Skip to main content

Good Friday Without the Violence of the Cross?

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Ready for Friday

Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him, and say, "Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine and given me what is yours. You have become what you were not so that I might become what I was not." --Martin Luther
Post a Comment
Read more

Families' Fridays

From Focus on the Family 10 helpful tips for single parents Imagine this: you’re the sole parent for your children. You get them up, get them fed and send them to school. You do the housework, maybe you go to work yourself, you get home and you’re still the only adult there. There’s no one to relieve you. No one to pass the baton to while you take a shower or take a few minutes for yourself. You make dinner and gather the family around the table to eat. You play with them, read to them, give them baths, get them to bed and there’s no one there to sit with and process your day. There’s no one there to laugh with you or pray with you. Instead you keep working. You clean up the house again. You pack lunches for the next day. And you eventually crash into bed, knowing you’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. For many, this is not an imagined scenario. When you parent alone – whether due to divorce, the loss of your spouse or having a spouse who works away from home for long periods of...
Post a Comment
Read more

The walking, talking providence of God

Today I met a man in Israel I will never forget.  Fifteen years ago he was voting in a primary for candidates of the Likud party.  At the polling station, two Palestinian terrorists burst in upon the crowd who were choosing their candidate for the next election.  They sprayed the crowd with automatic gunfire.  Seven people fell to the floor, wounded by the barrage.  The terrorists moved among the fallen, stopping to shoot each one between the eyes to make sure that they were dead.  Six people died that day.  Today I met the seventh. He was wounded four times in the initial burst of gunfire - once in each leg, once in the arm and once in the side.  The terrorists then put a gun two feet from his face and put a bullet between his eyebrows.  I saw the deep scar with my own eyes.  The next year he spent in a coma. Today I met him at the little restaurant he owns outside the gates of the ancient ruins of Beth She'an.  He stood in f...
Post a Comment
Read more