Mallory, can I ask you a dumb question about Jesus? Because you know a lot about Christian theology from before your own reverse-Damascus, and I was pretty into it for a few years before becoming non-religious, but I was High Anglican, so I’m more tea-cake-Evensong-y? Like, I’m super up on the Bible itself, but this is not really explained in the Bible.
Unrelated: this may be my favorite painting of Jesus ever made. Look at his whimsical eyes! Look at that cozy-looking caftan! Hi, Jesus! (It should be said here that I like Jesus tremendously, and I like the idea of Jesus in a caftan even better.)
There are atonement theories for every day of August, if you are interested in such things. Atonement theories have become particularly popular in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because even theology is subject to trends (LET’S DISCUSS MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY AND THE FOUNDING OF THE YMCA SOMETIME, YOU AND I). Let us for the moment set aside secular interpretations of the Crucifixion (“Jesus died because he was tried and convicted of attempting insurrection against the Roman state and that’s how courts work”).
So! You are quite right in that the New Testament books and the writings of the very early church (let’s say the first 300 years or so, to be somewhat arbitrary) weren’t terribly concerned with fleshing out an interpretational framework of the crucifixion. There’s 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, which talks about Christ “who died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,” of course, then there’s the Nicene Creed, which is a bit earlier than your Apostle’s Creed, that describes the crucifixion as having occurred “for our sake.” Some of the early church members subscribed to the idea that the Devil/Satan/Lucifer was fooled into accepting Christ as a sacrifice on behalf of all humanity, like a human ransom payment (later described as the Christus Victor theory by Gustav Aulen), which makes the New Testament more than a bit like Liam Neeson’s Taken. It’s quite nice! The crucifixion acts as a big “FUCK YOU” to evil and death.
So early on there’s a pretty clear understanding that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Romans was ultimately a triumph for God and justice and humanity, rather than a net loss, although the mechanics of how and why don’t seem to interest the Church Fathers and Mothers the same way they did Christians from the eighteenth century on.
Another aside: it is a lovely and a delightful thing for a religion to have Desert Fathers. It’s like Dune, a bit.
When it comes to modern atonement theories, however, you have to start with the big one: SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT. If you have ever attended a mainline Protestant church, particularly an evangelical one, you have almost certainly encountered this one. Since Christianity as an institution is particularly concerned with salvation and reunion with God, with fixing that which is irreparably broken, this idea has been understandably persistent. God requires perfection, human people stab and lie and otherwise damage one another, for this all human beings deserve to die, but rather than do this, God sacrifices a part of himself on our behalf to pay our debt. If you are familiar with the old hymn “In Christ Alone,” you will perhaps remember this line:
And on that Cross as Jesus died/ The wrath of God was satisfied<
For ev’ry sin on him was laid/ Here in the death of Christ I stand.
Grim, but not without its poetry! This substitutionary/satisfaction theory replaced the ransom theory sometime around the eleventh century in most of Europe, thanks in no small part to Anselm. Its concern is primarily with the perfection and justice of God, and how an imperfect species and imperiled world can possibly hope to connect with him.
So those are some big European/Western theories, but there are plenty of others from Eastern traditions, too. There’s a brand of thinking within parts of the Roman Catholic Church known as liberation theology (or Christianized Marxism if you’re a particular kind of person) that sees the crucifixion as an act of solidarity: if God’s people are going to suffer and die, then God will suffer and die with them.
If you are a fan of HBO’s Oz (and you very much should be), Father Ray Mukada (played by the very nearly perfect B.D. Wong) is a perfect example of this variety of social justice Christianity. An inmate who has just lost a child asks Father M where God was when his son was murdered, and he says, “The same place he was when his son was murdered.” A bit pat, but this was by season 4, I think, and the show wasn’t nearly what it used to be. Still well worth watching, though. In Season 5, he sings a terrific cover of Tori Amos’ “Lace and Leather” (it makes sense if you watch the whole series). Anyhow, that’s liberation theology in a nutshell.
