When we visited out old church in Preston a couple of weeks ago, they were all talking about this up and coming event in the old bus station in the city centre. Lots of my friends were involved in the choir, or the crowd scenes. Today it was televised on the BBC, and the whole thing was quite remarkable. Those in the UK can watch it again here.
The Passion was a retelling of the Easter story using three short films set in Preston- a mayor dealing with riots in 1842, women waiting for the return of sons from the first world war, and a young girl (above) who was caring for her brothers and sisters because her mother was drunk. In the mix was a live performance of music and dance based at the huge Preston bus station– itself a rather famous example of brutalist architecture from the 1960s.
It made me cry lots. In a good way. It was possible to visualise an incarnate loving God permeating everything. In the muck and gristle of human existence. And to see this in the TV in these supposedly secular and post Christian times was wonderful to an old Christian like me.
Some of the places in the films were so familiar too- Michaela and I met a couple of hundred yards from one of them.
If I was to be at all critical, the black gospel bits at the end seemed tacked on, almost like the only way we Brits can do celebratory spiritual music is this way. I love this music, but it just seemed a bit cliched. Having said that, Preston has a sizeable Afro-Caribbean population so perhaps I am being harsh.
Within churches across the western world, many of us will be singing this line today- from the modern hymn by Stuart Townend, ‘In Christ alone’. The whole verse goes something like this;
In Christ alone! who took on flesh
Fulness of God in helpless babe!
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones he came to save:
Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied –
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.
It is a great hymn, deeply emotional and soaring in its melody. However I increasingly find the one dimensional nature of it’s theology really difficult. It is this one line about the wrath of God. It conjures up the idea of some kind of unstoppable force of holy hate and destruction in the universe that was narrowly averted only by the torture and death of Jesus.
This is another one of those underpinning assumptions of Evangelicalism that most of us accepted as unassailable truth- Jesus died the horrible death on the cross that was rightfully ours and because of this, God was able to undertake some kind of divine conjuring trick for some of us. This was the only way to overcome the natural forces of justice in the universe. It was the only way to deal with the wrath of God.
For non theologians like me, the fact that this kind of understanding of the atonement of the cross is not the ONLY way of understanding the central drama of the Christian faith might come as a surprise. Recently of course, a number of hugely controversial books have emerged taking a new look at the issue. The authors of these books (Rob Bell, Steve Chalke, Brian McLaren) have often been subjected to the outrage of the faithful.
So, on this Good Friday, I thought that it might be worth examining some of the other understandings of atonement- the other ways that followers of Jesus have attempted to come to terms with the enormity of a God who would come to earth to die such a death.
The name given to the theory of atonement outlined above is ‘Substitutionary atonement’ or sometimes ‘Penal Substitution’. However rather than talk more about I think it would be useful to take a journey through atonement in church history.
Firstly, there is a summary of some of the ideas in this clip by Tony Jones, along with some of his own hard hitting alternatives;
There are other theories of atonement, but here is a quick summary of the dominant ones again;
Moral influence
In this view the core of Christianity is positive moral change, and the purpose of everything Jesus did was to lead humans toward that moral change. He is understood to have accomplished this variously through his teachings, example, founding of the Church, and the inspiring power of his death and resurrection.
This was the atonement theory dominant in the early church in the second and third centuries and was taught by the Church Fathers. It was also popular into the middle ages and beyond.
Ransom theory
Jesus liberates mankind from slavery to Satan and thus death by giving his own life as a ransom. Victory over Satan consists of swapping the life of the perfect (Jesus), for the lives of the imperfect (mankind).
Christus victor
Here Jesus is not used as a ransom but rather defeated Satan in a spiritual battle and thus frees enslaved mankind by defeating the captor. This theory continued to influence Christian theology for a thousand years.
Satisfaction
This theory grew from the work of the 11th century theologian Anselm. Mankind owes a debt not to Satan, but to sovereign God himself. A sovereign may well be able to forgive an insult or an injury in his private capacity, but because he is a sovereign he cannot if the state has been dishonoured. Anselm argued that the insult given to God is so great that only a perfect sacrifice could satisfy and Jesus, being both God and man, was this perfect sacrifice. Here we see the influence of earthly politics projected onto the heavens.
Penal substitution
The Protestant reformers developed Anselm’s theory. Instead of considering sin as an affront to God’s honour, rather sin is regarded as the breaking of God’s moral law. Placing a particular emphasis on Romans 6:23 (the wages of sin is death), penal substitution sees sinful man as being rightfully deserving God’s wrath with the essence of Jesus’ saving work being his substitution in the sinner’s place, bearing the curse in the place of man (Galatians 3:13).
A variation that also falls within this metaphor is Hugo Grotius’ “governmental theory“, which sees Jesus receiving a punishment as a public example of the lengths to which God will go to uphold the moral order.
Some would argue that all these theories contain part of the truth, and (in the absence of certainty) I think I would agree with this.
Apart from this thing that we call ‘the wrath of God’.
