The Ultimate Sacrifice?

[Stanley]

This weekend I was reading Misfits:The Church's Hidden Strength by Barbrara Wendland. She had an interesting statement:

In the form in which we now hear the substitutionary atonement theory, it was first presented by Anselm of Canterbury, a theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury who lived more than a thousand years after the death of Jesus.

So one of the driving doctrines of modern Christianity has only been around for about half the life of Christianity? Anybody here know more about that? I had not heard that before.

[glintofpewter]

I used the words loosely but here is the early development of the ransom version from wikipedia:

 

The first major theory of the atonement, the ransom theory of atonement originated in the early Church, particularly in the work of Origen. The theory teaches that the death of Christ was a ransom, usually said to have been paid to Satan, in satisfaction of his just claim on the souls of humanity as a result of sin.

-----------

I'll have to think some more about my "What if".

 

Ideas evolve. Our Thinking changes over time, over thousands of years. Perhaps not as certain biology but change over time with added value (evolution) just the same. Without this process we would not have democracy. (Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane)

 

Dutch

[glintofpewter]

From wikipedia

 

Themes of moral transformation through God's redemptive love in Jesus were prevalent among writers in the early church, leading some scholars to claim that the moral influence theory was universally taught in the second and third centuries.

 

Wikipedia goes on to say that ransom and Christus Victor were thought in connection with moral influence view.

 

Dutch

[Jagged Zen Monkey]

When I was in my late teens I started to get more into Christianity. While on that path I tried to do things that made me closer to the person I thought a Christian should be. One of the things I saw as important was honesty, so I started trying to be more honest. I wasn’t a dishonest person before but I tried to make sure what I said was truthful to the extent I could. But a weird thing happened because of that. In all honesty, I had to admit to myself that the basic premise of Christianity didn’t make sense to me. Why would a God of love require Jesus to be the ultimate blood sacrifice for forgiveness of sins? Even more so, why would a God of perfect love, perfect peace be so arrogant to require any blood sacrifices at all? So my plan to become more religious/Christian ended up eroding my Christian faith.

 

Over the years I have asked that question but have never received a decent answer. I figured people here have thought about it and I would be curious to hear some ideas.

 

I too struggle with any type of literal blood sacrifice. When I think of what Jesus actually did, I tend to view his sacrifice in terms of a life dedicated to the Father, which is oddly enough what we are called to do ourselves [Romans 12:1]. God does not demand spilled blood [surely], but I do think he expects us to present ourselves as living sacrifices as Jesus did. This amounts to living our lives in obedience to God's will. If we take Jesus' life, his teachings, and his actions to heart then God's will is for us to love one another and serve one another's others needs. Even Jesus, the son of God lived a life of service. This was his sacrifice as well as his reasonable duty as God's son. Likewise, we too are called to live a life of service, which is our reasonably duty as adopted children of God.

 

Blood signifies the seat of life, which for those who have been born again, is the Holy Spirit. To be born again simply implies being made new, given a new heart and purpose through the Spirit, which is love. The blood of Jesus, which was his seat of life is the Spirit and love of God. The blood, which is Spirit cleanses each of us from our sins, making us new creations according to God's will. The reason I believe this is because of what Jesus alluded to in John 6 when he spoke of drinking his blood and eating his flesh, which he later referred to as Spirit and life. He in effect told us that blood represents Spirit and flesh represents a life dedicated to God's will. See John 4:34. Jesus, who's food (meat) was to do his fathers will, trudged a path that few of us follow. However, we are required to follow that narrow path if we desire to enter into the kingdom of God.

 

We all know the way. It's as plain as the nose on our faces. It's not a difficult path by any stretch of the imagination. As a matter of fact, Jesus told us that his yoke is easy and his burden light. The yoke by which we are yoked to Christ is love. Love is God's will for us all. It is likewise written that God is love, thus it is God who guides us through his Spirit. Christ simply shares the work load with us. I think we sometimes make it more difficult than it truly is. We sometimes resist love which makes for a not so pleasant day in the field. However, when we yield amazing things happen. We are blessed whereby we are able to bless others. In closing, shed blood equates to the pouring out of God's Spirit upon humanity, through which we are cleansed from our sinful nature (the old man) and are reborn, becoming partakers of the divine nature (the new man).