There is even a queer theory of the atonement, which is tremendous:
Queer theologians have observed that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is essentially a rejection of the scapegoating system. Jesus Christ, the sacrificial victim par excellence, condemns and terminates the need to scapegoat others. The resurrection is God’s emphatic “No!” to the insider/outsider dynamic. Queer theologians have expanded upon this initial insight by reinterpreting the traditional satisfaction theory of the atonement in terms of this denunciation of scapegoating. What does it mean to say that Jesus died for the sins of humanity? Queer theologians stress that it is incorrect to maintain that God demanded the death of the Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. God was most certainly present at the cross, but He was not in attendance in order to assist in the act of crucifixion. God draws near to humanity because God longs to halt the repetitious cycle of violence against scapegoats.
Very Maria-sobbing-over-Tony-to-stop-the-killing at the end of West Side Story, if Maria and Tony were gay lovers, which they ought to have been.
One of the loveliest, I think, comes from Eleonore Stump (with such a name, could she have become anything other than a philosopher?) in her summation of Thomas Aquinas’ theology:
We can understand the gist of his idea by considering a homely example of minor evil. Suppose Anna is the mother of a feisty little boy, Nathan, who loves soccer. Anna loves flowers and has asked him repeatedly not to play soccer on the side of the house where her flower beds are. But Nathan does play with his soccer ball near the flower beds, and the inevitable occurs: some of the flowers are trampled. Nathan, however, is so interested in his game that he stops just long enough to run into the house and say, “Sorry, Mom, I trampled your flowers” before he returns to his game. What he has done presents his mother with two problems…She has lost some of her flowers and it will take her some time and energy and money to replace them. But the real problem is with her son, because from this episode she sees two things about him. In the first place, he does not love what she loves; if he had had any care for the flowers, he would have played in a different place. And second, he does not love her as she would like him to, because although he knows she loves her flowers, he does not care for them for her sake. So what Nathan has done has created some distance between himself and his mother. His will and hers are not in harmony and he does not love her as he might; her recognition of both these facts make her sad.
Let us all pause and call our mothers, if our mothers still live in this world to be called.
C. Stephen Evans sums up the rest of her story thusly:
The son, if he was truly sorry, might want to make amends by restoring the garden. If he was too small and unskilled to do this, we can easily imagine the mother helping him, perhaps restoring a key section herself. Such costly love on her part would undoubtedly increase the son’s love and appreciation for the mother.
Of course, if the son wasn’t even sorry for the deed, then the mother’s task would be even more difficult. Should she simply forgive him by ignoring the action and pretending it did not happen? Such ‘forgiveness’ would not really reestablish the relationship, because it would mean the mother did not really take her son’s actions seriously. Perhaps the best solution would again be for the mother to offer the son forgiveness by repairing the damage herself. Perhaps when the son saw his mother on her hands and knees, doing what he ought to be doing, he would be moved to love her and to join in her work. By suffering on his behalf the mother would graciously tell him that all will be well…Families don’t operate on a strictly legal basis. The mother is willing to forgive, and to forgive in a costly way that shows she takes the son’s wrong actions seriously.
There’s much to be said for an understanding of the life and death of Jesus as something that is participatory, active, ongoing, and joyful, rather than something static that has already been done on one’s behalf. There are a few others, I think, some of them more orthodox than the rest: the moral influence theory, which is the idea that God’s redemptive act on the cross was supposed to act as a moral instruction about how to live in a loving and sacrificial way. Calvinism has more than its share of atonement theories, all of them very involved and specific. But let us not be too harsh on the Calvinists! They gave us Lew Smedes, after all, which was awfully kind of them. Let us end this conversation with him, because it does not get much better than Lew:
I joined this small church because it had a great vision of God as the Creator and the Redeemer of the whole wide world. I also liked its orderliness, its sobriety, and its respect for education. I liked the practice of baptizing babies into the family of God and bringing them up as children of God and not as lost sinners who still had to walk down the sawdust trail to get saved. I also liked its modest expectations of our spiritual improvement. The Heidelberg Catechism, everyone’s favorite creed, taught that we can expect no more from ourselves in this life than a small beginning into holiness and wholeness. And this comforted me in view of the sluggish pace of my own spiritual improvement.
