Virtually every person on this planet assumes that something is fundamentally wrong with human life, and that the main reason for this is a disconnection between human beings and whatever powers, forces, spirits, or gods are thought to create, sustain, and interpenetrate the universe. The various religions and philosophies then propose to connect man to the supernatural or spiritual side of existence. In Christianity, such connection is called atonement, the causing of disparate things to become "at one" with each other. So many specific proposals for atonement exist that many moderns despair of finding a reason to select any of them. But in fact, the worthiness of the vast majority can be determined by considering the following basic principles.
The creation itself is the problem. Both the dominant philosophies of western (European) civilization and the major eastern (Asiatic) religions believe that the material universe is a hindrance to true spirituality. Rigid diets, complex meditation techniques, and disembodied afterlives are all symptoms of the assumption that the earth and the body are evil, illusory, or barriers to the divine. As a result, what appear to be different religious choices are in fact merely different versions of the same choice. For example, Roman Catholicism and Buddhism are alleged to be unrelated programs, yet an examination of their most highly recommended lifestyles (their respective monastic systems) reveals a common theme. Both affect unusual hairstyles, dress, and diets, live in remote communities, abstain from sex and other temporal enjoyments, pursue prayer and meditation to achieve unity with the divine, oppose violence as an unqualified evil, and seek ultimate reward only when the body has been discarded in physical death. Anyone who believes that physicality is a basic attribute of a fulfilled humanity has just rejected the vast majority of religious and philosophical options which have ever been proposed.
Humanity itself is the solution. Virtually no one would say, "Humanity alone is the solution"; those few systems which rigorously exclude any spiritual or supernatural elements have been effectively discredited (Communism being the most obvious example). Nevertheless, regardless of what assistance any force, spirit, or god is alleged to provide, most agree that it is ultimately what we do in response that counts. Again, the majority of supposedly competing religions end up in full agreement on this point. The evangelical Protestant who bases his destiny on a personal decision for Christ does not in fact differ from a follower of that watered down derivative of Hinduism known as the New Age movement, who bases his destiny on an inward journey of self-discovery. Anyone who believes that humanity does not perform the crucial acts which result in a fulfilled humanity has just rejected the vast majority of religious and philosophical options which have ever been proposed.
The problem will never be solved. Few of course would state this overtly, yet this is the inevitable result of a religion or philosophy which has existed for centuries but is still awaiting its first sign of success. The most common example of this is the proposal of an afterlife, to which the supposed benefits of many religions are postponed. Fatalism and tribalism are also frequently employed to explain why the majority of humans do not now (and probably never will) access the ultimate benefits of a religion. Constantly shifting definitions of basic human problems contribute further to the experience of never accomplishing any real goal; note how official religious and political definitions of substance abuse, sexual misconduct, and racism have been repeatedly amended in 20th century America alone. Anyone who believes that human problems will be overcome on this planet has just rejected the vast majority of religious and philosophical options which have ever been proposed.
Biblical Christianity is overtly based on the rejection of all three of the foregoing assumptions, all propaganda of the various "denominations" to the contrary notwithstanding. Attempts to minimize or denigrate the physical creation are refuted by the refrain of the Bible's initial chapter, "God saw that it was good." The "fall into sin" two chapters later did not introduce defects into the universe, but into mankind's view of the universe: the creation affirming attitude of humans prior to the fall ("they were naked and not ashamed," Gen. 2:25) is now all but universally called sin, and the first effect of sin ("I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid," Gen. 3:10) is now called righteousness.
The Bible is just as vigorous in proclaiming a gracious God as the sole source of human blessings. God simply bestowed on the first humans their existence and their authority over the earth (Gen. 1:26). Those who thought it their own responsibility to work their way up to God were condemned (the tower of Babel, Gen. 11:1-9). God instead came down to man, with gifts that man did not even know existed, much less did man solicit, deserve, or cooperate in receiving them (Jacob's ladder, Gen. 28:10-17). Incredibly, even "Bible believing Christians" turn this incident upside down, as in a famous song which asserts that we are climbing Jacob's ladder, even though Jacob himself never did.