 

Ultimate sacrifice is about presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice as Jesus did. It is about dying to the old man, and being made new creations through the Spirit. It's about becoming who we were born to be. It's about forsaking our self serving ways to pursue something beneficial to those we share this world with. It's about service, love, and sharing our blessings with our fellow man. It's about becoming the good ground so that the seed which is the Word/logos of God can grow within each of us without being strained by the world. It's about becoming a tree of life through love and wisdom, whereby we are able to bring good fruit to maturity. When the fruits we produce are love, joy, peace, gentleness, kindness, patience, faith, and self control we ourselves have become the ultimate sacrifice, even as Jesus was an ultimate sacrifice as recorded in scripture.

[PaulS]

It could also be that early Christian's got carried away with this 'sacrifice' stuff, when they were left to figure out what Jesus was all about after his execution. Clearly he had an impact on many in his day, and then he's put to death very abruptly by the authorities. What to make of it all? It seems some reached back into their scripture and came up with passages from hundreds of years before that they than adopted and made fit into the current situation. If your cultural understanding is that God needs sacrifices to be made happy, then it's not suprising that the theologians of the day came up with linking Jesus' death to some sort of sacrifice for God.

 

Personally, I'm not comfortable with all this sacrifice talk, whether it's about Jesus or us. I don't see my life as a sacrifice if I choose to try and live it fully. To me, I don't need some sort of God-will to determine that loving one another is a responsible and reasonable way to live. I don't see that as a life or service, but rather simply a life of sense.

 

The fact that it is often so hard to keep on this path when challenged, demonstrates to me that there is no ideal world that we somehow need to find, but rather we are humans who are learning to do the best we can with what we have.

[GeorgeW]

So one of the driving doctrines of modern Christianity has only been around for about half the life of Christianity? Anybody here know more about that? I had not heard that before.

 

Stanley,

 

Didn't the atonement theory originate with Paul?

 

George

[JosephM]

When speaking of human ideas and thinking, I don't think you can say that any process was necessary - just that it happened, and here's why. The burning of heretics at the stake for worshiping the wrong deity wasn't necessary - it just happened.

 

NORM

Norm,

I would disagree.

If it happened, it is not hypothetical as is your assumption that it was not necessary in the process of the evolution of consciousness. I think Dutch's statement was very insightful.

 

Joseph

[Stanley]

Wikipedia to learn about atonement. Why didn't I think of that? That was an interesting read. Thanks, Dutch.

 

Didn't the atonement theory originate with Paul?

 

I know there is talk of things like that in Paul's letters which is why I was surprised to hear it being a later concept instead of existing from the beginning. I am not a Bible scholar by any means though, so that was why I was asking.

[PaulS]

Didn't the atonement theory originate with Paul?

George

 

I think that's debatable. I know I've both read and listened to arguments against such, but at short notice this is all I could come up with:

 

If Paul had frequently imaged Jesus' death in terms of temple sacrifice and the Day of Atonement elsewhere, or if he had elaborated this idea in Romans, seeking an alternative interpretation of his teaching would be a waste of time. But this is emphatically not the case. Apart from one passage in Romans, 3:21-26, there would be no grounds for attributing this thinking to him. The impression that he taught this idea frequently grows out of traditional interpretations of this one passage and then reading other passages in light of this interpretation. But none of the other verses would by themselves lead to this doctrine if interpreters did not bring it to them. They can be understood more naturally and plausibly in another way.

 

The case for Paul's teaching the doctrine of the atonement actually rests, not on this whole passage, but on one part of one verse, Romans 3:25. Interpreting this one clause involves decisions on some very technical matters, but since I cannot deal with those, I will describe the issue in more general terms.