Tags: christianity, dune, gabbin about god, nicole and mallory, oz, questions, religion, theology
OH BOY CALVINISM. Can we talk about Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg?
Part of my falling out with religion came from trying to reconcile atonement with the idea of Hell. (I grew up Baptist.) It didn’t make sense to me to have some people HAVE to be saved through belief in Christ. What happens if people never hear about Jesus? I realize this stretches to the importance of missionaries, but you can’t get to EVERYONE, you know? Then I read The Gospel According to Peanuts in which the author rejects the idea of Hell pretty adamantly, and it made sense to me.
There’s a really good This American Life episode, called Heretics, that talks about an evangelical pastor who rejected the idea of Hell outright. It’s one of my favorites, and worth a listen.
I’ve heard it! It was really emotional for me because his conflict of faith mirrored mine so well.
That episode had me sobbing in heavy traffic. I grew up Baptist, too, and — eh, pretty much the same story, except I’d also been hearing too much about the long-term behavioral results of childhood abuse and trauma, which led to a lot of ranting half-debates with my parents about predeterminism. They’re largely cured of damnation now, after too many years in social services, but they still want and need church. I can’t.
Heretics is my favorite TAL episode! I listened to it for the first time on a bus in Sri Lanka, on my way to complete a research project interviewing Pentecostal pastors.
I love Muscular Christianity! (And its Jewish equivalent in Poland and Austria.) I spent way more time than was necessary in my master’s thesis on Muscular Christianity.
TELL US EVERYTHING.
Well, that section of the thesis was about football (soccer) and the media throughout time, so I did some stuff about the way football was disseminated into the English working class, as opposed to the rich people who’d codified it and were playing it in its first years. And it turns out it was muscular Christianity! Basically, introducing sport into the lives of the working class, and especially working-class children (who were no longer being used as labor and were instead going to school), as a method of “wholesome” activity and competition (which was actually its purpose in the English public schools as well). I was particularly looking at magazines/comics for boys and how they reinforced the muscular Christian idea of sport and sportsmanship. It was a pretty brief part of the thesis, but I had a lot of fun with it.
Muscular Judaism as a response is super interesting, though! I was in Poland last summer and went to an exhibit on early Jewish sport in Krakow, where Jews were urbanized and decently assimilated, but still also wanted to prove that they were just as capable of being tough and athletic in a very much muscular Christian way, as that’s what was the founding impetus of most sports clubs at the time and it also provided a counter to still-prevailing Jewish stereotypes. (It was also often tied into Zionism or socialism, also influenced by prevailing Christian/general society ideas of homeland/labor.) So they had sports clubs that had teams of all kinds of sports- apparently the Jewish clubs were dominant in water polo. This was also the case in other countries. I’m totally fascinated by Hakoah Vienna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakoah_Vienna) and wish there was more on them out there.
Uh. That’s a lot of stuff, sorry, but I love the topic!
[applause.gif]
This was so cool.
“I’d love to know more about the Devil, and his interactions with Liam Neeson.” I too would like to learn about this.
And as a from-birth member of the Drunk Episcopalian Society, I must say I’m terribly envious of Caftan Jesus. All the tasteful floral arrangements and Latin service music in the world can’t live up to the promise of those whimsical eyes. (Plus I think Caftan Jesus would not be cowed by the fearsome society of the Altar Guild ladies.)
ETA: Oh, oh! And I would love love LOVE to hear more about liberation theology! That’s the current Pope’s big thing, isn’t it? And that unifying of religious thought and social justice is so fascinating, and is something I never heard about in my years of Catholic school OR Episcopalian Sunday school (and WHY NOT)
I’ve only been a member of the Drunk Episcopalian Society for 10 years now, but I’m also envious of Caftan Jesus. Although as a lay eucharistic minister in my church, I get to serve (and finish off) the high-octane port (not sherry, Mallory) during communion, which helps me be less cowed by the Altar Guild.
Slight nitpick at the end – I think it should be “Go in peace to love and serve____”? Although the idea of peace as a verb is kind of a cool one.
The dismissal in my Episcopal church has always been “Go in peace…” though I also like the concept of verbing peace.
