The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God just zap everyone, so they get with the program? God forgave sins before the crucifixion; Jesus healed people and raised the dead before the cross. What is this death on a cross all about?

Jesus did not explain why he had to die other than to enigmatically take the Passover bread and wine and tell his followers, “this is my body; this is my blood.” Jesus’ apostles (“sent-ones”), especially Paul and the author of Hebrews, worked out some of the “why” regarding the crucifixion and resurrection of Messiah. Their writings are the basis for various theories of the atonement. Although there are multitudes of variations, they all seem to fall into one of four main categories. They are all efforts to understand why Jesus had to die.

1. The most prominent theory among American evangelicals is Forensic Substitutionary Atonement, or Penal Substitution. It comes from Martin Luther. It is often explained by way of a courtroom metaphor. I am the guilty criminal; I have violated Gods law and deserve to die. (Actually, I deserve to be tortured forever.) God the Father is the holy and righteous judge who hates sin and must punish wrongdoing or be unjust. The satan is the prosecuting attorney. The Holy Spirit is my defense attorney who doesn’t have much of a case, and Jesus is the substitute who pays the just penalty on my behalf. I have broken the law of God, and the penalty is death. Jesus chooses to die for me. In this view, God’s righteous wrath is vented on Jesus. Instead of me, God kills his son. Now I can be forgiven. Penal Substitution makes sense to many. It sounds too much like infanticide to others. Its core is true – Jesus died for our sins. Somehow, Jesus’ death takes sin off the table.

2. In the Middle Ages, Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, put forth the Satisfaction theory, which basically says that God’s honor was at stake and Jesus preserved it. More specifically, it teaches that the crucifixion is a substitute for human sin that satisfies God’s just wrath against human transgression due to Christ’s infinite worth. It doesn’t explain how an innocent death satisfies God’s honor, nor why God is concerned about his reputation, but certainly Jesus’ death effectively solves whatever the problem is.

3. Influenced by the Enlightenment, philosopher Peter Abelard introduced the Moral Influence Theory, which asserts that Jesus died on the cross to show us how much God loves us and thereby motivate us to be kind and loving towards each other. In that view, Jesus is an example for us to follow, which is true – I need to follow Jesus’ example, even unto death, but what about my essential problem of being separated from God? I find myself unable to follow his example.

4. Christus Victor, the victory of Christ over all evil, is the view held by the global majority of Christians. On the cross, Jesus absorbed within himself all the evil (past, present, and future) in the cosmos. All that is not of God, all sin, all chaos, was laser focused on Jesus. On the cross, Jesus destroyed the works of the devil. Christus Victor is the broadest of the theories. It encompasses the idea that Jesus’ crucifixion takes away our sins, satisfies God’s justice, and shows us God’s love. 

N. T.  Wright points out that these theories need not be in conflict, that one need not accept one and reject the others. Instead, they are mutually veracious. We need not jettison one to accept another.

In the Genesis creation stories, God creates a good world crowned by “very good” image-bearing humans. God did not create a perfect world, nor did God create perfect people. It would have been impossible to do so because the Triune God alone is eternally perfect. To create something other than Godself that was perfect would have been God creating God. Anything other than God is by definition less than perfect. Good, but not perfect.

God invited Human (Adam) and Living One (Eve) on a journey – a journey with God towards teleios, wholeness, completion. God invites us to join in making all things new. God’s purpose is not simply to rescue a handful of humans out of this mess, take them to heaven, and throw away the rest. God’s purpose is for all of creation to become heavenly. The Bible ends not with humans flying away to a heaven somewhere, but with heaven coming to earth and all the material universe, including our bodies, being made new, sinless, eternal. 

To join God in making all things new, humankind needs a change of heart. Without that change of heart, we want to go our own way, which, as we see from Genesis 3 through the rest of the Hebrew scriptures, leads to violence and oppression. All of us, one way or another, have chosen our own path rather than God’s.

Why do we do choose our own way when God’s way leads to eternal love, peace, and joy?  We do so because it seems natural; everyone is doing it, and it’s the path of least resistance. Besides, God’s way seems incongruous. Turn the other cheek? Go the extra mile? Be the servant of all? Love your enemies? Forsake all violence, coercion, manipulation? Sell everything and give to the poor? Eschew wealth? Trust God for daily needs? Identify with the marginalized? Welcome the stranger? Prefer to die rather than kill? Wash stinky feet? Conquer death by dying? Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus? It sounds absurd. It’s not how most Christians live.

To choose the narrow path of the Kingdom of God, we need a change of heart. We need to change course, go a different direction. That’s what repentance means. But there’s a problem. We can’t even repent on our own.

What’s a God to do? God, motivated by pure love, became one of us, incarnate, human. Jesus lived fully united with God, always doing God’s will, always choosing the God-path. He showed us what it looks like to have a repentant heart; a heart turned towards God. Jesus showed us what it looks like to live not enslaved by death.