Scripture of course proposes blessings which increase in the future, and specifically that human life will continue beyond what we experience here and now. Yet it is just as clear in asserting that God's gifts come now, not merely later. Noah (Gen. 8:13-22), Lot and his daughters (Gen. 19:27-38), Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 21:1-7), Isaac (Gen. 24:67), and Joseph (Gen. 41:38-45) did not merely receive theories or promises of future divine assistance, nor were they taught to await consolation in an afterlife.
The modern Christian distortions of biblical atonement can for the most part be laid at the feet of one man, Anselm of Canterbury, whose understanding of salvation is the foundation of everything today called Roman Catholic as well as Protestant. Anselm was the first truly Roman Catholic theologian, since he constructed his system in the eleventh century, in the decades immediately following the split between the bishop of Rome and what is now called Eastern Orthodoxy.
In his most famous work, Cur Deus Homo ("Why God Became Man"), Anselm claimed that God the Father cannot save human beings by mercy alone. The Father was held to be a God of law and wrath, demanding perfect obedience of a complex moral and ritual system, and threatening anyone who even slightly or occasionally violates it with eternal damnation. Since no human being can avoid the latter, salvation becomes possible only if someone replaces mankind in suffering the penalty for sin and thereby placating the Father's wrath. That someone is God the Son, a God of grace and mercy, who becomes incarnate as Jesus Christ. Since he is human, he must perfectly obey the law of God to earn his own salvation, and since he is God, he actually accomplishes this, unlike "mere" humans. He nevertheless agrees to suffer eternal damnation for sins he did not personally commit, the credit for which suffering he can then transfer to those who have sinned so that they will not have to suffer damnation themselves. This does not place anyone immediately in heaven, since mankind must still perfectly obey the law of God, but at least the fear of an eternal hell has been removed.
Apparently Anselm failed to notice that this system, among other effects, converts Christianity into polytheism. With Jesus more gracious than the Father, the idea of co-equal persons in the Trinity is abolished; now God is from Mars, but Jesus is from Venus. Subsequent Roman Catholic scholars apparently recognized this, and "fixed" the problem by asserting that Jesus also is a wrathful being who demands perfect obedience and threatens damnation. As a result, another allegedly more gracious figure needed to be introduced, namely, the virgin Mary, who would placate Jesus so that Jesus would placate God. As the mother of God is gradually converted into God the Mother, as in modern Roman Catholic proposals to declare her officially the "co-redeemer," more will doubtless be said of a wrathful Mary who is angry that her Son is not correctly worshiped and her own rosary not sufficiently prayed. Then yet another more gracious individual (Mother Teresa?) will be sought to placate Mary, to placate Jesus, to placate God.
Protestantism rejected the post-Anselmian development of a wrathful Jesus and a more gracious Mary, and for the most part returned to the original Anselmian formula, without recognizing that it is entirely based on the rejection of what is supposedly Protestantism's most sacred principle: sola gratia, salvation by grace alone. Instead of saying that God cannot save by mercy alone, Protestants achieve the same effect by claiming that the Father cannot simply pardon mankind without offense to his "justice." Ironically, biblical justice prevents the very doctrine of atonement which they proclaim, for the law of Moses clearly condemns the blaming of anyone for crimes he did not personally commit (Deut. 24:16).