 

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3354

[glintofpewter]

If I remembered the following material I would not proposed my "What If" as I did

 

From Thomas Sheehan's The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986--electronic edition 2000)

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/thomas_sheehan/firstcoming/three.html

 

 

 

This third part of the book is about that twofold process: the growth of Jesus' reputation and the corresponding undoing of his message.

 

Our objective is to examine the evolution of the Christian faith over its first fifty years, from its earliest formulations to its full-blown interpretation of Jesus as the Son of God. I will trace this evolution via the church's transformation of Jesus' notion of history. We will examine how Jesus' ideal of the present-future disintegrated as his own reputation grew in the decades after his death. Although this evolutionary process was quite complicated, we can distinguish three general phases within a broad spectrum of christological variations:

 

STAGE ONE: THE APOCALYPTIC FUTURE. Whereas Jesus had dissolved the future of Jewish apocalyptic expectations into the presence of that future (the dawning kingdom), Christianity reconstituted the apocalyptic future by recasting Jesus as the future Son of Man.

 

STAGE TWO: THE HEAVENLY PRESENT. Christianity then drew that apocalyptic future back into the present moment by reinterpreting Jesus as the Lord and Christ who was already reigning in heaven.

 

STAGE THREE: THE CHRISTOLOGICAL PAST. Finally the church projected the Lord Jesus into the past history of the cosmos by declaring that he had preexisted from before creation as the savior of the entire world.

 

Not everyone will agree that Jesus as the Christ represents an undoing of his message and there are other analyses of the development of Christian thought. This development or evolution, I guess might be seen as a braid with many strands since it seems that at any time in history someone is representing each of the various ideas about who Christ is.

 

Dutch

[NORM]

If it happened, it is not hypothetical as is your assumption that it was not necessary in the process of the evolution of consciousness. I think Dutch's statement was very insightful.

 

Joseph

 

I don't think you are seeing my point. The Shoah forced those of us in the Jewish faith to evolve. However, it wasn't NECESSARY to that evolution. There were reformers all throughout the early part of the 20th century who were pushing for secularization. Had we listened to their counsel; my great-great grandfather would likely be here today (were he to live to the age of 97).

 

My point is that we don't need to wait for a calamitous situation to force societal evolution.

 

Every now and then we ought to listen to our dreamers:

 

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today...

 

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

 

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

 

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...

 

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one - Imagine, by John Lennon

 

NORM

[JosephM]

I don't think you are seeing my point. The Shoah forced those of us in the Jewish faith to evolve. However, it wasn't NECESSARY to that evolution. There were reformers all throughout the early part of the 20th century who were pushing for secularization. Had we listened to their counsel; my great-great grandfather would likely be here today (were he to live to the age of 97).

 

My point is that we don't need to wait for a calamitous situation to force societal evolution.

 

Every now and then we ought to listen to our dreamers:

 

 

 

NORM

 

I understand your point but it is still contains hypotheticals like 'ought to' and ' if's' and 'we don't need to'. It seems to me, it misses the possible inference of Dutch's suggestion.

 

It seems to me, from the perspective of the whole, this very moment is 'as it is' as a result of ALL things since the beginning of time including such trivia as the number of hairs on your head. Reality by definition is not a hypothetical or mere assumption. Reality is a product of everything intertwined in a 'dance', where each element influences every other element and brings us to this moment in time. 'This moment' by definition could not be other than what it is or it would be different. Dreamers are fine and give us hope, but who can say what wasn't necessary to arrive at this point except what actually happened?

 

Reality of the moment is the result of all happenings, whether real or presumed by the mind. Therefor, i would also say ... "believing in a substitutionary sacrifice was a necessary step in the present evolution of our thinking about Jesus" as Dutch alluded to in his post. In my view, it is an established historical sequence and a correct statement. IMO, while hypotheticals can be used to influence future happenings they have have no real existence in reality.

 

Just my take on the original post and your comments.

 

Joseph

Edited September 26, 2012 by JosephM