On The Death of Jesus

People find all sorts of reasons to reject Christianity. These almost always seem to me to be driven by the determination to reject and not an effect of the reasons presented to explain or justify the rejection. (As I've often said, the acceptance of Christianity or any theism is generally made on no better reasons than those advanced to reject it. But that's not the subject today.) One of the justifications for rejecting Christianity comes from the notion of sacrifice, sacrifice as payment. It's a very old theological concept--medieval in origin though it quotes the New Testament, as it would have to do, in support. Accordingly, Jesus' crucifixion functions as animal sacrifice and even human sacrifice before and elsewhere functioned to pay a price in an economic exchange. We sinned. The perfect God cannot accept sin. So we have to recompense God for our sin by giving up something in payment. As we have nothing worthy of payment, the loving God said he'd pay the bill for us. He can't forgive it, as one might be able to do in most economic dynamics on earth, so he has to pay it himself to balance the books. 

I find this economic model distasteful in a number of ways. The idea that God needs to satisfy some larger economy of justice, something outside his creation and beyond his control suggests to me that God is not God after all, but the employee of some force or being beyond him. That's the theological problem. God's power is limited. And his love is constrained. The one willing to go so far as to suffer and die, who will pay your debt himself rings true. But if he's the one that set up the system in which he had to do that, that seems cruel and oddly dramatic. Even sadistic. "Couldn't you just forgive them? Couldn't you just pay the debt? Maybe you want them to ask first, but do you have the see someone slaughtered like an animal to activate it?"

God clearly doesn't have to have a sacrifice to activate his love or his forgiveness. God doesn't have to send anyone to hell for any reason at all. There is no force greater than God to which God is subject. 

So why did he do it? 

I'm not John Milton or Alexander Pope or William Blake. I'm not going to justify or vindicate God's ways to humanity. I don't know the mind of God. I can't tell you what God is thinking. I can however think about the death of Jesus outside of an economics of sin and sacrifice, outside of the discourse of debt and payment. 

The willingness of God to undergo suffering because that would, properly understood, model the perfect attitude of people toward God and one another, that begins to make sense of the event. The criticism of this is historical. One points out all the wars waged in the name of Christ, by the church or this church or that church--all the ways that the event of the crucifixion led to everything Jesus preached and acted against. Yes. I don't believe that Christianity made war any more common or any more deadly. If it has had any effect on war it has probably been to mitigate its evil. But not much. What people will do in the name of anything is just what they will use to justify what they want anyway--wealth and power. Nietzsche analyzed this pretty well, his anti-Christianity is sometime to the point and sometimes misses it. Rene Girard analyzed it better.

Add Girard's cogent notion that this event put an end to sacrifice and focused the attention of the vigilant, that core within and outside of the church, who are willing and able to experience and respond to the event of death and resurrection, to inhabit them and not try to use them, this notion helps. Jesus is the end of violence but only if it is taken in as such, not for those who ignore it. 

Given the way humans are constructed, either this event had to happen or we had to reach a crescendo of violence in which the whole project of humanity comes to an end. Why God created human beings this way or did not interfere in the evolution that led to this species being as it is and not otherwise, we can only speculate about. But that speculation is worth doing. It may be that we are still on an evolutionary path that continues after physical death. One problem I have always had with Christianity is that it posits an infinite God who would love such unimpressive creatures as humans collectively always are. The willingness to die for such worms seems to me at times unintelligible. But if we are not yet what we will be, then perhaps it makes sense after all.