3gi. Why did Jesus Have to Die?  A Historical Review of Explanations for Christ’s Death  (under construction – April 10 2004)

 

The research which follows was presented in Time Magazine, April 2004.  I found it very interesting and believable and wanted to include it in my treatise for completeness.  There have been many theories as to why Christ had to suffer and die and this article summarized below seems to have captured the essence of the most popular.  

The movie, “The Passion of the Christ” has generated new interest in understanding the biblical passage in Isaiah, “He was wounded for our transgressions and by His stripes we are healed.”  Now people are revisiting the age old question, “Why did Christ have to die?”  Is the answer as simple as, “Jesus loves me, this I know”?  Regardless of you we may blame for killing Him, what is the cosmic reason for His agony?  What is the purpose in the Grand Scheme of a thinking, Creator God?  If His death is somehow an atonement for sins, then how exactly does it lead to the salvation of humanity?  What is “atonement” that it is the mechanism for the believer to realize redemption and Everlasting Life? 

 

For most churches the issue of why Christ had to die is inert, if everpresent.  The rote response is simply, “He gave His life for us” and any further inquiry plunges into the metaphysical formulations for which all but the serious religious scholars lack the basic vocabulary.  Even if they did live in the theological nuances, there are many mysteries to the concept of “atonement” that no one can hope to clarify in this life.  Instead American Christianity is focused on a friendly, helpful, and personal Jesus, so that any deep discussion of His violent death is an increasingly difficult pulpit pitch.  Now, however, this new movie has resurrected the interest in understanding this concept of atonement.  Now people may again need to find better answers to questions like, If this really happened, then why did it happen and what does it mean to me 2000 years later?

 

This concept of a human need to atone was part of the Jewish temple ritual, which in Jesus’ time included regular sin sacrifices in the hopes of reconciliation (atonement) with God.  It was Paul who put the Christian spin on that idea in 57AD when he penned the Book of Romans.  He reconfigured the reconciliation around the life and death of Christ.  Yet the New Testament has no clear consistent answer to the questions of why Christ had to die to achieve that reconciliation.  It is clear that something really drastic, fundamental, and dramatic has happened, and many writers of New Testament books are suggesting ways to understand that.   In the Book of Hebrews, Paul has Christ as the substitute sacrificial lamb in the traditional Jewish rituals, securing redemption by spilling His blood.  The Gospel of Mark favors the Roman legal language for the Freeing of Slaves: “The Son of Man came to give His life as a ransom for many”.  In Peter’s first epistle, Jesus’s trials are an example to be followed by the believer: “because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in His steps”.  In his letter to the Colossians Paul says that, “ He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in Him”.

 

For a thousand years the mainline church saw His suffering and death not as salvation’s critical tragedy, but as just one more step in God’s triumphant campaign into the human world and the devil’s domain.  The Church Fathers saw Christ’s incarnation and resurrection mainly as a necessary means of overcoming Satan’s hold on and claim to humanity and essential to reconciliation and a new start for humanity.  Eastern Orthodox Christians still hold this view.  According to writer Fredrica Mathewes-Green, it’s like the firefighter, who comes out of the burning building with the baby in his arms.  People tend to ignore his wounds and scars.  Christ’s victory was that He snatched everlasting Life out of sin and death. 

 