Protestants do however diverge from Anselm in one important respect. Instead of viewing Jesus as a man who by virtue of his divine nature was enabled to obey the law perfectly and thus save himself, Protestants see Jesus as simply God, who doesn't need to be "saved." If Jesus nevertheless perfectly obeys the law, having no need of such works for himself, he can then transfer the credit for them to others, just as in Anselm's system he transfers the credit for his suffering to others. This augmentation of Anselm is what Protestants mean by the phrase "substitutionary satisfaction": substitutionary in that Jesus replaces all other people in accomplishing it, satisfaction in that he obeys the law perfectly ("active obedience") and sacrifices perfectly ("passive obedience") to placate the Father's demands. The teachers of this system often speak of Jesus "covering" us with his righteousness, meaning his meritorious works of the law transferred to us, so that when the Father looks at us, he sees not us and our sins, but Jesus and his righteousness. This however requires that God the Father is somehow being tricked into not noticing who we really are, which in fact is impossible for an omniscient deity.
If Roman Catholics and Protestants really believe that their respective derivations from Anselm are valid, why is it so crucial for them that humans, in addition to whatever satisfactions Jesus or Mary have performed, perfectly obey God's law and offer perfect sacrifices on their own? Since by their account humans rarely if ever do so, a permanent apartment, the exact opposite of an atonement, is created between Christ and the body of Christ: Jesus is holy, but we are still sinners; Jesus is in heaven, while we remain on earth; Jesus is a God with some human qualities (but not sexuality or the ability to sin, which even the first man possessed in Gen. 2), whereas we are mere men with certain divine qualities (but not the divine nature of 2 Pet. 1:4). Various proposals exist to resolve this apartment: a "second experience" beyond coming to faith in God (Roman monasticism and rosary praying, Protestant revivalism and prayer warriorship, and the charismatic movement across denominational lines); physical death, which according to some Protestants causes an instant and complete purgation from sin; an interval between "this life" and "heaven" (the Roman purgatory, as well as the post-rapture tribulation period and millennium of many Protestants), during which less holy persons receive further opportunites to obey and sacrifice. All result from the same error: the Word, faith, and baptism notwithstanding, we are still not really saved, not yet completely holy in God's sight.
Many Protestants employ "substitutionary satisfaction" and "vicarious atonement" as synonymous expressions, when in fact the latter is in most respects an inversion of Anselmian derived systems. Modern dictionaries testify to the confused history of these terms. "Atonement," defined today as "satisfaction," originated as a contraction of the phrase "at one," denoting reconciliation or unity, but this is now regarded as an archaic usage. Similarly, "vicarious" and "substitutionary" are commonly equated, yet a "vicar" traditionally names the deputy or associate of another, whereas a "substitute" is simply the replacement of another. Biblical Greek is far more precise and consistent in distinguishing between the "substitutionary" preposition anti ("instead of" or "in place of," as when Archelaus replaced Herod as king, Matt. 2:22) and the "vicarious" preposition uper ("in the stead of" or "on behalf of," the relationship of Baal to his worshipers, Judg. 6:31). The New Testament consistently employs uper in such phrases as "Christ suffered uper you" (1 Pet. 2:21), thus indicating that Christ suffered for the same reasons as us in order to be reconciled to us. Unfortunately, most English translations render uper with ambiguous terms such as "for" or "for the sake of." Followers of Anselmian systems then misread these texts as though the preposition were anti, thus asserting that Christ replaced us in offering a sacrifice to appease an angry God.
The vicarious atonement, biblically defined, is nothing less than the long sought "full Gospel." God the Father is in fact co-equal in grace and mercy with God the Son (Luke 12:32; John 10:30); he really does simply pardon human beings for their various limitations and errors. Jesus came into the world not to create a salvation which had never before existed, but to demonstrate a salvation which had rarely before been believed (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 1:1-3). Jesus did not perfectly obey the law of God instead of us (Gal. 3:13), but demonstrated that the law could not be perfectly obeyed by anyone, not even by God himself, thus permitting us to cease striving for the theological equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Jesus did not placate a wrathful "God the Judge," but demonstrated that no such being exists. On the cross he offered, not a sacrifice to appease a deity, but a sacrament to appease a humanity which falsely accuses God of being a negligent Creator. Now, whenever humans protest, "Where was God when ...?" or "What kind of a good and loving God permits ...?" we respond, "Unjustly condemned just like us, cruelly killed just like us." Man was not in Christ reconciling God to himself; God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19), becoming "at one" with the sons of cancer patients, the mothers of children killed in car accidents, and the victims of Auschwitz and the Gulag.
