04-03-2022, 04:33 PM
[A word of explanation. What follows below comes from the Foreword of a manuscript waiting to be snapped up by some enterprising publisher. It can be taken as a Religion thread or as an Introduction thread according to taste. Much of the site knows me already anyway.]
The death of Jesus on the Cross is the central fact of the Christian faith.
So the meaning of the death of Jesus on the Cross is the central issue of Christian teaching. I propose to offer my own understanding of the event. But I need to explain first how I got there, and part of the explanation must be biographical.
The story really begins with my father, who was brought up in Lincolnshire as a Primitive Methodist. Then he went to teacher-training college, and somebody advised him to get “confirmed”. That is, to qualify himself as a member of the Church of England by means of the ceremony which supplements infant baptism. The advice made sense, because a large proportion of the country’s primary schools, my father’s chosen field, were Anglican foundations. In fact, as a career move, it worked like a charm. He spent the whole of his professional life working in two such parish schools.
As a direct result, I was brought up in a parish at the “high” or Anglo-Catholic end of the Church of England. We had “sung mass”, in the English-language pastiche devised by Victorian clergymen. We used incense and the English Hymnal. As a school, we were taken to church on Ash Wednesday to have crosses marked on our foreheads, and so on. This was important. It meant that when I entered the usual stage of adolescent rebellion, it was the more catholic version of Christianity that I was rebelling against. Evangelical Christianity would be a fresh discovery at a later time.
My religious education was compulsory, under English law, but the effects were superficial. I took the teachings for granted without fully absorbing them. I did not begin questioning things until I reached the Sixth Form (that is, in American terms, the years covered by the eleventh and twelfth grades). My primary interest was History. We were studying that classic examination period “The Tudors and the Stuarts”, which meant coming to terms with the Reformation. Looking over the disputing parties, I came to the conclusion that both sides were wrong. On the one hand the papal side were basing their claims to authority on a falsification of history. On the other hand, Luther and Calvin were promoting legalistic theories of Election and Predestination which I rejected instinctively. There needed to be a middle way. By the time we got to the eighteenth-century Deists, I was ready to accept their picture of God as a “watchmaker”, someone who set up the machinery of the world and then left it running.
The final turning-point came at Christmas, when we visited my grandparents and went to the local “midnight mass”. A nail on the back of the pew in front of us was banging into my knee every time we kneeled down in that narrow space. The very unctuous voice of the clergyman was delivering the sermon, and the decisive moment, I believe, was the phrase “little baby in the manger”. It struck me then that he was addressing the congregation in the same terms that he would have used for addressing an audience of children. I was seventeen years old, nearly eighteen. I was no longer a child. I thought to myself “I don’t believe in all this stuff”, and from that night onwards I identified myself as an atheist.
Then I became a student and went to university, which brought me up against the most important question in the universe; How do I go about meeting girls? There was a great imbalance of male to female students in that place. The figure normally quoted was “four-to-one”. I noticed at an early stage that the three most popular ways of meeting the opposite sex were disco-dancing, left-wing politics, and religion, and they were all barred to me, for different reasons. I was obliged to try other approaches.
For example, at the start of my second year, I was using notice-boards to find lists of new students, and knocking on girls’ doors in my genuine capacity as representative of the United Nations Students Association. I remember one girl, while I sat drinking her coffee and eating through her bourbon biscuits, examining the “areas of interest” portion of the membership card I had just sold her. “Is there a section here”, she inquired sweetly, “on ‘conning innocent freshers out of their money’?” “Yes”, I said, “that comes under ‘fund-raising’.” That relationship lasted for six months.
At the beginning of another term, I was about to start a course on “France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century.” A group of us gathered in the study of the relevant professor, who gave us the first essay title (on the economic background), dictated a reading list, and assigned us weekly appointments to discuss our essays. An hour or so later, one of his other students arrived at my door. He had been given a Wednesday afternoon appointment which he found inconvenient. Would I be willing to swop my Tuesdays for his Wednesdays? I agreed without much thought. Only later did I realise that my easy acquiescence had done me a favour. The original plan would have obliged me to give up the weekly bread-and-cheese lunch to raise money for War on Want, which was becoming one of my social highlights.