Other scenarios from the early Church fathers had Christ paying the ransom to the devil for lost humanity.  Then, St Augustine likened the devil to a mouse, the cross to a mousetrap, and Christ to the bait.  Christ’s mission was to somehow rescue humanity from the legitimate claims of the devil.  As others decided to leave the transaction a mystery, they were certain that there was a supernatural battle ongoing in a dimension beyond our direct perception.  This conception survives in Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God”.  However, the theory developed by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1098 came to define Christianities majority understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death.  He read in the New Testament that Christ’s death was a ransom, but he could not believe that the devil was owed anything, so he restructured the cosmic debt.  He posed that humanity owed God the Father a ransom of  “satisfaction” for the insult of sin.  The problem was that this debt was unpayable.  We lacked the means, since everything we have already belongs to God, and we lacked the standing, like the lowly serf in his feudal world was helpless to erase an injury to a great lord.  Anselm initiated the concept of substitutionary atonement.  Everlasting damnation was unavoidable, except for the miracle of grace.  God “recast” Himself somehow into human form (the mystery of the incarnation), Who was both innocent of sin and also God’s social equal.  As a human Christ could then suffer Crucifixion’s undeserved agony and dedicate it to the Father on behalf of humanity.  Thus Anselm wrote that, “Christ paid for the sinners what He owed not for Himself.  Could the Father justly refuse to Man what the Son had willed to give him?”  This concept has been restated in many ways since and it has been extended to cover everyone’s transgressions for all of human history.  Later, John Calvin the founder of the Presbyterian Church in the 16th century replaced Anselm’s feudal king with a severe judge furious at a deservedly cursed creation.  He also introduced the concept that only the “elect” would be saved and they were chosen from before they were born.  Here man has no free will, and many are thus predestined to burn in hell without hope that they could ever change that.  They can do nothing to secure their salvation and they can do nothing to stay their damnation, so an eternal torture chamber in hell awaits them. Most Christians find this concept, ridiculous in that it casts God as a furious dictator, who would create humans just to burn in hell forever.  While there are various other concepts on how one can obtain salvation, the ultimate horror of the Cross is generally viewed by Christians as the paramount Western icon of love.  Surely the greatest kind of love is that of the parent, who is sacrificing himself for his child while that child is causing him to suffer.

 

In the recent age of Evangelism marked by the “Great Awakening” of the 18th century, Anselm’s legalistic equation struck some as a liability for those preaching to win souls.  The idea of a personal relationship with Jesus emerged.  The French theologian, Peter Abelard had introduced a different concept in the Middle Ages addressing Jesus’ role in reducing sinful humanities distance from God.  His unique twist did not require a tit for tat transaction.  His atonement took place less as a compact between God the Father and God the Son and more in the hearts if the believers, who recognized God’s love by His willingness to die rather than to renounce his calling.  “Love answers love appeal”, wrote Abelard.  With Jesus’ example before it, humanity, its deaf ear reopened, could now gain salvation and reconciliation with God.  Yale theologian, Serene Jones notes that, “In substitution theory, the problem between humanity and God is one of debt.  In Abelardian theory the problem is one of ignorance.  We don’t have enough information.”  Horace Bushnell, the great 19th century proponent and Hartford, Connecticut minister declared that atonement’s now location was not in “remote fields of being” but in humanity, as “a moral effect, wrought in the mind of the race.”  Jesus’ death became less central, because it no longer was the price for lifting the burden of sin.  Instead, Bushnell’s successors took to preaching the Savior’s life, exhorting their congregations to strive toward reconciliation with the Father by emulating the Son’s healings, His scourging of the money changers, or His precepts of love and tolerance.  This theory is known as exemplary atonement.  No longer was the central purpose of Jesus’ existence to offer Himself as a sacrificial ransom to a God made angry by our sin.  Instead the purpose of Jesus’ ministry and life was first to model for humanity the fullness of mercy and forgiveness that God offers to us sinners, and second to model for us the perfection of love that God is and that those, who accept God’s forgiveness are invited (by God’s grace) to become.   As such, it is not the death of Jesus that can save us but His life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter and Paul allowed the Church to grow   They took a movement that expected Jesus of Nazareth to come back and ring in the Kingdom of God immediately and turned it into a movement that lasted for generation after generation.  They took a proclamation about the Kingdom of God and made it palpable and meaningful to people, who had never heard of that God, and who could not imagine any kingdom but Rome.  They took a proclamation that made sense mainly if not only to the Jews living in the Judean /Galilean area and rephrased it so it made sense to Gentiles living the wider world.