They talked about a soul unable to turn around and walk rightly, and Jesus leading the way, and making it possible. They spoke of Jesus as a shining example, calling to a part of us that had been silenced and covered over.

They talked about their experience in many ways, but they all agreed; “I was lost, but now I’m found,” “My soul was dying, but now I’m alive,” “I was trapped, but now I am free.”

But people don’t tend to like ambiguity. Iit feels unclear and disorderly. People don’t like ambiguity. It feels inconclusive. So, over time, we humans try and pin things down with a little more certainty, a little more surety, to seal things up in a tidier box. That’s just what we do. We don’t like stories with multiple possible plotlines. We like to know the plotline, the one and true story.

So, understandably, we reduced the many ways of telling the Christian story of sin and redemption to only one way, and we called that way, the substitutionary atonement. There are specific historical reasons why this way of telling the story has become the primary way our Story is told. It got a big boost in the 11th century, and then again in 1895, but it is by no means the only orthodox way to tell the Story. In fact, it has some real liabilities that should encourage us not to make it the only way we tell the Story.

In the 11th Century, a theologian named Anselm was trying to explain Christian sin and redemption story in a way that made sense to people. He lived in a world of medieval European politics (feudalism), so he told it in a way that resonated with the sensibilities of his constituency. For him, God’s honor was offended by sin, and had to be restored. In the medieval world, politics, economics, and social structure were held together by feudal hierarchy, and honor was the glue that held it all together. Consequently, it was a fit metaphor for Anselm to suggest that God was the lord, we are the vassals, and sin has broken the honor bound covenant between us.

In the feudal system, the lord’s honor didn’t have to be restored to make him feel better. No, honor was not that trivial. The lord’s honor had to be restored because it was the foundation of order for the whole social, political, and economic system. A broken covenant ripped the social fabric, and invited chaos and anarchy.  Consequently, sin, to Anselm, violated God’s honor and stood as unanswered justice that had to be made right for the world to keep functioning. Sin could not simply be forgiven willy-nilly. To preserve God’s honor and dignity (lest the system, the very universe fall apart), God needed satisfaction.

For the sake of the universe, for the sake of all, God must preserve the honor of his own dignity. He must not forgive sins without some form of payment being made. So when Jesus died, Anselm keyed in on those scriptures that spoke of Jesus’ sacrifice being a sacrifice of the one, to pay the penalty for all. For him, Jesus death satisfied God’s dignity , restored honor, and repaired the breach in the universe. And his way of telling the Story was a perfect fit for those living during feudal times. It matched the world around them. It fit with the way they understood society. It had comforting familiarity for them and touched their hearts deeply.

But for us, today, living in a decidedly un-feudal society, it has problems. In essence, here’s what it says to our 21st Century ears. God is omnipotent and omniscient, all-powerful, all-knowing. God made the world, the universe, and all that are in them. God set the rules of physics, the rules of human nature, the whole thing. It’s God’s game, he made the rules from the beginning.

So… God made human beings with the ability to sin (all powerful). God made human beings knowing they would sin (all-knowing). And then when they did sin, God saddled them with a debt they couldn’t possibly pay. Sinful human beings must pay the ultimate penalty of death and eternal separation from God (hell, we call it) for being who God made them to be and doing what God knew they would do.  Furthermore, there’s nothing they can ever do about it.

However, to show his gracious and merciful side, God sends his only son, a perfect man, without sin, and then he proceeds to beat the tar out of him, flog him, crucify him, turn his face from him, and then kill him. And only after this, after the blood of an innocent man has been shed, only then will God let that be enough.  His wrath is satisfied, his honor is restored, he can now allow humanity back into his good graces.

Now few Christians tell the Story that baldly, but for all the nuance we try to put around it, that’s the basic plotline of substitutionary atonement.  And that way of telling the Story of sin and redemption is a bit problematic for people not living under a feudal lord. It seems highly unfair. God seems capricious, devious, unjust, and unsporting. All in all, it’s a pretty dirty business and God is at the center of it.

