RethinkingOurStory

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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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2010 at 9:47 pm and is filed under 6-What Happened?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.