The price is paid
There’s been quite a fuss in the Press this week about a Lenten talk given by Dean Jeffrey John. The fuss comes, once again, because he addresses the idea of the Cross and how Jesus ‘paid the price’ for our sins. There have been the usual knee-jerk responses (sadly from bishops in the Church of England, too, this time!) that, because he rejects penal substitution, he is somehow heretical and rejects all substitutionary ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you actually listen to what he said (or read the transcript), you’ll see that he’s very firmly still in the substutionary mould. It’s just that the focus is away from a God who is mostly wrathful and bent on punishment to a God who is all Love. And, I don’t know about you, but I know which God I meet in the Bible and, most particularly, in the Person who said “whoever has seen me has seen the Father”.
On the cross Jesus dies for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God but by God.
Not to God but by God.
pax et bonum
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I’ve wanted to address this for a long time. i think it’s no accident that it has come up now.
If you truly believe that the price has been paid, not to God but by God, who has it been paid to?
Hammertime () (URL)
3:36pm on 05 April 2007
If your answer is:
(a) No! Then please read no further, and Happy Easter when it arrives!
(b) Yes! Then thank you and read on:
Went to a dinosaur park today and saw models of neaderthal man. They got me thinking. They made tools and fires and things. But was God their God? I know that we didn’t evolve from them. But at what point in evolution did God become the God that he is for human-kind?
Ruth ()
4:50pm on 05 April 2007
He was the God of all before the foundation of the earth. No matter what we may think about human ancestry, God has always been the same. He is immutable, and his nature of who He is has not changed. When did humans enter into relationship with Him? Upon the creation of Adam, of course. I don’t think you have to hold a dust-to-Adam-in-an-instant view of man to agree. You can call creation whatever you wish – but that God made man in his image is, at least Biblically, not up for discussion.
If you don’t agree, than whatever you make up is as valid as whatever anyone else makes up.
Hammertime () (URL)
8:07pm on 05 April 2007
First thing to say is that I don’t find a “price” model of the atonement particularly useful, partly for this reason. The idea that the crucifixion was a price paid to God has serious issues – Jeffrey John articulated some of them. But, for a starter, there’s a definite logical problem with God requiring payment and then, by legal sleight of hand, paying Himself and claiming that that makes everything alright. If He could sidestep payment by paying Himself, why require the payment in the first place? The alternative (which is the idea actually found in the NT) is that the price was paid to Satan – we were slaves to sin and Christ redeemed us (i.e. paid the price) from that slavery and set us free. But I don’t like this idea much, either, if taken too literally, because I don’t think that Satan has that much power.
One major problem with all these models is that they fail to account for the resurrection – there’s simply no place in them for it. Indeed, it’s something of a problem, because it effectively sidesteps the “payment” by negating it. If the payment is a death (whether paid to God or Satan or anyone else), that’s cheated by a resurrection. There hasn’t really been a death at all – the person’s life continues.
Personally, I think that models like the Christus victor model (also found in the NT and the dominant model in the early Church) are good – by his life, death and resurrection, Jesus won the victory over sin, death and the devil. This necessarily encompasses all parts of the Incarnation, not focusing on Good Friday to the exclusion of everything else. Or (I think I’ve mentioned it here before) the idea from Catherine of Sienna of medicine – we were sick with sin, sick to death, and the only medicine is death itself (see Paul’s discussion of how death is what liberates us from the Law). Jesus came to tasted death for us, and was the only one who could do so and survive (being God). Then, we partake of His death by our baptism and our new life in Christ. He feeds us as a wet-nurse fed a baby, taking the strong medicine herself so that the child may receive the medicine in diluted and tolerable form in her milk.
The point, as I’ve said previously, is that there is no “One True Model” of the atonement. What the Bible presents is the fact of the atonement. All we can do is try to wrap our minds around it. Claiming that we have it all tied up (especially in such flawed models as penal substitution) is arrogance. If the Bible gave us a single model, it would be different. But that isn’t how it is. The only thing we can do is to look at multiple models and let them criticise one another, in the hope that we will be able to hold the good pieces of each without letting our vision be too distorted by the bad pieces.
pax et bonum
[John] () (URL)
9:14pm on 05 April 2007
Good question! The first thing to say is that we don’t know the answer, and can’t this side of heaven. But I do have a few thoughts.
It’s usually been held by the Church that the thing setting humanity apart from the animals is the possession of a rational soul. That is, the power to think, speak and reason is what makes us human. If so, we would have to suggest that Neanderthals were also human in this sense. And so, yes, God would be their God, too. Of course, God is the God of the animals and the rocks and the stars, too, so in that sense it’s trivial. But, if the Neanderthals sought any God then the triune God would the One to whom they would be reaching. And I believe that God would reach back to them.
If the Neanderthals had no soul then, we’d have to suggest, they would have no desire for God, no experience of the numinous. And that problem would solve itself. It raises issues, though, of what then really distinguishes us from animals – if Neanderthals thought and spoke and reasoned and crafted and created, why are we any different?
However, there’s one final thought that makes sense to me and might help. If Neanderthals and other hominins were en-souled (had the divine spark that makes us different) then their story and salvation is the same as ours. Just as, we are told in the Bible, salvation was available to those to died before Christ was born, so these others would partake in that salvation. And if they weren’t en-souled, there’s nothing to worry about.
To answer your question, then, I personally suspect that we aren’t the only species to have had souls. I’ve no evidence for this, but there’s no evidence against it either. Insofar as we have any idea of what the soul is, we relate it to ideas of self-awareness, of rationality, of awareness of personal death, of creativity. All of these things appear to have been present in Neanderthals and possibly other hominin species. So, either souls were given once, a long time ago and shared among many species, or they were given several times, as a few species came into the place in God’s plan where they needed one.
Perhaps not very satisfactory, but an answer, at least!
pax et bonum
[John] () (URL)
9:26pm on 05 April 2007
Ruth ()
6:44pm on 06 April 2007