I would contend that our theological projections of God are always partial, always incomplete and always emerging from our cultural perspective. So it was natural for the children of the modern enlightenment to see God as embodying a force of logical, highly technical justice. It seemed like the elevation of mankind towards democratic freedom mediated by the purity of the law was a process ordained by God, and so this must also be the character of God himself.
God the judge- stern, inflexible, bound by the fine detail of the law, but able to save a narrow few through a technicality.
But today we remember the death of a man Jesus.
The scandal of the cross.
The unreasonableness of the cross.
The injustice of the the cross.
The laying down of all power and majesty, the ultimate vulnerability of the cross.
Regular readers will know that about a year ago, I took a road trip down to Derbyshire to collect two kilns and a load of pottery equipment that we intended to install in our cellar. It turned out to be a lot harder than we thought as the big Kiln, weighing in at over half a ton, had to be extracted from an outbuilding at the end of a garden, carried in over and around rockeries, garden ponds and bushes and then lifted into the back of a hired van. Without a couple of Michaela’s uncles (both ex miners and used to moving big things) we simply would never have moved it.
When we got it all up here, the first challenge was getting it out of the van- stop forward some more friends, and we somehow got it on the ground without killing anyone. However, getting it down the cellar stairs was a whole different challenge.
I was discussing this problem when out for a curry with a group of blokes- one of whom, Dave, is in charge of the men who work on the hillsides keeping our electricity lines safe and functional. Dave sent round a couple of his workers, along with a winch, a ground anchor and a special sledge they use to move generators and the like into inaccessible places. They had the Kiln in the cellar in no time.
Then we discovered that the cost of wiring in the Kiln was not as simple as we had hoped, costing roughly 4 times what we had paid for the kilns and equipment! However Michaela and Pauline managed to get a grant towards this, and invested the earnings that they had already made through their craft workshops.
Meanwhile, I installed worktops, shelves, lighting, and we painted the whole cellar white to make it all a bit less murky.
After all this hard work, and kindness from friends, you will understand how exciting it was to fill the kiln with Pauline’s pots, and fire it up.
Pauline and Michaela will be running workshops soon- so if you are up for a combination of a break in Scotland and some pottery- let me know!
The lovely Visit Cowal website has given our Wilderness Retreats a plug on their news section. Very charitable of them considering the retreats will not actually be held in Cowal, beautiful as this part of the world really is.
Incidentally, if you are considering a trip up north, then please consider our holiday accommodation. It can be booked through a whole host of online agencies- including the Guardian website, country cottages etc. It is also worth dropping me a line as we have a few owner bookings that we can use (particularly for loyal blog readers!)
We are moving towards our mixed-economy kind of way of making a living. Last night we had the first firing of the pottery kiln in our cellar. The house did not burn down! It is always a little bit scary to see the temperature gauge reach 1000 degrees centigrade inside something close to the floor of your house. We are still waiting for the contents to cool down to see what the firing will be like- watch this space!
We humans are so contradictory. Sometimes we are driven to destroy anyone or anything in our pursuit of personal gain. At other times we are capable of such incredible self sacrifice in pure service of the other. Always we hope that life is more than mere bio mechanics- it has to mean something.
For men in particular, this contradiction often creates some kind of deep void that we spend a lifetime’s journey trying to fill. We believe that the only good life is a life a success. And ultimately success has to be measurable against the failure of others- against the poverty of others, the lack of creativity in others, the lack of godliness in others, even the lack of love in others.
The problem is that success is so fickle- life moves the goalposts constantly and so we feel constantly diminished.
The void remains.
I read this today;
It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your ‘I’ is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary ‘I.’ No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever.
Richard Rohr
It seemed to me that there was a deep spiritual significance in this. What is this thing that we are becoming as we seek to live deeper, more meaningful, more loving lives? Is it really to be bigger, or is it more about recognising that we are small?
Small that is, like a beloved child, whose achievements might be indeed be celebrated, but in no way make us any more (or any less) beloved.
If only it was so simple.
But then again, I am still immature. I have a lot of growing to do yet.
What a lovely weekend. The sun mostly shone and the days were long.
Everything seems to be breaking down at our house though- the (new) car, the mower (so the grass will grow a little higher) and the bikes- but we spent a long time mending them, and so at least we have one form of transport.
This morning we spent a few hours down at Castle Toward, working on the cricket pitches, scraping out the moss and lichen and deciding which strips might be the best ones to use this year.
I think this sport-as-analogy-for-life is way overused but still this feeling of preparation seems right as Lent draws closer to Easter. Everything is possible again.
For William it may well be. He has been picked to play cricket for a regional under 13’s side. I took him to practice at a posh private school in Helensburgh the other day and watched proudly as he spun his leg spinners into the stumps of his team mates and then crashed the ball around when he came to bat. The boy has real potential.
As for me, this new season is more uncertain. A career ending to be replaced by uncertainties. It is hard to plan or to make choices.
this fragile tent 