One week from today is Good Friday. In light of that fact a "Christian" theologian has just published his blog on how we can celebrate Good Friday when we don't believe in the violence of the cross.
What do you do with Good Friday and the Cross when you’ve abandoned the centrality of the doctrines of substitutionary atonement and the divine necessity of Jesus’ death? Like many progressive Christians, I grew up hearing the mantras “Jesus died for our sins,” “Jesus died so that we might have eternal life and escape God’s wrath,” “Jesus paid the price for our salvation,” and “sin deserves death and Jesus stood in our place.
Although these “orthodoxies” may have provided assurance for us once upon a time, to many of us who still call ourselves Christian, they no longer make sense, nor do we believe in a God who requires the death of “his” son to secure our salvation. We also see divine grace operating in other religious traditions and in the experience of faithful agnostics.Besides having the burning question of what is a "faithful agnostic" (faithful to who or what?), I am burdened with the question: Why bother? If you are going to tear the heart out of the Christian message, why do you still want to call yourself a Christian? It is ironic that in providing a list of all the things he no longer believes, the writer actually gives the perfect description of what Good Friday is all about.
- • Human sin brought death into the world.
• We are born steeped in this original sin.
• Human sin deserves divine punishment.
• Jesus came to break our bondage to sin.
• Jesus’ death was foreordained and Jesus lived his adult life knowing he was going to die on the Cross.
• Jesus’ death is God’s way of securing our salvation.
• Only a divine sacrifice can free us from sin and insure eternal life, rather than eternal damnation.
• The only pathway to salvation is a personal relationship with Jesus, demonstrated by an explicit affirmation of our sin and the sole salvation of Jesus Christ.
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