Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
February 7, 2010
Text: I Corinthians 15:1-11
In what I consider the best book on the development of Christology in the church, Roger Haight states “The question of salvation is the religious question” (My underline). Haight is absolutely correct. Put beside the question of the meaning of salvation, every other theological question pales in significance. Doctrines about the church, Trinity, the last days, they are all secondary to our doctrine of salvation. Only the doctrine of God itself rivals our beliefs about salvation.
I am going to devote two Sundays to this critical question—today and a Sunday in March. Today I will talk briefly about the history of the doctrine and why I think it is not terribly helpful to Christians today. In March, I will talk about where we are today on the doctrine of salvation and how it addresses the most fundamental need we have—to know that we are loved by our Divine Parent. Obviously, the two are so inter-related, so there will be a bit of overlap.
In the 15th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Paul states his doctrine of salvation in very simple, concise words: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” For Paul and the early church, salvation wasn’t about the meaning and purpose of our lives. It was about sin.
This shouldn’t be surprising since Paul was a person who, by his own account, was wracked with guilt over things he had done. He had done some pretty awful things, including persecuting members of the early church prior to his conversion. Paul was also obsessed with his failure to live faithfully according to the Jewish Law.
We all know Paul’s personality type. We may see it in a colleague at work who is never satisfied with her work product. She always sees the flaws in her work; rarely does she see the positive things she produces. We may see it at home with a family member who can’t satisfy him or herself. Maybe one of our kids can’t be satisfied with a B in some subject that is very difficult or one of our siblings is forever critical of little things he or she does less than perfectly. Or maybe we see this type of hypercritical tendency at work in ourselves. We can please others but not ourselves.
At some point, Paul came to the correct conclusion that he couldn’t forgive himself for his mistakes real and imagined. Judging himself by an external law, he needed an external source to experience forgiveness. Not able to find relief in the world, he rightly looked to God. Once oriented toward and accepting of God’s grace, Paul’s life took a change for the better that also changed the world as he became the lead disciple of a graceful God.
This is the context for what Paul meant when he said that Jesus died for our sins. God, as revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, can do that which we cannot do—liberate us from guilt by forgiving our sins. The grace of God can wipe out, erase, bury forever our sins and with them the guilt that is so debilitating and destructive of our lives.
How is this message of forgiveness connected to Jesus’ death? If God can forgive humanity after we killed the Christ, surely God can forgive you and me. So often, we think we are unforgivable. We basically say to God, “You don’t understand just how bad I have been.” Well, yes, God does understand. And when we confess our failures, no matter how bad they are, God does forgive us. This was Jesus’ core message.
I should add that for Paul, our sins stood between us and life eternal. If we remain unforgiven while on earth, Paul believed the possibility of heaven doesn’t exist. So for us to join God for eternity, in his mind, the issue of sinfulness had to be addressed. Paul felt Jesus did so directly and unequivocally.
Paul’s teaching remained the primary understanding of God’s redemptive work through the first eleven centuries of the church. Augustine in the fourth century began to develop some systematic thoughts. But the church’s teaching on salvation didn’t engender a large debate until the 11th century when two of the church’s greatest thinkers went toe to toe: Anselm, an Italian Benedictine monk, and Abelard, a French monk about fifty years younger than Anselm.
Picking up on Paul’s claim that Jesus died for our sins, Anselm shifted theology in a direction it followed almost unchallenged until the 19th century. He decided that Jesus had to die for our sins because humanity, on its own, could not atone for them. Beginning with Adam and Eve and continuing onward, our sins were too many and too awful for any sufficient act of contrition on our part.
Anselm asserted that our redemption could be achieved only through an internal transaction within the Godhead. God demanded satisfaction for the sins of humanity just as a judge demands satisfaction from a criminal for a crime. And yet, no human could make that satisfaction because the crimes were too numerous for any one person to make restitution. Therefore and logically, only God could satisfy God’s need for the debt to be settled. As a result, God became human to do what humanity could not—satisfy the debt. Jesus died for our sins.
Anselm’s theology of atonement has a certain logic but seems bizarre to many of us in the 21st century. It is certainly bizarre to me. But it wasn’t bizarre in the Middle Ages. It appealed to the “eye for an eye” reality in which they lived. Scores had to be settled with the appropriate punishment. Only God could settle this particular score. God did so by offering up Jesus as the price to be paid for humanity’s thousands of years of sin.
Anselm and generations after him saw this as God’s supreme act of sacrifice. God loved us so much that God gave up God’s only begotten to create the grounds for New Life for humanity. What amazing grace it was, they believed.
Abelard didn’t buy it. He did not believe God’s thinking toward a sinful humanity had to be changed by some act of atonement, a supernatural settling of the score. It felt like an all-too-human a way of dealing with sin.
In opposition to the idea of a divine self-sacrifice, Abelard wrote that what needed to take place was not a judicial transaction in which our sins were negated. No, what needed to change was sinful humanity’s attitude toward God. It was this change that Jesus accomplished. By remaining faithful even unto death, Jesus showed us the proper attitude for humans to have toward God. Forgiven we become grateful for the renewed possibility of a faithful life. From this flows an grateful effort to live as Jesus lived—faithfully, creatively, lovingly.
We confess our sins. They are forgiven. We are restored to the path of faithful discipleship. This sacred progression is the essence of Abelard’s teaching.
Anselm’s notion of redemption is called objective because it happens independent of us. God does it, not us. We receive the benefits unaided by anything we have done. We are the objects of salvation, not participants in it.
Abelard’s concept is called subjective. God can only do what God can do: forgive us. Salvation takes place as we respond faithfully to a loving and graceful God. We make it happen when we repent and rejoin God’s family.
These two theories, objective and subjective, are at the heart of many of the differences between conservative and progressive Christian theologies.
Much of the language of our tradition, especially as found in our hymns, proclaims Anselm’s theology of salvation. We hear about Jesus’ blood, his suffering on the cross and death as being the essence of God’s redemptive act. In a way they are.
However, such an approach also makes no sense to many of us. Why would God kill an innocent, family member to satisfy a debt? There had to be another way. There was and Abelard described it.
As I and many others understand God’s redemptive work, Jesus’ death did not satisfy an angry God. His death satisfied an angry Roman empire and angry religious leaders. Jesus’ death was the result of our sinfulness, not part of a cosmic drama to satisfy God.
We are saved by Jesus because he introduces us to a realm of grace the likes of which we can find nowhere else. He ushers us into a world where prodigal children and adulteress people are forgiven, tax collectors and persecutors of the church become leaders of the church, lepers are embraced and those given up for dead find new life. In this mystical realm, we see ourselves as good rather than sinful; forgiven rather than burdened; children of God rather than children of a struggling world.
God does save us from our sins. As we are forgiven, we are freed, yes, saved to live a healthy and holy life. It is this forgiveness and the new life it engenders, this salvation that we celebrate around the Lord’s Table.
Gracious God, your love for us is, indeed, amazing. Even though we sin and sin again, you forgive and forgive again, refusing to give up on us. In this sacred process, you save us from ourselves. Thank you. Help us to live lives worthy of such love, following the example of Jesus who shows us the Way to you. Amen.