This is a God that smart people would stay away from. If anybody we know treated a dog like that, let alone their own son, well, that’s just somebody we ought to give a wide berth. How in the world did we get so indebted to a God who made a system with such crummy rules? Well no thanks, God!  You stay over there, I’ll stay over here.

And we ought to be repulsed by this telling of the Story.

If it wasn’t so common, so mainstream Christian, we’d have nothing to do with it. It’s fundamental assumptions are that God is not eternally loving, that God made us one way, and then rejects us for being that way; that God despises, and that God abhors at least part of us, the sinful part.

So, how do we unravel the telling of our Story in a way that remains faithful to our history, to our scriptures, but at the same time holds together more consistently, the themes of God’s love, human beings made in the image of God, and the tragedy of these two natures within us?

I think a good starting place is to ask ourselves what sin is. What happened to the human race that resulted in the two natures? What is the nature of this dark side of our souls?

If we answer these questions well, we’ll be better positioned to answer the question of what it means when we say that Jesus saves us from sin.

Next week.

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Welcome back to our year-long project Rethinking Our Story.  Thus far we’ve covered four of six sections (the seventh section on rethinking our spirituality, will be pushed to next year, and cover a full year itself). The first section focused on rethinking how so many Christians think about scripture. Then, we spent some time rethinking how we have told the story of God’s nature and human nature, and finally we focused on the way we talk about Jesus.

That section before the summer break focused on the players in our Story, and now we are turning to the Story itself. Now, we’ll synthesize what we’ve said before the break, and begin to talk about what happened before you and I came on the scene; what happened to human beings that got us to this place in which we find ourselves; what happened that makes human nature the way it is? And how do we overcome the dark parts of our souls, and awaken to the light?

What is the Story we find ourselves in?
And how, then, are we to live accordingly?

When we began this project, I talked about a problem we Christians face. The way we have told our narrative; the way we frame reality that under-girds how we think, how we act, and the program we design to help us grow spiritually, has not really been working for vast numbers of American Christians of late. As a whole, we Christians are faring quite badly in our sexuality, our mental health, our finances, our marriages, our stress-related disorders, and our influence in the world around us. In other venues I’ve given a lot of statistical evidence on this point, but as a species, we American Christians are doing quite badly.

I’ve suggested that the Story we tell about ourselves, about our religion is a root cause behind how badly we’re doing. For the past many generations, we’ve reduced this narrative to one dominant focus; the point of life is to escape punishment in hell for our sins. Original sin, as the doctrine is called, is going to keep us all from being with God in eternity. Our sinfulness has created at best, a rift, a legal separation between us and God, and at worst, has earned us the very wrath of God. We desperately need to solve this problem.  In this view, the relevance of the God-Jesus narrative is to do just that; rescue us from the horrible, horrible part of ourselves, to settle the legal dispute between us and God, to assuage the wrath of God, and to secure a place in heaven for the eternal afterlife.

If you’ve been part of the project, or listened online to catch up, the groundwork we’ve laid by talking about God’s nature, human nature, and the nature of Jesus will make it easier, to rethink this singular with a very different emphasis.

There is no dispute that human beings are in a bad place, no dispute that sinfulness is a very large problem. Anyone who watches the news, or teaches school, or deals with the public in retail, or marries a human being knows that human beings are trapped in sinfulness. We’re stuck.  We’re in a pickle, and like all the other religions, Christianity is trying to figure out how to get out of this pickle.

The groundwork we laid in the first part of this project affects a very different view of how we face that dilemma. I suggested that God is love, and if we think about that reality deeply enough, it forcefully challenges some of the old ways we’ve told the Story. We’ve suggested that human beings are made in the image of God, and that too changes everything. And, we’ve suggested the Jesus was fully human, and fully divine, and this too, if properly considered, forces us to question some of the assumptions behind the old telling.