It’s really interesting that this Pope is into Liberation Theology, given JP2’s NOPE NOPE NOPE reaction to anything that could be associated with communism.
Oh no altar guild flashbacks from my years of acolyte service! Although they must be less terrifying now – when I go back home, often the acolytes are wearing UGGS.
This reminds me, in the very best way, of a truly great religion class I took in college. But I was religious then and am not now and very much appreciate the chance to look at material presented in a similar way from a different perspective.
(A+ for Oz and Dune references. College class didn’t have those. A++ for B.D. Wong photo.)
I loved this and I would be very interested in reading more about the trends in Christian (or another religion) beliefs over time. In my Sunday School class we are watching “The History of Christianity in America” right now and the idea that by separating church and state the US has a marketplace where religions are competing for individual’s participation is facinating to me. I also really enjoyed this recent NPR story about non-religious people singing religious music in NYC: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/25/214852468/atheists-….
Way to completely absorb me and make me sit still and think for a few minutes today. Nice piece!
I have only a rudimentary knowledge of Christianity (you might say I’m culturally Christian), so this was really interesting. I had no idea there were different theories on the crucifixion/resurrection! I thought substitutionary atonement was it (and now I know it has a name). The soccer/flowers passage is beautiful.
MALLORY, can I ask a follow up question on the phrase “If you have ever attended a mainline Protestant church, particularly an evangelical one”? Specifically, how exactly do you (or does one) define “mainline” and “evangelical”? I’ve always assumed “mainline” means “a protestant church in a classically church-looking building with a denomination name that someone in the 19th century would recognize,” whereas I feel like in the secural press “evangelical” is often just used as code for “a politically/culturally conservative religious person” and I associate it with nondenominational churches in new exurban buildings with coffeeshops and bookstores. I know that there are individuals or movements within just about any denomination you can name that refer to themselves as “evangelical” (even among Anglicans, even among Quakers) but I’m very curious to know what the words mean to you, and to churchgoing US Christians in general.
JOSH! Yes of course. So mainline Protestantism is actually a phrase with INHERENT MEANING and has nothing to do with the spires on your church building. It includes the following denominations: United Methodists, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church USA, Episcopalians, most Baptists traditions, United Church of Christ/Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, Quakers, et al. They’re kind of like the Ivy League of American Christianity, in that they’re all fairly old and established and are often governed by centralized ruling bodies. Most of them are offshoots of the European Protestant Reformation.
WHAT’S ODD is that some of them are CALLED ‘Evangelical ____’ churches but do not in fact belong to the evangelical tradition. Fundamentalism was a late-nineteenth century reaction to, among other things, the social gospel and also Darwinism, and evangelicalism as we know it today actually began as a more liberal reaction to fundamentalism! There’s loads more here, perhaps for another day.
A Denomination Day!
A Denomination Day!
UM YES PLEASE
As someone who once spent a sorority formal drunkenly explaining the Wesleyan quadrilateral to her Jewish date (he asked! kinda), DIBS on United Methodism for Denomination Day.
Can we call dibs? I am ALL OVER the ELCA. My dad’s a pastor and, when people ask what denomination he is/we are, I always say “Lutheran. ELCA. Not Missouri Synod. Definitely not Missouri Synod. ELCA.”
I also had to spend a lot of time explaining to my (evangelical) elementary school friends in the bible belt that Lutherans don’t actually WORSHIP Martin Luther and thus were not going to hell, HEATHER.
Just HAVE to share my favorite ELCA anecdote: A few years back, when the ELCA was having its convention in Chicago and considering whether gays could start being allowed to do something-or-other in the church, the con slogan was something to the effect of, “We shouldn’t let the gays in the back door when we wouldn’t let them in the front door.”
OMG, LETTING THE GAYS IN THE BACK DOOR.
(Ultimately, the pros won, if you care.)
Ahahaha. I love unintentionally hilarious bigots.
