Substitutionary Atonement!

In seminary we learn a whole lot of fun terminology that only theologians use! One of my personal favorites is “substitutionary atonement.” It basically boils down to the concept that because Jesus died for our sins we have been saved that horrible punishment – that we are rescued. But on this resurrection day, I would like to push back on that concept a bit.

It is not so much that I am contending that Jesus did not die for us, but rather the belief that it saved us from death or was the source of our forgiveness. Now before you brand me a heretic, let me explain. We are already and have always been forgiven.  God – who is love – has caused that from the beginning.  It was one of Jesus’ main messages; he was continually saying that we are forgiven. In healing an illness or human error, no matter how egregious, his proclamation was, “you are forgiven; go and sin no more.” That is the given condition with God – you are forgiven; you are loved and accepted, just the way you are.  It did not take the crucifixion to get that grace. Furthermore, since we have come from God and will return to God in our passing, we have that as a given from the very beginning of time – we are already, always God’s creation and inextricably bound up in the Divine from the beginning until the end of all time. We may not know what it looks like, but it is a given. It didn’t take the crucifixion to gain that.

So I don’t celebrate Jesus life and death because of substitutionary atonement.  In fact, I don’t really call it a celebration, personally, because it scares me to no end.  You see, the other message Jesus was always preaching (along with love and forgiveness) was that we were to “follow” him. What? To the cross?

Yes. All the way there and beyond. The crucifixion of Jesus is a total game-changer. In all my studies (I am a life-long student still in college in my 60’s) I have found that there are only two things that have to power to transform human beings: unconditional love and extreme suffering.  Loving unconditionally (that is, because you choose to love not because of the other person’s “worthiness” of love) we are turned inside-out. It is perhaps the hardest thing in life to do – to BE love.  And that other thing – the suffering thing – well we all know that it changes everything; if and when we survive it!  And in one fell swoop, Jesus, this man who said “follow me,” did both of those things: He loved (not just us, or his friends and family, but even those who were in the process of killing him) completely and unconditionally, so much so that he was willing to suffer the ultimate suffering to make that point. 

But he did not do that so that we did not have to.  He did it as he did everything, so that we would know the path to transformation.  And this new way of being – on the other side of the death of substitutionary atonement – is what we might call true Christianity; loving in a way that heals the hurts, in a way that bridges the gaps, and in a way that pulls everyone into the fold, irrespective of their human condition, skin color, religion, sexuality or politic.  It is why I cry every Good Friday – not because Jesus died, but because I am called to go down that same path, and there is no escape clause!

The Dark Night of the Soul

The time for writing my Master's thesis at my seminary is rapidly approaching and the topic I have chosen is the transformative effects of the dark night of the soul. Now there are two problems associated with this:  One is that unless someone has been up against that wall or had their psyche squished through that pinhole, it is an academic discussion that makes little sense on anything other than a hypothetical level. The second is that many of the processes within that transformation are nonlinear and happen to you as opposed to something you do or even participate in.

Dark nights, generically speaking, are those times when the current level of understanding and experience one has no longer work and must die off in order to make way for a new and deeper connectivity.  Most people speak of the dark night as the place where prayer and connection dry up - they lose that feeling that somehow they are connected to god.  But that is just the signpost along the road! It's kind of like that signpost in the Wizard of Oz that says "certain death ahead" and "I wouldn't go further." And then you step forward.

The transformative effects of these dark nights are hard to describe, though I have attempted to find a language for them.  I keep running into the limits of consensual definitions. As I continue to scan through the literature both in print and on line, I find two camps of dark night literature that I recently tried describing to my son as those that get it and those that don't.

It is really amazing to read the words of those who have been through this continual and de-layering process.  They almost look forward to the next wave of nausea - knowing that it is certainly coming. They breathe differently and there is an acceptance in their speaking that is open and relaxed and all-encompassing.  Finding an academic way to present this "process" and producing attributions and descriptions of that difference will be challenging at the very least. But the thing I worry most about is writing in a way that even slightly suggests a smugness of knowing.  If anything, the dark nights have taught me that I do not know a thing.