Ted Grimsrud—March 15, 2024

Christianity has focused a great deal of its theology on the death of Jesus and its purported cosmic significance. This emphasis has not had an altogether positive result. To mention just one of the problematic outcomes, viewing Jesus’s death as the necessary sacrifice that somehow enables God to offer salvation to sinful human beings has placed an act of terrible violence at the heart of Christian faith—thereby greatly weakening the peaceable impact of Jesus’s life and teaching. When some sort of punitive “justice” that needs to be “satisfied” by Jesus’s violent death is seen to be part of the essence of God’s character, it greatly increases the likelihood that Christians will also see themselves and their institutions as agents of such “justice”—that is, as agents of divinely approved violence. The long legacy in the “Christian” West of the state as the wielder of such violence in warfare and in criminal justice bears witness to the dark legacy of theological interpretations of Jesus’s death.

I suspect that part of the appeal for seeing Jesus’s death as salvific for Christian theology has been a large emotional investment in the notion of God being victorious and in control. If Jesus is God Incarnate and the Savior, how can it make sense that he would die such an ignominious death? How can it make sense that God would face such a defeat? How can it be that God’s control could be breached by such a horrendous and blasphemous act as executing the Christ? One way to understand traditional Christian atonement theology that makes Jesus’s death into such an efficacious act is to recognize it as a way to turn defeat into victory, to turn weakness into overwhelming power. But what if such a move actually has led to many problematic consequences—turning a peaceable story on its head and making it into a story that has underwritten a great deal of violence? And what if such a move actually misconstrues the story of Jesus’s death itself—and in doing so misses the main points of that story that would indeed have major peacemaking consequences? Perhaps it is no surprise that the truly peaceable and transformative message we find in Jesus’s life and teaching has been so seldom evident in the long history of Christianity these past 2,000 years.

Continue reading “The death of Jesus and the weakness of God [Peace and the Bible #14]” →