#24 Atonement theories drive me crazy, so maybe they are not necessary.

It's Good Friday.  I don't work at a church.  It is a little strange to be in this place.  Usually, I have to be prepping talks about the cross, and I am not a fan.  Let's face it.  The cross doesn't make sense.  It seems like stupid violence that we have glorified over other more important themes.  Or we use the cross to make us feel guilty because our sins put Christ up there.  Or we are told that the gospel is summed up by the cross.  Is the good news that Christ was executed by the state in a horrific and public display of violent might.  You cannot stand against Rome.  Then, worse of all, we get told that it was the Jews who killed Jesus, who was Jewish, when they had no power to crucify.  Let's not blame and scapegoat the Jews just because the author of John's Gospel does (probably in an attempt to distance his community from Jews, who had revolted and weren't held in high esteem by the Romans, who, you know, could kill you next).  

In short, I hate the cross.  I hate the violence.  I hate the way it gets construed and used to hate other people, or to make us all feel guilty.  I hate the atonement theory that becomes confused with the good news of Jesus Christ.  You know the one where God hates humans because we sin and only blood will satisfy this God to forgive us.  Oh, and the only blood that will do is the blood of God, which means that God both is perpetrating the violence upon Godself.  Which makes no sense.  So penal substitution theory goes that God murders God so that God can forgive us.  Then, God comes back from the dead and is totally cool with us now.  Yikes!  (I know that might be an unfair assessment of the theory, but this is the way it ends up coming across to me). 

I took a class on atonement theories in Seminary.  It was an awful class because no theory makes a whole lot of sense.  It is interesting to note that the early church didn't seem to worry to much about atonement theories.  The creeds don't say how God saves humanity, or redeems/reconciles humanity.  It is just assumed that atonement happened and that seems to be enough for the early church.  Isn't it funny that incarnation is what is mainly fought over in the early church councils?  It was more important to them to figure out who Jesus was than it was to figure out how God forgives sins or atones for sins.  The Gospel for them had more to do with who Jesus is and the whole God-human being thing than anything else.  I think Gregory of Nazianzus said that what is assumed in the incarnation is saved.  Thus, what comes into contact with God is what is saved.

So maybe the cross has less to do with redemption and more to do with humanities one last bow to the powers of the world to use violence as a means to rid ourselves of true connection with God.  Then, we made the very act of state sanctioned murder and called it redemptive.  The myth of redemptive violence is the predominate belief in our world just watch any action movie.  So after violence doesn't work, God gives us the gift of an empty tomb and life lived differently from the ethos of the Empire, which is still alive today.  Maybe redemption has more to do with the life before and after the death instead of the actual death.  Maybe the death is exactly from what we need to be redeemed.

I advise all of you to go check out Homebrewed Christianity to see some different ideas on atonement and look up Girard's mimetic theory, or read Walter Wink (he's fun).