We need a change of heart to have union with God, and we must have union with God to join with God in making all things new. Having chosen our own path, however, we have put ourselves in bondage to sin, death, the evil one. In Jesus, God came to us, joined with humanity in its present state. Doing so meant he would suffer and experience death like we humans do. 

Blood in scripture always represents life, not death. Jesus shed his blood for us means he gave his life for us. His blood is precious because his life is perfect. He went through death so he could pull us out into everlasting life on the other side.

Joined with Christ, we enter his repentance, death and resurrection. Jesus fully identified with us. That’s why he allowed John to baptize him. Jesus lived as the faithful human, Israelite, covenant partner with the Father. He lived a life of returning to God in faithful, loyal, covenant union. He loved God and all others. He fully turned towards God, which is what is meant by “repent.” His turning towards God becomes our repentance if we are willing. 

The relationship God established with Human and Living One was a covenant with a commission to rule, steward, and fill the earth as God’s viceroys, royal officials, partners.  Rather than the problem being reduced to “sin”—understood as a legal infraction—the tragedy goes much deeper. Sin is a synonym for idolatry. When we turn from worshiping the true God, we surrender the authority God has given us to idols—the powers and principalities of darkness. The covenant of vocation was reiterated to Abraham, promising a worldwide family. Through Israel God would rescue the world. Jesus is both the God who fulfills the covenant and the true Israel in and through whom God will accomplish God’s purpose. 

Idolatry is the plight; victory over the evil powers through the forgiveness of sins via Christ’s cross is the solution. Thus, God restores us to our vocation as prophets, priests, and kings here and now. When the first Christians spoke of Jesus “dying for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,” they meant: “a revolution had been launched!” 

The idea that God is an angry judge who must vent divine wrath on somebody is a pagan concept. It does not come from the Judea-Christian scriptures or worldview. God is a loving Father. God’s warning to humans that they would die if they ate of the forbidden fruit was not a threat; it was a loving fact. 

The too common idea that when believers die, they flies away to a heaven somewhere comes from Plato. Plato taught that we are souls trapped in bodies. Gnostics believed that the material world, including our human bodies, is corrupt and destined for destruction. It is from them, not the scriptures, that we get the idea that this present world will be done away with. 

We hear it all the time: “It’s all going to burn.” “So and so died last week – now he has his resurrection body.” When we talk like that, we are moralizing the problem (sin merely as violations of a code), paganizing the solution (an angry god punishing his son), and Platonizing the goal (going to heaven when we die). 

By Jesus’ passion, history is redeemed, and so is the material universe. The goal is not escaping an evil world and a useless body. All is being redeemed, set free, transformed. The goal (teleios) is the realm of God saturating everyone and everything. 

Jesus’ death on Passover brings deliverance, freedom, manumission, here and now, as well as in the future. It’s as if all the evil of universe – all death, sorrow, pain, suffering, sin, rebellion, hatred, violence, war, etc. – coalesced into one huge storm that spent itself out on Jesus as he hung on the Roman gibbet. The storm we call evil, the satan, and sin spent itself, and has no more power. This is proven by the resurrection (for which there is an abundance of rational evidence). Jesus simultaneously becomes the nation of Israel meant by God to influence the world with divine love, the redeeming Pascal Lamb, the fulfillment of all the covenants of the old economy (Adamic, Noahatic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic), the culmination of divine history, and the perfect revelation of the divine heart. 

A revolution has begun. All evil is banished. We are enabled by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to literally follow the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. The last are first, we meet violence with nonresistance, the greatest is servant of all, and we forgive unconditionally.  A whole new way of living has begun. The way of nonviolent, self-sacrificial, other-oriented perfect cruciform love. 

This changes everything. Our physical bodies are not prisons in which we are trapped – they are beautifully crafted, to be cared for and honored. They will rise again, literally, physically. The cosmos is God’s handiwork. We treasure, defend, protect and care for nature. We altruistically love others and non-narcissistically love ourselves. 

We are God’s works of art, God’s poems. God sings the universe into being and dances with joy over us. War and oppression are never options. There is no place for hatred and no need for fear. Our moral imperative is to eliminate poverty, suffering, and injustice. We cannot die. We will live with God forever, temporarily in “heaven;” later in a material universe where all things are made new. 

When we die, we are with Jesus in a temporary disembodied state. Paul said that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Jesus said he was going to prepare a place for us, that in his Father’s house are many dwelling places. The Greek word there indicated a temporary resting place, like a fine hotel. At his appearing, our real, solid, physical bodies are resurrected and revivified. We live in union with God forever in a renovated, perfect earth in a perfect cosmos.

This Christian life is not about going to heaven when we die; it is about living in God’s kingdom now, bringing divine shalom – wholeness, holistic health, actualization, peace, grace, forgiveness, acceptance, hospitality – to the cities, towns, neighborhoods and countryside. In Christ, we are fully human and fully alive – now and forever.