And there is an example of the way God works, because he had his own plans for that event. Nobody had warned me that War on Want lunches were a hotbed of Christian activity. I was about to meet the girl who would make it her business, a couple of months later, to begin introducing me to the Christian faith. I was a very difficult pupil, but a captive audience. I found ways of continuing the discussion, though she was shrewd enough to guess that we were following different agendas, as my diary records; “Later, in a period of rest, she asked me why I had sent her a note. Because, I said, eventually, I had thought she might not be in if I didn’t. She said that wasn’t answering the question. We finally agreed that I had been driven by curiosity, which was (she said) the result of the Holy Ghost working in me”.
This process came to a climax when I took back to my room, and began reading, the book she had lent me (“My God is real”, by David C.K, Watson). The book set in motion a number of thought processes about the symptoms of sin, and about the death on the Cross. I began to recognise how much of my character was governed by pride. I realised that I was proud of my self-sufficiency, and that this was the real remaining barrier between myself and Christianity. But the biggest impact on my mind came from the one page that explored the meaning and implications of the cry “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
I finally came to the point of making a decision. Giving up the attempt to work things out on my own, I decided to put my trust in an action of faith, and made the suggested prayer. I was expecting some kind of tangible spiritual change, but nothing seemed to be happening, so I went to bed. Nevertheless, the point had been settled. I had made a commitment which I was taking for granted from the next morning onwards. The secretary of the college Christian Union was nearly as startled as I was. “We’ve been praying for people to be converted”, he told me, “but you weren’t one of them.” But I don’t think that was meant to come out quite the way it sounds.
In the following years, I was probing ways of getting involved in evangelism or apologetics, hoping to help other people to follow the same course. For example, I spent some time in a coffee bar run by my local church, and experienced at first hand the modern teenage reaction to presentations of the gospel. One important discovery was that the conventional “substitution” language about the Atonement is now an obstacle to understanding the message. If people have not been acclimatised to Christian language, the mere quotation of “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin” is not enough to convince them of the premise. While the further premise that one person can take the penalty that belongs to another offends their sense of justice. They cannot believe in the objective Atonement because they cannot understand how it works.
That is not a good reason to abandon the objective Atonement and replace it with “He set a good example”. It is a good reason, though, to find other ways, consistent with Biblical teaching, of explaining the objective Atonement. Two remarks, separated by decades, have helped me in this quest.
“But what exactly do you think sin is?”
That very awkward question came from a Jehovah’s Witness. I had invited them to meet me as part of my self-training in apologetics. Though this was a role, like “anti-abortion campaigner”, which did not develop in the long-term. At some point in the discussion I threw out a line which I had picked up in my reading around the Arian controversy; that only someone who was infinite could effectively deal with infinite sin. I was walking myself into a trap, I realised later, because “infinite sin” implies the possibility of “finite sin”, which seems to imply that sin can be something quantifiable. Hence the question, presumably. Having no immediate answer that I could lay my hands on, I backed out of that line of argument.
It was a very important question, all the same. The task of solving any problem begins with finding out the cause of the problem. We need a germ theory of disease before we can develop a science of antiseptics. The entire Bible, culminating in the gospel, is about the problem of sin and how it gets resolved. How can we understand what God is doing about sin without sorting out more clearly our view of the nature of sin?
“Silly boy, it’s all about trust.”
That one came from my own mouth as I sat on the bed, alone in my room. The strange thing is that it came without any intention to speak, on my part, and without any previous warning. The words were not coming from my conscious mind, nor were they connected with anything in my current train of thought. That was why the mild rebuke “Silly boy!” sounded so odd. Apart from the fact that I was in my forties at the time. So I’ve always taken the remark as a message from God, though it’s unique as such in my experience.
At first, I thought of it as personal advice. In the long term, I began to think of it as a theological guideline. For what is faith but the act of throwing ourselves upon God in trust, giving up our distrustful self-sufficiency?
And that is also, I believe, our answer to the puzzle of the Atonement.
For what is the problem of sin? I premise that sin is our disobedience, our disengagement from the will of God, following on from the shortfall in our trust
How is the problem of sin resolved? I premise that sin was reversed in the death of Christ, as the final act of his perfect obedience, following on from his absolute trust in his Father..
