American Christian activists, both progressive and conservative, skew toward the college educated, higher-income, and white range of the population, according to a
recent poll. You’d also think that their leaders are all straight white men, if you track who gets invited by the media to speak for both sides. That is about where the similarities stop.
Predictably, only 3% of progressives think the Bible is the literal word of God, but I was surprised that even among conservatives, just less than half, 48%, think God dictated in King James English. Though, of course, the “pelvic issues”—Catholic ethicist Dan Maguire’s term—dominate the right: gay marriage, abortion, and such. Whereas, progressive Christians, committed to creating the Kingdom of God in this world, believe God loves the whole world, including other religions, the poor, outcast, and oppressed—like gays and women—and a natural world that we are trying to destroy with climate change.
A significant majority of Christian conservatives, 61%, think torture can be justified. Only 5% of progressives agree with them. A whopping 83% of conservatives are OK with the Iraq War, with 7% of progressives on that side, numbers that also correlate with support or lack thereof for the “Bush doctrine” of preemptive war.
How can any Christian support torture and war? That moral confusion is, I think, directly related to one of the five pillars of evangelical faith: the substitutionary atonement. This doctrine says God uses torture and war to save the world because God loves us, and the only reason for the existence of Jesus Christ was for him to die and atone for human sin. Sinful humanity has incurred an insurmountable debt that no human person is good enough to pay. Only someone pure, innocent, and worthy can pay to restore God’s honor. Jesus, the one perfect human who incarnated God, atoned for humanity’s sins and saved those who believe this from God’s eternal punishment. This idea developed in the ninth to twelfth centuries to support imperial conquest in Europe and worked well as propaganda for the Crusades. Since the only sure protection from the wrath of God is being good and innocent (especially sexually, since lust transmits sin) or totally undoubting and obedient to God’s will, this idea makes people narcissistically obsessed with their own salvation and hostile to anyone who threatens it.
This obsession with sinfulness and innocence is how the radical religious “pro-life” right can defend the death penalty, war, torture, and shooting doctors. The truly righteous defend and protect innocent victims, especially unborn children. A born child is tainted with sin. Saving the innocent unborn is virtuous; killing the guilty is a divine mandate.
When this substitutionary atonement theory started circulating widely in the twelfth century, after an imperial terror campaign that inflicted it, one opponent of the Crusades, Peter Abelard, asked, “who will forgive God for killing his own son?” He thought the God of this doctrine unworthy of worship if he was so thin-skinned as to be insulted and diminished by human behavior and so desperate he’d kill his only perfect son to get his honor back.
Abelard said it was not a need in God that killed Jesus, but human sin. When people are willing to face into the horrors revealed in the crucifixion, they can see the extent of their sin. Jesus’ death also shows them the extent of divine love, a willingness to endure unimaginable suffering and sacrifice self for others’ change of heart. Because Jesus bore the worst penalty that human sin could inflict, even unto death, sinful humanity was offered a chance to repent, have a change of heart, receive forgiveness, and become ethical, loving and forgiving others as Jesus did. In other words, God’s love was so generous, his son willingly bore the full magnitude of sin in order to reveal the truth about human culpability. Abelard’s alternative is usually called the moral influence theory of the atonement.
Many progressive Christians still follow some version of the Abelardian atonement. On the one hand, it has the strength of noticing that it was the Roman Empire that killed Jesus, not God, and it opens the door to political and social analyses of sin such as war and economic exploitation, which the Bible calls usury. But it has problems.
We don’t really have evidence that Jesus loved Pilate or the Romans, and he wasn’t particularly acquiescent or loving toward his religious opponents. He did say love your enemies, but he behaved by being downright argumentative and challenging. Strategies of dealing with enemies—turning a cheek, walking another mile, giving up your clothes—are, as biblical scholar Walter Wink has noted, a nonviolent way of shaming the enemy or of causing him to break the law. Perhaps, when one’s enemies behave badly, love requires actively challenging them and demanding they behave better, rather than submitting to them unto death.