Our religion’s Story, our way of talking about The Way Things Really Are must be better. Things are at a desperate place, and we must do better. Our Story must inspire us to better lives than we’re living today, it must inspire and enable us to live more virtuously, more like Jesus, it must help us bring the values of God to our relationships, our society, our economy, it must help us live less frenetically, with less exhausting busyness, it must inspire us to love better, forgive better, extend grace to our enemies better, do politics better, do social justice better.

We need a better telling of our Story at the core of our religion. So let’s begin rethinking what happened that got us to where we are, and hopefully, as we do, we’ll find a better way to move into the abundant life Jesus taught us about.

***

Our Story, like all good stories, begins with the problem of good and evil. It tries to address these deep human realities, not on the surface, not this act of good, or that act of evil, but in a deep and universal sense, the good and evil that are at the core of our very existence as human beings.

How is it, that we are good (we spent a lot of time talking about the implications of being made in the image of God), and are at the same time, so bad?

We’ve avoided the word “sin” thus far, because I believe our old telling of the story so trivializes and misunderstands it, but in effect, the “bad” in human nature, is what we Christians call “sin.”

How can we human beings be both noble, good, loving, gracious, kind, and merciful, and at the same time be hateful, spiteful, stingy, selfish, mean, and sometimes unspeakably evil? How can good and bad exist side-by-side in the same being? How can fresh water and foul water spring from the same well? How is it, as Paul says, that the things we want to do, we don’t do, (the virtuous and good things), while the things we don’t want to do (the ignoble and sinful things), we do so often? How did it come to be that we wake up inside ourselves and find these two natures so powerfully alive inside of us?

This is the problem our Story is trying to understand, because if we can understand it, we’ll be better equipped to walk toward the light, and away from the darkness.

Ours is not the only religion to grapple with this dilemma. All the religious traditions have this problem as the starting place for their stories. The Jewish and Muslim faiths frame the cornerstone of the problem with the same story we do, but come at the solution a little differently. The Buddhist and Hindu religions frame the cornerstone of the problem a bit differently, but comes at the solution very similarly to the teachings of Jesus.

From the beginning, this is the problem religions are trying to solve. In college I remember a story from a comparative religion class. Iit was one of the cosmological myths of the ancient world religions from before the Axial Age. I think it was from Babylonian, but can’t be sure (that was a long time ago).

Their story went like this.
In the beginning, there were two gods among the pantheon; one a god of pure evil, the other a god of pure good. They were, quite naturally, at odds with one another, and one day their ill-will erupted into physical confrontation. In those days, people thought of universe as a 3-tiered affair, with the dome of the heavens above, a flat earth below, and an underworld for the spirits of the dead below that. Onto the dome of the heavens, climbed these two gods to have it out once and for all. It was such a vicious fight , that they completely tore one another apart and from the residue of their bodies, their mingled blood fell to the earth as droplets; each drop a little bit of the god of good in it, each with a little bit of the god of evil in it, and wherever a drop fell, a human being grew from the earth.

In this clever ancient story, our ancestors framed an understaning of the condition in which they, like us, found themselves. Each of us has an essence of good within us. Each of us has an essence of evil within us. This is the human dilemma. This is the starting point for our Story, the problem that our religion, like the other religions, is at work trying to solve. To the degree that our thinking gives us a context, gives us understanding, gives us a point, this is the degree to which we are able to walk away from darkness and walk toward light.

As to specifics, our account begins in a garden. It begins with a purity, innocence, and goodness born of the very breath of God in the human soul. But then enters the villain, a serpent, a temptation, a rebellion, and with the rebellion erupts a dividing of our humanity between two loyalties; loyal to the Divine image within us, loyal to the rebellion of self-as-God. How well we solve the problem of these divided loyalties, is how well we are able to find our ways from darkness to light.

Next week we’ll begin thinking about several different ways we have told our Story through the centuries, several ways we have stopped telling it, that if we were to revisit, might help us avoid some of the current pitfalls that are so damaging us.