Jesus is thus an example to us, not of perfect obedience and sacrifice, but of faith. He like us was saved by faith (Rom. 3:22 is rightly translated "the faith of Jesus," not "the faithfulness of Jesus," much less "our faith in Jesus"), not of works lest any man (including the man Christ Jesus, 1 Tim. 2:5) should boast (Eph. 2:8-9), since by works of law no flesh (including the Word made flesh, John 1:14) is justified (Rom. 3:20). To love God means nothing more than to trust God; seemingly weak faith in the midst of agonizing struggle is no more a disqualification for us than for Jesus himself (Mark 14:34). To love our neighbors as ourselves means nothing more than to treat everyone by the same standards. The Christian life has nothing to do with abstinence from earthly pleasures (Mark 7:18-19; Luke 7:38), self-denying charity (John 12:1-8), or constant prayer (Jesus had no daily regimen of prayer, never prayed for the sick, never opened or closed a sermon or Bible study with prayer, rarely prayed in connection with meals, and offered half of his recorded prayers in the last twenty-four hours of his life). Jesus did indeed pardon real sins (Luke 23:39-43), but the bulk of his ministry involved liberating believers from false accusations of sin by those who constantly expanded God's true will for man into an impossible standard of behavior (Matt. 15:9, 23:4).
The following illustrations provide more precise contrasts between vicarious atonement and the various forms of "apartment" or limited atonement based on the Anselmian system, each of which is associated with one or more "denominations." Inevitably, members of a given church body react defensively against criticism of their own, while engaging in ad hominem arguments directed at everyone else's. As a result, the following evaluations focus exclusively on the flawed presuppositions and damaging effects of these theories rather than on who promotes them.
Jesus takes away some sins of all people. This view has Jesus remitting "original sin," the collective guilt inherited from Adam and the general human tendency to sin, but not all the effects of "actual" sins which each human personally commits. The grace of God, the ministry of Christ, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit assist a person in overcoming actual sins, and may even be presented as playing a dominant role, but are never the exclusive remedy for sin, guilt, death, and hell. For that, specific works of man must be added to cancel out the effects of each actual sin. These are usually a series of works performed throughout life, and may include works performed in an "afterlife." They may be restricted to a person's own works, or may include works of other Christians, clergymen, or even deceased believers. In every case, however, the person remains perpetually uncertain that he has made sufficient satisfaction for all sins.
This view of salvation is analogous to an airport, which repairs planes and supplies gasoline and flight directions. It is nevertheless up to the pilots to bring themselves to the correct destination.
Jesus takes away all sins of some people. This view presents Jesus as saving only those whom God predetermined should be saved. The burden is then placed on the individual to discover whether he is one of these specially favored persons. Proof is usually sought in one's ability to be obedient to an extensive and rigorous moral code. Sins subsequent to "conversion" inevitably suggest that the individual is not among the favored persons, and quite likely never will be.
This view of salvation is analogous to confirmations of airline reservations which are addressed, "To Whom It May Concern." Recipients are left without any certain method of determining whether they are indeed among those whom it concerns.
Jesus potentially takes away all sins of all people. Jesus' work is seen in this model as a mere statement of God's willingness to save, which must be responded to in the correct manner in order for it to go into effect. Typically, the response involves one major work rather than a series of works throughout life, namely, a "conversion experience" associated with an emotionalistic prayer or a visionary event. As in the previous models, the certainty of salvation is lost when subsequent experiences of personal sin or external evil suggest that the "conversion experience" did not provide a sufficiently comprehensive conversion.
This view of salvation is analogous to an airline advertisement. Customers must find the right agent at the right time with the correct payment, or else they don't acquire the necessary tickets.
Jesus takes away all sins of all people, but nothing changes. Possibly the most deceitful of the four ways of limiting the atonement, this view appears to confer salvation on everyone, but then maintains that people remain sinners afterwards. This creates an endless cycle of confessing sins, receiving pardon, then being reaccused of sin and repardoned.
This view of salvation is analogous to airline tickets, which upon their holders' arrival at the airport are repeatedly challenged by security guards and thus must be repeatedly verified. While the passengers are being detained, the plane takes off without them.
The correct view of the atonement is quite simple:
Jesus takes away all sins of all people, period. God really did reconcile the whole world, not merely the pious, not merely the elect, not merely those who committed themselves to something, and not just as a theory. God did this by putting himself in the same cursed condition in which we find ourselves. Now, to be cursed by the Law is to be equal to Christ! If anyone ends up not getting "saved," it is because he rejected this atonement, not because he did not qualify for it by a certain type or number of prayers, confessions, or works of charity. The effect of the atonement is freedom, not merely from guilt for real sins, but also from false accusations of sin derived from illegitimate expansions of God's law.
This view of salvation is analogous to a helicopter, which an unjustly prosecuted individual's father employs to rescue him from prison. Some fellow convicts, having heard of the plan, are standing with the son when the helicopter arrives and are also rescued. Unfortunately, others remain behind because they don't believe the helicopter exists, they have their own escape plans, they feel unworthy to gain freedom, or have actually come to prefer a life of slavery.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth century German theologian best known for being executed by the Nazis for his participation in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He has influenced Christians across denominational lines by his work on Christian sanctification, "The Cost of Discipleship." Though nominally a Protestant, Bonhoeffer unwittingly demonstrated the essential similarity of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism when he asserted that the greatest accomplishment of the early church (AD 100-500) was neither its bold defense of the faith against various heresies (such as those involving the Trinity and the person of Christ) nor its endurance under governmental persecution, but its development of the monastic system. The following anecdote was created as a refutation of every form of Christianity which is similar to Bonhoeffer's approach.
You get up out of bed, at no particular hour. There are no cows to milk, no chickens to feed, no timbers to saw.
During the morning, you sit on your butt, and listen to Jesus telling clever stories about God and bashing the Pharisees, your enemies.
Then you have lunch, possibly provided for by miraculous means.
In the afternoon, you sit on your butt, and watch Jesus heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and exorcise demons. Occasionally he turns to you and asks, "Would you like to do this too?" You exclaim, "What, us do miracles?" He replies, "Sure, pick any town you like. Come back whenever you're finished."
When evening comes, you're invited to dinner at some guilty rich man's house, replete with wine and female companionship, after which you sit on your butt, and listen to Jesus telling more clever stories about God and again bashing the Pharisees.
You've got so much money, since your enterprise is being bankrolled by (among others) the wife of the prime minister of Galilee, that the poor can be helped from it, Judas can embezzle from it, and you still want for nothing. Rarely are you found without clothing, shoes, food, and drink, and never without the means to acquire them. When you are caught outside in a storm, a simple word from Jesus causes the winds immediately to cease; when your taxes are due, he even has a fish miraculously come up with the payment.
It's a tough life.
Oh, yes, for about 72 hours it's a living hell. Jesus is dead, and for all you know, you're next. Everything you've done for the past three years vanishes into worthlessness, and nothing portends for the future besides your own horrible death, and possibly eternal hell to follow.
But then Jesus is risen from the dead, and after he cooks breakfast for you on the Galilean lakeshore, he ascends into heaven. His charge to take his message to all the world sounds imposing at first, until he miraculously gives you the ability to speak fluent Coptic and Latin.
So you spend every remaining day of your life like your first day as a disciple: you sit on your butt, telling clever stories about Jesus and bashing the Pharisees.