And believe me, I know the pros won! It was a big deal in my house. My dad’s best pastor friend is a gay dude (in Kentucky!) and he was able to openly date after that. Before the vote at the convention, gay folks could be ordained but they had to be celibate. The rational initially was that since ELCA pastors aren’t allowed to have sex outside of marriage and gay people couldn’t get married, then gay pastors had to be celibate. BUT then states started passing marriage equality laws and fucked that all up, so at the convention they voted to treat gay relationships the same as straight relationships. In states where there isn’t marriage equality, gay pastors can be “church married” and those relationships are treated the same as legal marriages.
Buncha churches left the ELCA after that. No one misses them. One of the pastors of a defecting church unfriended my dad on Facebook over the whole thing though, which I find endlessly amusing.
Those jerks with the signs were kind of right, in a roundabout way, though. We should have come out in support of equality BEFORE a bunch of states called our bluff, rather than doing it on a technicality.
Denomination Day! I think I was the last mainline Presbyterian on the planet to believe in double predestination–I actually preached a sermon on it in high school, over a century after we had officially given it up–in part because I was really, really committed to my denomination.
I would also love “reverse-Damascus day,” even if they tend to be pretty straightforward stories. (“And then I didn’t believe.”) I had an actual-Damascus and a reverse-Damascus, which I’ve never had a name for until right now.
I went to Catholic school from K-6 but was born and raised Episcopalian. This resulted in a couple of interesting hand-waves during religion class (“whaddya mean I don’t get First Communion? I want a pretty white dress!” and culminated in at least one conversation in the car on the way home from soccer which my mother tried to explain the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. She did a pretty good job, as I recall. ANYHOW. This is all a long roundabout way to say that I am VERY interested in the differences between Christian/Protestant denominations and I would very much like a Denomination Day, if only so I can continue to make jokes about my drunk WASPy Episcopalian brethren.
Oh hello yes, I would like to volunteer for Unitarian and Universalism and their wild and storied pasts. Unitarians: God is one being (not three), and Jesus could be a Son but not God himself. Universalists: God forgives everyone, so hell does not exist or at least is not permanent, though whether or not this meant Judas escaped eternal damnation caused a huge schism.
My college theology professor docked me half a grade in my epic write-up of the two because I could not thoroughly explain why these once-mainline Protestant denominations combined in the mid-60s other than “It was the mid-60s and there were important protests to be gettin’ on with”. One was for rich Boston elite, the other was for poor rural folk, and how did we ever end up where we are today (still fairly urban/well-to-do secular humanists but still protesting! Cf. the latest national lawsuit against NSA civil liberty violations).
Seriously, let us know when it’s getting close to Denomination Day and I will dust off my footnoting abilities.
Hey now, lets not forget the Reformed churches (RCA, CRC) as mainline denominations. There’s not many of us now, but as the founding church of New Amsterdam in 1628, we’ve been around for awhile!
As someone whose religious experiences were limited to celebrating Christmas and Easter and Hanukkah and Passover, this is FASCINATING.
Anyone have book recommendations for more on all this? As a skeptic, I don’t have a good eye for evaluating theology yet.
Are you interested more in reading an overview of Protestant Christian theology in general, or in atonement theories in particular? N.T. Wright is a good, accessible, modern theologian. Lew Smedes might not be a bad choice either. Give me some more details on what aspects you want to learn about and whether you’d rather read something from a traditional Christian/an outsider Christian/a secular perspective.
I think I’m most interested in outsider perspectives, then secular, and finally traditional, which isn’t to say I’m disinterested in traditional Christian perspectives. I’m super interested in liberation theology in particular, but also atonement theories–the ideal of theologieS and theorieS, in the plural, is wonderful to me seeing as how I was raised in a lazy-Catholic atmosphere where you could believe as little or as much as you wanted but there was only one school of thought.
We read Sexism and God-Talk by Rosemary Radford Ruether in my Women & Theology class, which was grounded in liberation theology but looking at it from a feminist/womanist perspective.
ETA: Also the Jacquelyn Grant book Mallory mentions below, which I had forgotten but now remember being really good.
Then, my friend, I recommend to you the following:
Kenneth Stone’s “Practicing Safer Texts.”
Ludger Viefhues’ “On my bed at night I sought him whom my heart loves” in Modern Theology (do you have JSTOR access?)
