The Role of Jesus' Sacrifice

An Episcopal church in California is holding discussions regarding whether Jesus' death on the cross plays a part in our salvation, or if it is an unnecessary and damaging aspect of historical Christian theology. If one affirms the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture, it's a difficult stance to take. My affirmation of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement aside, I take issue with Rev. Bacon's argument that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement leads one to accept the death penalty. If that is one's argument for utilizing the death penalty, he or she drastically misunderstands the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. The fact that some people misunderstand a doctrine should not be evidence in favor of discarding it.

The beginning of the article follows; the full text is available here.

Christ Died Because of Our Sins, Not For Our Sins
by J. Edwin Bacon, Rector
All Saints Church, Pasadena
[from this week's edition of Saints Alive ... All Saint's weekly newsletter]

Is God’s capacity to forgive limited or is it mea­sureless and lacking desire for retribution?

Did Jesus die because of our sins or did he die for our sins?

In this debate about the nature of God, Jesus actually had quite a strong point of view. Jesus’ image of God was one of un conditional love as he described the forgiv ing parent in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32). Quoting Hebrew Scripture (Hosea 6:6; by the way, don’t ever let some one tell you that “the God of the Old Testa­ment is a God of punishment”), Jesus said, “Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9: 9-13).

Much of institutionalized Christianity has taught a theology that disagrees with Jesus. Rather than seeing God with a power ful eagerness to forgive simply because of the nature of God’s love, which has no need for bloodthirsty sacrifices, the church has often expressed a competing theology (based on an 11th century theory of St. Anselm referred to as “substitutionary sacrificial atonement”). That theology has held that the very essence of Christianity is that without Christ’s sac rificial death on the cross, “we would for ever be guilty, ashamed and condemned before God.” (Mark Dever, “Nothing but the Blood,” Christianity Today, May, 2006, p. 29, quoted in Borg, Marcus, Jesus; Un­covering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, pp. 267-268)

The Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser, says about this theology, “the idea of God murdering his son for the salvation of the world is … morally indefensible. It turns Christianity into cosmic child abuse.” (Giles Fraser, “Cross Purposes,” The Guardian, April 4, 2007) Furthermore, Dr. Fraser (the Vicar of St. Mary’s Church, Put ney, in London and lecturer at Oxford) argues that it promotes a heretical theological basis for the death penalty, refusing to believe that pure and simple forgiveness without punish ment can ever be a proper response to sin. Such a conditioned form of forgiveness is the basis of retributive understandings of justice (a debt has to be paid off in full) instead of restorative understandings of justice.

Thanks for reading! Don't miss out; sign up to have posts delivered right to your inbox via FeedBurner: