Good Stuffs

[liralen]

Jet came off the bus dancing and making noises like a duck into his fist. Just because it was fun.

I can breathe. That's good.

Blueberry muffins. I finally made some and they are Good.

I did get the raspberries transplanted. I have more tomato seedlings. The OUR center garden is doing just fine without me. There will be twenty ladies planting plants on the last weekend of May because of me. And, even with lung stuffs I can write. That is good, too.

So. Since I said I'd write a bit about the class. I shall do so now.



And to start, THIS IS NOT WHAT ALL or even many CHRISTIANS BELIEVE. In fact, many would take offense at what is being spoken of in this class, and probably rightfully so as it's at the heart of some denomination's theologies. Just so that no one reading this goes up to someone that's Christian and goes, "Well you believe this, huh?" Cause, likely, they don't.

So the first class materials pretty much presented why the Roman Empire, as the established civilization of the day, pretty much had to kill Jesus and the Jews of the times were a ready scapegoat.

Part of it was that the books were written at about 100 C.E. (common epoch, the non-Christ-centric way of dennoting the dates), which was when the Romans were in power (and therefore pretty dangerous to antagonize), and the Jews were starting to push the Christians out as a dangerous edge group that was too different from the norm of Judism. So both groups were trying to differentiate themselves, and it was both more useful and safer to make the Jews the Bad Guys than the Romans. This is probably why Pilate was shown as a kind of wimp.

It's Augustus' time. The golden time of the Ceasar Augustus, when the Empire was built, and Pax Romana is the by-word of civilization. Where over 1000 times is carved, "I conquered X, I brought peace to X" over most of the known world. The model of the day was that one has to defeat, conquer an area in order to bring peace. Jesus' idea was new and dangerous, that the way to peace as through justice, not through force. The Romans and Pilate had ways of dealing with violent protest, they had troops to deal with violent protest, but they couldn't deal with Jesus non-violent protest. As one of the speakers in the video said, "Pilate got it right. He got it absolutely right. He killed Jesus and just Jesus and left his followers alone."

The basic idea of the first class was that the Roman's had to execute Jesus to keep the State stable. So they did. Pilate could have pull the strings anyway he needed to, but Jesus, because he was promoting an idea that was actively dangerous to the state, had to be dealt with. Like Martin Luther King, like Socrates. Ideas are more dangerous to the State than simple violence. There was also a whole section on the pre-mediated, cold violence by the State of a real execution by the lady that wrote Dead Man Walking.

It really rattled the way I'd always seen Pilate, and the whole way in the gospel of John that the Jews are the Bad Guys. And there was a whole section of the video by a Jewish scholar of the New Testament (yes, she studies the New Testament) about how she first ran across anti-Semitism as a result of those very passages.

The second part examined the whole idea of the Doctrine of Atonement. Bad shorthand for it is that Jesus suffered and died for our sins, and that God wanted it that way. It was really pushed by Anselm nearly 1000 years ago, in the Middle Ages because at that time he couldn't conceive of a God that could forgive sin, that *someone* had to pay. And, as one speaker put it, Anselm was a terrible historian, so he had no idea why the Roman Empire would have killed Jesus for practical reasons. So Jesus became the payer, and it was through not just the blood of the lamb but the suffering on the way to and on the cross. Or, as some put it, "You've got a credit card and Daddy's paying the bill." Which just makes me shake my head for different reasons.

Some clergy have used this in ways that make me cringe. One of the segments in the video was about a woman who, twenty years ago, went to her priest because she was being beaten by her husband. The priest said that she should just endure it, and rejoice as her suffering brought her closer to Christ. And twenty years later, the husband was starting to beat the kids, too, so she went to this woman priest to ask if the other one had been right. GAH!!

And the woman priest said, "No. He was wrong." There are dozens of stories of Jesus standing up against abuse, of saying "No, you cannot continue this, this is wrong." Dozens of incidents of non-violent protest, of calling people on what they were doing that was evil. And the church was made to support those who would stand for the right against abuse, against evil, against wrong. Not just endure it. It's the same sinkhole as "Jesus meek and mild."

Ahem. Uhm.. that last bit about the sinkhole is my opinion anyway.

One speaker really clarified it for me by separating sacrifice from suffering from substitution. In Jesus' time, blood sacrifice was an outgrowth of simple human need to right relationships. If you fought with someone, the best way to make it up was through either a gift or a meal. And in rural times, a meal, or a feast with another basically meant an animal had to die to provide the meal. So if you wanted to right your relationship with God, you took an animal to the Temple (to make it official), and spilled its blood on the alter (to make it sacred). Then you were given the sacred animal back in order to take it home, prepare it, and feast with God. It would be obscene at that time to even *think* that you had to make the animal *SUFFER* for it to be sacred. The animal had to die to make it food for the holy meal; but suffer???

And no one, at that time, would have thought, Well, I'M the one that's supposed to die, so I'll use a goat or a sheep instead and let them die for me. It's just with time and Anselm's doctrine that it's all warped into something very different than the words would have been understood as 2000 years ago.

That was the speaker who said that the whole doctrine of atonement was a crime against divinity.

I tend to agree. I could see, however, how others would not. So it is.

But the whole class brought to light a lot of things I hadn't known about the historical context of the whole death of Jesus.

So that's the scrambled gist of what I got. *grin*

Comments

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I need to stop reading these posts of yours while I'm at work. The temptation to drop what I'm supposed to be working on in order to type out a lengthy response is nigh-overwhelming.

But not quite :) I'll be good and wait until I get home this evening...

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Hoorah! A promise of Ross thoughts! Hoorah!

[archangelbeth]

Well, I like the notes.

Like other ones, too, but am not keeping up well. *mutter*
*begs pathetically for another round-up post of your fics?*

[liralen.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

This is everything other than the newest Giving Grace fics. (http://liralen.livejournal.com/644269.html)

I should link those in, but they're... I'm probably going to wait until they're all posted.

I'm glad you like the notes! It's important stuff as I'm really changing how I think about what Christianity is about.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Oh! And if you lose the link... if you just go to my journal, now, the first entry is alway my All My Writing entry. I dated it out a couple decades... *grin*

[tagryn]

* Don't see the connection to Pilate...did I just miss it? Pilate's one of my favorite characters/historical personages in NT, so I was curious.

* From what I've read, the idea of exchanging "blood money" or gifts is still widely practiced in the Middle East...at least in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Coalition troops had an easier time once they figured out this part of local customs, which is meant to provide an alternative to two tribes having to fight it out over an infraction.

* I think the HTML in the cut on this page is a little messed up, its showing HTML coding...

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Pilate being the arm of Roman law in the area. I think that's the connection. That he really did the right thing for the Roman Empire on the whole, and did it thoughtfully and with the right goals for the Empire. It was interesting to see him that way rather than just the guy who washed his hands.

I didn't know about the blood money! That makes a lot of sense, and a good way to figure out how to not fight over an infraction.

It was messed up!! Thank you. I think it's fixed now. I missed a quote.

[tagryn]

Oh, I see it now; the HTML coding on the cut was disguising it.

I'm not sure I agree that Jesus was a threat to Roman rule, even in Judea. Pilate's recorded reaction in the Gospels seems to be to keep going back to the Pharasees and saying "Look, this is *your* problem, deal with it," which they keep throwing back to the Romans, since after the public demonstrations of Palm Sunday they were fearful of the popular support Jesus had. Pilate keeps trying to delay and to put things off, until finally he's faced with a crowd whipping itself into a riot, and decides to give them what they want.

The Romans certainly showed little compunction towards wiping out revolutionaries who showed themselves to be a threat to their government. Pilate's reaction - of relative mercy for the time: give Jesus a flogging for disturbing the peace and send him on his way - would seem to indicate that he saw little danger in letting Jesus go. The Romans had seen more than a few "Messiahs" come and go in their time as rulers of the area, John the Baptist most recently, and would have regarded it as a local matter, as long as open revolution against them wasn't called for. Even if Pilate believed that Jesus had declared himself "King of the Jews," it would have been more of a challenge to Herod and his ilk than to Caesar or Pilate.

Anyway, that's my take on it.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that would have been my take on it before the class, too.

I sum it up badly, perhaps. But, yeah, the Romans were very thorough in their wiping out of violent revolutionaries, they had a system and a plan for doing that on a frequent basis.

I think the gist of the argument was that, as with Martin Luther King or Ghandi, Jesus's non-violent resistance and all the lessons he was teaching and the ideas he was spreading was something that the system wasn't made to address easily. And like those other two, the system as it was saw him as a real threat and used the Pharasees and Jewish powers of the day as the cover for making sure that the threat was taken care of. Not a *power* threat, but an insidious idea threat, something that could unite all the power and oppressed financially as well as physically against the systems that were at that time.

Which is their own kind of conjecture, as I don't think Jesus' execution was even recorded in any manner in Roman records. *grin*

But both takes are entirely plausible so far as evidence is concerned.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Re: Pilate. A lot of the "sympathetic Pilate" material comes from John's gospel, and John's gospel seems to be expressing some intra-Jewish factional politics. The author had reason to paint the Jewish authorities in a negative light, which meant building Pilate up a bit.

Our other source for information on Pilate, the historian Josephus, is less flattering. In Josephus, Pilate comes across as a right bastard.

The Romans in general had no trouble executing rabble-rousers, but as a matter of practical politics when you're putting the axe to a highly popular figure, it helps if you can set your local puppet authority figures up to take the bulk of the blame for it. That's one of the things puppets are for, after all.

As for the Jewish authorities, they had a very reasonable and legitimate fear of what would happen if there was a popular rebellion against Rome. Exactly that thing happened in 70 CE, and it didn't turn out well for the Jews.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Right. That's when the Temple got razed, pretty much.

Mmm... yeah about the puppet figures.

And John's gospel was written right when the Christians needed more anti-Jewish statements to shore up their differences.

So I don't know if the *details* in the gospel are that accurate, as the people who wrote it had their own agenda as well.

And, yeah, Pilate being a right bastard, would fit into what was being said on the videos.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

(Posted in two parts because of long.)

OK, so first of all, I'm not really a fan of classical theories of atonement, and it can't be denied that it's been abused. That being said, I think you're being a little hard on poor Anselm.

What we're talking about here is soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. If we take as a starting point that we are saved by Christ's death and resurrection, the question of Christian soteriology is: what are we saved from, and how? Historically there have been three broad categories of ways this has been answered.

One sheaf of understandings is collectively known as Christus Victor; in these models, Christ has triumphed over the forces that oppress us -- sin, death, or the devil -- by his death and resurrection. Variations of Christus Victor were popular in the early centuries of the church.

The second main category of models is the one that you're responding to: atonement theories. Atonement is usually associated with Anselm of Canterbury, although Anselm's theory was more strictly known as "satisfaction." More on that later. In one form or another, atonement theories swiftly dominated the medieval church and are still going strong to this day.

The third group of models can be loosely named "transforming love." Peter Abelard, who knew something about the price of love -- and was a contemporary of Anselm -- is one of the names associated with this group. According to this view, Christ's sacrifice serves as the supreme example of selfless, redemptive love for the entire world. A lot of modern liberal theologians like to work in this space.

But back to Anselm... when Anselm was writing, a particular version of Christus Victor was popular that went something like this: because of sin, Satan owned the souls of humanity by right. (If this sounds familiar, it's the model that C. S. Lewis lifted for the White Witch's claim on Edmund's life in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.) God offered Satan the soul of Christ in exchange for the souls of everyone else, and Satan accepted; but because of the resurrection Satan was denied Christ's soul. Anselm hated this model, first of all because it suggested that Satan had rights that God had to respect, and secondly because it suggested that God was a cheat; so he set himself to find a better answer.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Hee! Actually, these all fit into what was said. That's interseting....

But I think, for what we're studying and where the speakers were coming from for the materials, that point of If we take as a starting point that we are saved by Christ's death and resurrection is what might even be under contention.

That's why it's so controversial, I think. I think the main point of the series is that we're not saved by his death and resurrection, but by his life and example. The death was an inevitable part of how he lived, and it was a sacred sacrifice; but it's not the source of our salvation.

But we're talking about people that believe that our duty is to bring the Kingdom of God here to Earth. That there is no heaven or afterlife... so we're kind of... radically Out There.

But... I really love the detail you're putting into this... this makes more sense to me, now, too!!

And, yeah, the speakers really attributed Anselm's thoughts on trying to make sense of Jesus's death within his context and without knowledge of the historical context, but with a full understanding of medeval thought.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I think the main point of the series is that we're not saved by his death and resurrection, but by his life and example.

My Christology prof said that, much like soteriology, there are sort of three fundamental ways people approach Christology. (Funny how it always seems to work out in threes, isn't it?) Some people look at Jesus primarily through the lens of the Incarnation; others look at him primarily through his life and ministry; and others primarily through the Paschal mystery, i.e., the death and resurrection.

You have plenty of company in your approach, by the way.

An interesting note on this topic: a few weeks back, I asked the kids in my Sunday school class to take a few minutes and outline their own gospel -- that is, if they had to put together what they considered the essential core of the evangelion, what would it be? Then I gave them the Incarnation/life & ministry/Paschal mystery model, and asked them to look back at their gospels with that in mind and see what approach they'd taken.

