Salvation (Part 2)

Ask Me Anything

Week 6: Salvation (pt.2)

Why did Jesus have to die on the cross in order for the rest of us to be saved? I’m a scientist and I’m just not following the cause and effect. Isn’t God all powerful? He made the Big Bang happen and all of this stuff! Why couldn’t he just make it so that we all go to heaven and let Jesus live his life. Is it because we sinned and he’s upset? But he made us this way? Isn’t he supposed to be forgiving? Is God not perfect?
Who doesn’t “go to heaven”? What is heaven? My last student ministry claimed that you go to heaven after you die if you have Jesus in your heart/accept him as the messiah (with some exceptions), but I don’t want to be a part of something exclusive to anybody. That doesn’t make sense with what the Bible says about Grace anyway. What's the truth?
Wait so if you believe that Abraham and Job and David and Jacob and Esther did get saved, why did Jesus need to die? Were they just extra holy or..?
Is Jesus still Jewish? Is that just completely irrelevant?

We have all been asking ourselves, "why"? What happened, and why? There are seven dominant theories of atonement, We are going to talk about a few of them today. Most people believe a combination of these, and there are even more not mentioned that weren't as widely held.

The Moral Influence Theory

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 BCE) was an early church father who has had a major theological impact on Christianity. He was a proponent of The Moral Influence Theory. This was one of the earliest theories of atonement. Essentially this theory believes that Jesus died to bring about a positive change in humanity. This theory focusses a lot on the moral example of Jesus and the life that he lived. In this theory, the crucifixion is viewed as a ramification of the radical life that Jesus lived. There is an emphasis on the Holy Spirit and on free will in this view. Many theologians feel that this is an incomplete view because it focusses too little on why he was crucified and on how Jesus's death saves us.

The Ransom Theory

This was an early, prominent theory this theory relied heavily on the idea of Adam and Eve's original sin, and this theory has laid the foundation for many subsequent atonement theories. Here is a basic summary given by Stephen D. Morrison in his 7 Theories of the Atonement Summarized, “Essentially, this theory claimed that Adam and Eve sold humanity over to the devil at the time of the Fall’ hence, justice required that God pay the Devil a ransom, for the Devil did not realize that Christ could not be held in the bonds of death. Once the Devil accepted Christ’s death as a ransom, this theory concluded, justice was satisfied and God was able to free us from Satan’s grip.”

Christus Victor

This has been the dominant theory for the majority of the Church's history (up until the 12th century). This view is similar to the Ransom theory, however, no one is being "paid" in Jesus's death. Instead of Jesus "buying back humanity" with his death, he is defeating the powers evil (which can be interpreted as sin, death, devil).

The Satisfaction Theory

Anselm of Canterbury has had a lasting impact on Christian’s relationship to the cross. Anselm wrote Cur Deus Homo or “Why God Became Human” in 1098, which is where we get the satisfaction theory. This theory proposes that Jesus's death satisfied God's justice, meaning that Jesus's death was restitution (or paying of a debt) for humanities sins. Anselm wrote this theory in response to the flaws that he saw in the Ransom theory. This is the first theory where we see that Jesus's death interpreted as acting upon God. Anselm lived in the middle ages, where the feudal lords ruled in lieu of a centralized state. If there was any sort of wrong done to the Lord and his household, the wrongdoer had to pay penance in order to set things right. That was the cultural reality Anselm existed in. You can see the undertones of this feudal substitutionary atonement in his view of the crucifixion. This theory idealizes violence and decreases hope while increasing apathy. In his view, life on earth is rendered irrelevant because it is all about the end destination—heaven. Thus there is an apathy towards lived life and its consequences. There is also little regard to the earth because heaven will be a “new earth”. This theory was built upon and we variations and additions to this with the Penal Substitutionary Theory and The Governmental Theory.

Penal Substitutionary Atonement

This theory arose from the reformation. John Calvin and Martin Luther modified the Satisfaction theory to add more legal imagery. Morrison explains it as this, "Jesus is punished (penal) in the place of sinners (substitution) in order to satisfy the justice of God and the legal demand of God to punish sin. In the light of Jesus’ death, God can now forgive the sinner because Jesus Christ has been punished in the place of the sinner, in this way meeting the retributive requirements of God’s justice." This theory has been the predominant modern and protestant/evangelical theory. I would argue that, the majority of western Christians are the most familiar with this theory, whether or not we realize it.

The Scapegoat Theory

René Girard believes that by simply being human, we mimic all behavior and by mimicking desire, we are innately going to encounter conflict and tension. Girard believes that in order to lessen the tension, we have the tendency as humans to "scapegoat" other people or groups of people in order to alleviate conflict and bond with other humans. Theologically Speaking, Girard and James Allison believed that this tendency to "scapegoat" played out on the cross.

Morrison explains it like this "1) Jesus is killed by a violent crowd. 2) The violent crowd kills Him believing that He is guilty. 3) Jesus is proven innocent, as the true Son of God. 4) The crowd is therefore deemed guilty." This theory highlights that Jesus was a victim, and not a sacrifice from God.

Progressive Revelation

I worked at a summer camp where we taught campers about the "Bridge to Life," which is a tool to teaching salvation. In this tool, there are several steps to salvation supported with verses. Which does seem to create a pretty compelling argument of salvation backed up by scripture. However, as I have learned other models of salvation, I find myself revisiting those verses listed, and I can see that they still apply, and can be interpreted to fit nearly any model of salvation. Scripture supports God's grace, love and mercy, and upholds the Power of Christ Jesus, and there is a multitude of ways in which that can be specifically interpreted.

Ephesians 2:4-10 (NIV), "But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

I think, that in many ways the church, and pastors have failed us by stripping us of our theological imaginations. Instead of being encouraged to continue questioning and expounding upon the ways in which God saves us, we are giving a set of theologies that has remained largely unchanged and unquestioned since the middle ages. Many of the theories we have discussed are eerily similar to one another (with the exception of Moral and Scapegoat). I think that we need more robust, updated theological imagination. I believe in progressive revelation, meaning that we are continually reimagining our understanding of God over time, from ancient civilization to now, and will continue. No one theology is truly correct, because any theology that is pushed to its limits will break down. After all, theology is a human attempt to explain divinity, and that understanding will ultimately fail. So what is our role, when these theologies fail? Also, if we spend all of our energy as the Church, explaining and speaking to salvation and the afterlife, what are we doing about our time on Earth. The Work of the People has a great interview with Becca Stevens entitled The Sacrament of Healing, where she discusses the relationship between Justice and Salvation, and how much time she spends thinking about and arguing salvation.