An act which is our own, in Christ, not by substitution but by inclusion, becoming an act of restored obedience, following on from our self-commitment in trust.
The solution fits the problem. The key fits the lock.
The death of Jesus on the Cross is the central fact of the Christian faith.
So the meaning of the death of Jesus on the Cross is the central issue of Christian teaching. I propose to offer my own understanding of the event. But I need to explain first how I got there, and part of the explanation must be biographical.
The story really begins with my father, who was brought up in Lincolnshire as a Primitive Methodist. Then he went to teacher-training college, and somebody advised him to get “confirmed”. That is, to qualify himself as a member of the Church of England by means of the ceremony which supplements infant baptism. The advice made sense, because a large proportion of the country’s primary schools, my father’s chosen field, were Anglican foundations. In fact, as a career move, it worked like a charm. He spent the whole of his professional life working in two such parish schools.
As a direct result, I was brought up in a parish at the “high” or Anglo-Catholic end of the Church of England. We had “sung mass”, in the English-language pastiche devised by Victorian clergymen. We used incense and the English Hymnal. As a school, we were taken to church on Ash Wednesday to have crosses marked on our foreheads, and so on. This was important. It meant that when I entered the usual stage of adolescent rebellion, it was the more catholic version of Christianity that I was rebelling against. Evangelical Christianity would be a fresh discovery at a later time.
My religious education was compulsory, under English law, but the effects were superficial. I took the teachings for granted without fully absorbing them. I did not begin questioning things until I reached the Sixth Form (that is, in American terms, the years covered by the eleventh and twelfth grades). My primary interest was History. We were studying that classic examination period “The Tudors and the Stuarts”, which meant coming to terms with the Reformation. Looking over the disputing parties, I came to the conclusion that both sides were wrong. On the one hand the papal side were basing their claims to authority on a falsification of history. On the other hand, Luther and Calvin were promoting legalistic theories of Election and Predestination which I rejected instinctively. There needed to be a middle way. By the time we got to the eighteenth-century Deists, I was ready to accept their picture of God as a “watchmaker”, someone who set up the machinery of the world and then left it running.
The final turning-point came at Christmas, when we visited my grandparents and went to the local “midnight mass”. A nail on the back of the pew in front of us was banging into my knee every time we kneeled down in that narrow space. The very unctuous voice of the clergyman was delivering the sermon, and the decisive moment, I believe, was the phrase “little baby in the manger”. It struck me then that he was addressing the congregation in the same terms that he would have used for addressing an audience of children. I was seventeen years old, nearly eighteen. I was no longer a child. I thought to myself “I don’t believe in all this stuff”, and from that night onwards I identified myself as an atheist.
Then I became a student and went to university, which brought me up against the most important question in the universe; How do I go about meeting girls? There was a great imbalance of male to female students in that place. The figure normally quoted was “four-to-one”. I noticed at an early stage that the three most popular ways of meeting the opposite sex were disco-dancing, left-wing politics, and religion, and they were all barred to me, for different reasons. I was obliged to try other approaches.
For example, at the start of my second year, I was using notice-boards to find lists of new students, and knocking on girls’ doors in my genuine capacity as representative of the United Nations Students Association. I remember one girl, while I sat drinking her coffee and eating through her bourbon biscuits, examining the “areas of interest” portion of the membership card I had just sold her. “Is there a section here”, she inquired sweetly, “on ‘conning innocent freshers out of their money’?” “Yes”, I said, “that comes under ‘fund-raising’.” That relationship lasted for six months.
At the beginning of another term, I was about to start a course on “France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century.” A group of us gathered in the study of the relevant professor, who gave us the first essay title (on the economic background), dictated a reading list, and assigned us weekly appointments to discuss our essays. An hour or so later, one of his other students arrived at my door. He had been given a Wednesday afternoon appointment which he found inconvenient. Would I be willing to swop my Tuesdays for his Wednesdays? I agreed without much thought. Only later did I realise that my easy acquiescence had done me a favour. The original plan would have obliged me to give up the weekly bread-and-cheese lunch to raise money for War on Want, which was becoming one of my social highlights.