Almost unanimously, they'd focused on the death and resurrection of Jesus as being the core of their gospels. That's of course a very traditional view, but I find it fascinating that a bunch of thirteen-year-olds gravitated there.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

(Part two.)

Anselm's model of the universe was that of a medieval royal court, with God of course in the position of supreme king. Human sin, as Anselm saw it, was an offense against the honor of God -- again, a very medieval understanding -- and this was a problem because if the offense was allowed to stand it would throw the entire universe out of whack, and you'd get plagues and famines and who-knows-what. It's like the belief that if the king is wounded or impotent, then the land suffers. So satisfaction for the offense to God's honor was imperative to restore the proper order of the universe, but the offense was so large that it was beyond the power of all humanity to render that satisfaction. Therefore, God became human in the person of Jesus to submit to death in order to make that satisfaction on our behalf -- infinitely valuable because he was God, on our behalf because he was human.

After Anselm, other thinkers put a slightly different spin on Anselm's theory, especially Reformation figures like Calvin. Rather than a royal court with God as the king, the world became a legal court with God as judge; rather than an offense against God's honor, human sin became an offense against God's justice. Therefore, instead of rendering satisfaction for the honor of God, Christ accepted the penalty of sin in order to fulfill the justice of God. This is because both the justice and the mercy of God must be perfect or God, per impossible, would be less than God. God's justice is fulfilled by the death of Christ; God's mercy is fulfilled by taking the punishment in our place.

Thus the classical theory of penal substitutionary atonement.

Now, there's a lot that can be said on both sides of the atonement question. You can find many modern theologians who detest it; "divine child abuse" is a phrase that gets bruited about in those circles. Even though I'm not a fan of atonement, I think that's unfair. I think that atonement theories touch a deep instinct that something of great value -- such as reconciling God's creation with God -- must come at a great price. I'm not convinced that atonement is the best way of expressing that instinct, but it has spoken powerfully to many, many people for hundreds of years. That alone prevents me from rejecting it out of hand.

I've been trying to put together some of my own thoughts on soteriology in a coherent way, but so far I haven't managed it to my -- to coin a phrase -- satisfaction. When I do, I'll probably post a link in my journal.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

That's a much better statement of it all.

I especially like your details on Anselm and Calvin. The videos covered what you wrote about Anselm and his real need to figure out WHY Jesus had to die and how to reconcile the model that God couldn't forgive without a Price. I like your extra details, though, about how it fit into the whole belief of Kings being tied to their lands.

Neat.

But what I think I dislike is that if the reconciliation of God's creation needs a great price and it's already been paid by God then there is no responsibility remaining for Christians to pay that price as well. That credit card analogy... Daddy's already paid, so you're free to spend as you will.

I agree that the idea that reconciliation takes something big. And that is deep and abiding in how I work through stuff.

It's really interesting, though, to read all this and learn more about things.

Thank you, so very, very much, for giving your time and efforts to these!!!

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

But what I think I dislike is that if the reconciliation of God's creation needs a great price and it's already been paid by God then there is no responsibility remaining for Christians to pay that price as well. That credit card analogy... Daddy's already paid, so you're free to spend as you will.

I hear you. I think the classical atonement-theory answer would be to say that there was never any possibility of you paying that price yourself, any more than you personally can pay off the national debt -- it's simply too big. But because that gigantic debt has been paid for you, then it becomes possible for you to begin trying to pay off your personal debt and work towards a lifestyle of living within your means.

But the financial analogy is strained, and I'm not really an atonement theologian anyway :)

Here's another take: Christ's death and resurrection established a template for how we, the people of God's creation, can become more and better than we are. That template says that we grow by death and rebirth -- our old selves must die, if necessary we must crucify them until they die, and then we are raised as a truer, fuller version of ourselves. It's a template for metanoia, transformation so profound that it can only be spoken of in terms as radical as dying and being born. And that pattern runs all through creation and all through life, in little ways and sometimes in really big ways.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

OOooo... yeah. That last I can relate to in a big way. We had a lot of work through the baptism/confirmation as a means to that kind of resurrection, that transformation of self. I can... feel that, get some grasp of how important that commitment and that type of death is to the overall template. But, yeah, that's a part of what I do accept in an odd way. That turning to God from the former path, and that is the way the reconciliation can be made. Bah... trying to catch it in words hurts, sometimes.

Neat. Thank you for what you did give me.

Mmm... strained analogies. *grin*

Yeah, that was my understanding of the atonement-theory as well, and it still rubs me raw on different aspects.