I have no patience left with this...what can I call it...with this fad, this craze, this rather preening pseudo-sophistication in certain Christian circles that rushes to parade how much more expansive, magnanimous, inclusive, humane and pluralist it is than God Himself.
What am I referring to? I am referring to our take on biblical teaching concerning two things: the atonement and the "old covenant."
These "takes" go more or less like this: regarding the atonement, it is barbaric, unenlightened, outrageous to teach that God required the sacrifice of a human being in order to forgive sin—the Cross was not God's will and the death of Jesus is no magic pill concocted by God to seal the deal; regarding what we call the Old Testament, i.e., the old covenant (in contrast to the "new covenant" that, for instance, Jesus directly names at the Last Supper), it was not replaced or transcended or in any way invalidated or superceded by anything Jesus did and to suggest that it was is to be an antisemite.
What these two takes have in common are: 1) that they are driven by unadulterated fear, the fear of looking somehow....let's say, "incorrect," the fear of being labeled with precisely the labels (antisemite, racist, bloodthirsty, pagan...) with which they implicity label anyone who fails to nod in unison; 2) their willful ignorance, their obtusely blind eye to the plain teaching of Scripture.
What else these two takes have in common is an insistent, knee-jerk offense, call it a horror, of plain, unadorned proclamation of central Gospel truths. Especially when it comes to the Blood ("this is my blood, the blood of the new covenant, given for the remission of sins"), and especially when it comes to the supreme, all-transcending, all-superceding Lordship of Christ.
It's what the apostle Paul called "the offense of the cross." It's the same horror of the Gospel's stark assertions drove his opponents (interestingly, both within and without the Church) so mad they hounded and vilified him into pariah status. There is nothing new under the sun.
"Not my will but yours be done," Christ prayed to the Father, and that prayer was surely granted. Jesus lived his entire life yearning for and straining after the fulfillment of the Father's will. And Jesus' final verdict on the unfolding of that holy will was, "It is finished." No, God does not do evil. But to suggest that that means death was not a requirement for atonement is to (besides simply ignoring Scripture) reduce the goodness and love of God to a two-dimensional Disney cartoon. (Not to mention it being unfathomably dim theological question-begging.)
It is to content oneself, in a back-patting way, with one's capacity to make God better than awkwardly disturbing biblical teachings seem to make Him. It is a very gratifying approach indeed if one's notion of theology is something akin to applying makeup as one stares into the mirror. One wouldn't want anything too strange or terrible to show up in the mirror, after all....
"Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin." "This is my blood of the new covenant...." "Accordingly Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant." "He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins; he endured the punishment that made us well; because of his wounds we have been healed." "Indeed, the time is coming...when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. It will not be like the old covenant...."
You know, when you make a milkshake, you gather the ingredients, like milk, ice cream, a banana, chocolate syrup, and you toss them in the blender, blend them together, pour it into a glass and enjoy it. Is the milkshake "better" than the ingredients were separately? Well, if your goal was a MILKSHAKE then the milkshake is inarguably, incontrovertibly BETTER. (The writer of Hebrews seems to agree, though I don't know whether he ever had a milkshake.) The ingredients separately weren't a milkshake, they weren't what you were aiming at. Were they therefore "bad"? Well, that's a stupid question hardly worth dignifiying with a response. They were what they were, and for what they were they were excellent ("the law is holy," quoth the apostle Paul). But since our aim was a milkshake, it is absurdly obvious that the milkshake is "better," that it supercedes the ingredients that went into it...even as we recognize there could have been no milkshake without those ingredients. The milkshake is, in a sense, forever indebted to its constituent elements, but, that said, there is also NO GOING BACK (apart from the illusion of running a video backwards) and the constituent elements cannot possibly compete with the milkshake on the level of "milkshake-ness." To assert this is not to be anti-banana....
Dear reader, I will not insult your intelligence by spelling out the point of my analogy. You get it.
As for the blood, the cross, the suffering, the "ransom," the propitiation, the sacrifice, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world," what can I say more than "Amen"? Yet I will say more.
It was the Father's will that Jesus die. It was Jesus' will that Jesus die. I'm not even talking about the cross yet. I'm just talking about death. It was GOD'S will (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) that God the Son DIE. Had it not been, God the Son would never have become mortal Man. Period. Death entered the world through sin. Becoming a child of Adam, the Son of God sentenced himself, redemptively, to that very death, the..."sin-death." That death, whether by crucifixion or otherwise, was bound to be the act of atonement, the bearing of our sins. precisely because of the One dying. Only His death--the Sinless One dying the "sin-death"--was the..."vacuum" through which all our guilt and offense could be expelled. Redemption IS His suffering in our place. Not because God is a sadist. Please. Just stop with that, okay? It's idiotic. Worse, you mock holy things you are therefore in danger of never entering into. No, it's because what He's taking in our place is something awful. You don't take it and not suffer. That's not God's fault. It's ours. Which is rather the whole point, isn't it.... Try reading Isaiah again.
These are my weak, frail scrabblings after understanding what is absolutely so. That it is absolutely so, Scripture leaves no doubt. My efforts to peer into it and make out its contours, its implications, its ramifications, a bit of its infinite depths, well.... My efforts, your efforts, are not in vain, with God's help. And there is certainty in what He has declared. And there is also, wonderfully, an eternity of understanding yet to discover.
Probably the most ignorant critique of the atonement I have ever heard, particularly so in that it came from someone who ought to have known better, someone I once credited with better insight, came from Brian McLaren on a radio show one day when he chortlingly parodied the propitiatory death of Christ by comparing it to an office manager forgiving a colleague's error at work but coming home and kicking the dog to vent his anger. So that crude, warped, insidious caricature--disastrously wrong verging on theologically malevolent--seems to be the best McLaren can make out of "the blood of the new covenant, given for the remission of sins." The parody earned sycophantic giggles from McLaren's interviewer. They were partners in idiocy.
By the way, the deity of Christ is COMPLETELY missing from McLaren's office-manager "parable." I'll leave that to you to extrapolate out theologically, only adding my view that it's KEY, the key to everything. McLaren seems utterly blind to it. It's what's all wrong, worse than wrong, in his preening chortles....
Only the One sinned against can take, absorb, the full brunt of the wrong done Him and expel it (and He goes through "hell," take that however you want, in the process). Which is why the blood of bulls and lambs could only ever have been a foreshadowing, not the Event itself. The New Covenant is better than the Old because the New one is...it. We're there. And once you're there, there's no going back. Especially when there's nowhere to go back to...which is the whole point of Hebrews.