Another problem with Abelard’s moral influence idea is that most people aren’t really so evil as to want to torture people or start a war. The magnitude of sin that we are all supposed to repent of is limited to child abusers, lynchers, torturers, batterers, murders, and war criminals. And social constraints, such as community monitoring, ostracism, disapproval, and teaching nonviolent strategies for conflict to children are more effective at crime prevention than asking people to witness terrible crimes of violence so they won’t do likewise.
Worst of all, Abelard’s theory is devastating for those who are victims of other people’s sins. What does it mean to tell an enslaved person, a sexually abused child, or a partner beaten by a spouse that, if they truly love, they will endure violence and oppression for the sake of love and forgive, even unto death. Abelard’s theory tells women and children that if they surrender to violence and make themselves weak, they will be like Jesus, and the more they suffer the holier they will be. The loving witness of their self-sacrificing love will change the heart of the perpetrator. Abelard himself noticed that love as self-sacrifice is powerless. Instead of empowering people to resist evil, his moral ideal tells them to become weaker.
Perpetrators don’t stop molesting children because their victims acquiesce—they pick children because they are weak. Batters don’t stop beating because their partners love and forgive them, and empires don’t call cease fires because people die. Why must victims serve the needs of the perpetrators of evil and give their lives for them? Sounds suspiciously like the salvation of the powerful and violent is more important than the lives of everyone they harm, at least to those who see themselves as perpetrators.
Christian atonement theory in all its forms is WAY too focused on the last week of Jesus’ life. If the state terrorism tactic of crucifixion has to be the gateway to salvation, it keeps Christians obsessed with sin, punishment, suffering, self-sacrifice, and self-righteously denouncing sin and injustice or with escape to self-deceptive innocence. Keeping people divided into the saved and the damned, the righteous and the sinful, illustrates to believers how to stay on the right side of salvation.
This proscribing and prescribing life from a model of trauma after violence is a dreary way to live. It tends to squeeze all the beauty, joy, and inebriating juice out of life for the sake of a perpetually unrequited promise of salvation.
The bottom line on atonement theology: if God needs torture to save the world and will use war to destroy evil, why should believers also not support the same strategies to protect a country or save lives? Or why shouldn’t people endure evil while loving and forgiving the perpetrators unto death, if Jesus’ crucifixion reveals true love? Neither inflicting nor enduring torture and war is an adequate moral answer to them.
While a lot of Western Christians today espouse some sort of atonement theology, it does not dominate Eastern Orthodox beliefs and was largely absent in early Christianity. If the imperial church hadn’t burned heretics and crusaded against Christians who objected to the Crusades, we’d probably still have a lot more who aren’t obsessed with the crucifixion.
Progressives, even those who retain some kind of focus on the death of Jesus, usually emphasize his life and his mandate to work for the kingdom of God in this world. It is Christian to believe torture and war have nothing to do with saving the world, and they should not be endured by anyone. We should be working to stop them.
My comment may or mey not be relevant, but this I know. The scriptures cannot be denied. I put it this way, in the same way that all roads lead to Rome, all blood leads to Christ. All kingdoms sooner or later must be subdued to him. When you see JC coming in Glory in the clouds, you will see him coming in red dyed clothes.
And it shall be said of him: “Who is this that cometh down from God in heaven with dyed garments; yea, from the regions which are not known, clothed in his glorious apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength?”
And he shall say: I am he who spake in righteousness, mighty to save. And the Lord shall be red in his apparel, and his garments like him that treadeth in the wine-vat. And so great shall be the glory of his presence that the sun shall hide his face in shame, and the moon shall withhold its light, and the stars shall be hurled from their places. And his voice shall be heard: I have trodden the wine-press alone, and have brought judgment upon all people; and none were with me; And I have trampled them in my fury, and I did tread upon them in mine anger, and their blood have I sprinkled upon my garments, and stained all my raiment; for this was the day of vengeance which was in my heart.
(Doctrine and Covenants Section 133:46 – 51)
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Thank you, Rita, for clearly addressing the problems with atonement theology, especially for your discussion of Abelard. I was just reading a NY Times article this evening (10/2) about the swelling of Antiochan Orthodox ranks in the US from (former) Protestants. I’m wondering how much a role the absence of atonement theology in Orthodox Christianity plays into that phenomenon.
But for myself, I will save this blog for future reference. Thank you again.