And there is an example of the way God works, because he had his own plans for that event. Nobody had warned me that War on Want lunches were a hotbed of Christian activity. I was about to meet the girl who would make it her business, a couple of months later, to begin introducing me to the Christian faith. I was a very difficult pupil, but a captive audience. I found ways of continuing the discussion, though she was shrewd enough to guess that we were following different agendas, as my diary records; “Later, in a period of rest, she asked me why I had sent her a note. Because, I said, eventually, I had thought she might not be in if I didn’t. She said that wasn’t answering the question. We finally agreed that I had been driven by curiosity, which was (she said) the result of the Holy Ghost working in me”.
This process came to a climax when I took back to my room, and began reading, the book she had lent me (“My God is real”, by David C.K, Watson). The book set in motion a number of thought processes about the symptoms of sin, and about the death on the Cross. I began to recognise how much of my character was governed by pride. I realised that I was proud of my self-sufficiency, and that this was the real remaining barrier between myself and Christianity. But the biggest impact on my mind came from the one page that explored the meaning and implications of the cry “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
I finally came to the point of making a decision. Giving up the attempt to work things out on my own, I decided to put my trust in an action of faith, and made the suggested prayer. I was expecting some kind of tangible spiritual change, but nothing seemed to be happening, so I went to bed. Nevertheless, the point had been settled. I had made a commitment which I was taking for granted from the next morning onwards. The secretary of the college Christian Union was nearly as startled as I was. “We’ve been praying for people to be converted”, he told me, “but you weren’t one of them.” But I don’t think that was meant to come out quite the way it sounds.
In the following years, I was probing ways of getting involved in evangelism or apologetics, hoping to help other people to follow the same course. For example, I spent some time in a coffee bar run by my local church, and experienced at first hand the modern teenage reaction to presentations of the gospel. One important discovery was that the conventional “substitution” language about the Atonement is now an obstacle to understanding the message. If people have not been acclimatised to Christian language, the mere quotation of “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin” is not enough to convince them of the premise. While the further premise that one person can take the penalty that belongs to another offends their sense of justice. They cannot believe in the objective Atonement because they cannot understand how it works.
That is not a good reason to abandon the objective Atonement and replace it with “He set a good example”. It is a good reason, though, to find other ways, consistent with Biblical teaching, of explaining the objective Atonement. Two remarks, separated by decades, have helped me in this quest.
“But what exactly do you think sin is?”
That very awkward question came from a Jehovah’s Witness. I had invited them to meet me as part of my self-training in apologetics. Though this was a role, like “anti-abortion campaigner”, which did not develop in the long-term. At some point in the discussion I threw out a line which I had picked up in my reading around the Arian controversy; that only someone who was infinite could effectively deal with infinite sin. I was walking myself into a trap, I realised later, because “infinite sin” implies the possibility of “finite sin”, which seems to imply that sin can be something quantifiable. Hence the question, presumably. Having no immediate answer that I could lay my hands on, I backed out of that line of argument.
It was a very important question, all the same. The task of solving any problem begins with finding out the cause of the problem. We need a germ theory of disease before we can develop a science of antiseptics. The entire Bible, culminating in the gospel, is about the problem of sin and how it gets resolved. How can we understand what God is doing about sin without sorting out more clearly our view of the nature of sin?
“Silly boy, it’s all about trust.”
That one came from my own mouth as I sat on the bed, alone in my room. The strange thing is that it came without any intention to speak, on my part, and without any previous warning. The words were not coming from my conscious mind, nor were they connected with anything in my current train of thought. That was why the mild rebuke “Silly boy!” sounded so odd. Apart from the fact that I was in my forties at the time. So I’ve always taken the remark as a message from God, though it’s unique as such in my experience.
At first, I thought of it as personal advice. In the long term, I began to think of it as a theological guideline. For what is faith but the act of throwing ourselves upon God in trust, giving up our distrustful self-sufficiency?
And that is also, I believe, our answer to the puzzle of the Atonement.
For what is the problem of sin? I premise that sin is our disobedience, our disengagement from the will of God, following on from the shortfall in our trust
How is the problem of sin resolved? I premise that sin was reversed in the death of Christ, as the final act of his perfect obedience, following on from his absolute trust in his Father..
An act which is our own, in Christ, not by substitution but by inclusion, becoming an act of restored obedience, following on from our self-commitment in trust.
The solution fits the problem. The key fits the lock.