Stephen Moore’s “God’s Beauty Parlor”
Jacquelyn Grant’s “White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response”
Jurgen Moltmann’s “The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology”
Yes, thank you! (I do have JSTOR access and work right next to a seminary where I have borrowing privileges, so I’m going to go check those out today.)
When I discovered that substitutionary atonement was not the only atonement, my mind was blown!
I love me some liberation theology.
So many thoughts! But the dominant one is that the mother need st stop taking her sons soccer scuff up less personally.
OMG, I just had a realization and google-confirmed it. Mallory: I dated your cousin (name starts with a D, parents are P&L) back in college, when I, like you, attended a conservative evangelical university. It didn’t work out between us (thank god!) but woah, colliding worlds.
I don’t have any cousins whose names start with a D.
Also, fuck you for insulting my imaginary cousin! Why the fuck would you think I want to hear that?
Woah, easy there. I meant “thank god!” in that it’s-been-10+-years-and-we’re-both-happily-married-to-other-people sort of way; not as an indictment of your imaginary cousin! He wasn’t such a bad guy!
Though this sheds new light — now maybe it turns out he lied to me about his evangelical cred? He definitely told me that his mom is your dad’s sister. Mystery.
This is SO WEIRD. Yes, that was a lie. My dad’s sister has no children whose names begin with D. Not even close to D! Given that this person is not my cousin and is also apparently a weird liar, I rescind my fuck you and say: fuck them! Glad you got out of that weird relationship, too.
great read. as a fellow former protestant, i would love to indulge in a denomination day. let’s make that happen.
here’s a nice article on the orthodox and non-orthodox theories. http://glory2godforallthings.com/2013/04/19/thera…
and, as an orthodox convert (where we do indeed celebrate the harrowing of hell, on holy saturday) and nerd, i will leave this here. from st. john chrysostom’s paschal homily:
He descended into Hades and took Hades captive!
He embittered it when it tasted His flesh! And anticipating this, Isaiah exclaimed: “Hades was embittered when it encountered Thee in the lower regions”.
It was embittered, for it was abolished!
It was embittered, for it was mocked!
It was embittered, for it was purged!
It was embittered, for it was despoiled!
It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!
It took a body and came upon God!
It took earth and encountered Ηeaven!
It took what it saw, but crumbled before what it had not seen!
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?
The reason for the merger was a combination of doctrinal convergence and the shrinking of the Universalist church. The Unitarians had slowly grown more Universalist (the old joke is that Universalists think God is too good to damn mankind and Unitarians think mankind is too good to damn), and both congregations were dipping their toes into secular humanist waters (Unitarianism been shedding doctrinal requirements like belief in God since the 1870s, and Universalism was having trouble answering the question "if everyone is saved and belief in God is not necessary for salvation, why not let in the secular humanists?" and the more immediate question "if a bunch of us basically don't believe in God or the Bible but still want to show up at service, is that ok?"). Also the Universalists, after a boom in the early 1900s and an accompanying boost in properties owned, were by the 1960s seeing much smaller congregations meeting in increasingly empty, numerous, expensive-to-maintain properties. The two congregation had been growing closer he whole century–the 1945 hymnal/service book "Hymns of the Spirit" was a joint publication between the Unitarians and Universalists–but the Universalist membership and financial crisis, combined with the political movements you mention drove the two to join together more concretely, and that is how the modern Unitarian Universalist church was born.
Also I should add that the merger wasn't complete and some churches chose to remain Unitarian or Universalist, and to this day are not UU. And even under the UU umbrella there are still churches that are obviously Christian Unitarian or Universalist in practice, but are managed under UU administration (King's Chapel in Boston, for example, which had its own unique history as a sort of one-church denomination even before the merger).
Mallory, please please please write more Gabbin about God posts. Please.
Hey now, lets not forget the Reformed churches (RCA, CRC) as mainline denominations. There's not many of us now, but as the founding church of New Amsterdam in 1628, we've been around for awhile!
I very much like your quote from that “old” hymn “In Christ Alone” which was written in 2001. An oldy but a goody.