In the comments section of my recent post, God is Love, Christ is Pain, a respectful and thoughtful atheist reader asked me why God had to sacrifice himself in order to forgive us. “If a god who is omnipotent wanted to forgive us,” he wrote, “couldn’t he just forgive us, and make it so we never forget? Why sacrifice himself to himself?”
My response was this: ”By dying as he did, Christ knew that he would be creating an image of that act that was so vivid, and so visceral, that it would forever last in people’s minds, hearts and imaginations. God couldn’t ‘just’ forgive us — without getting personally involved, without in every last possible sense of the phrase bringing it down to our level, without his very graphic mortal expiration on the cross — because he knew that wouldn’t stick. He knew that people tend to forget; that we naturally get so focused on their own lives that the reality of God — which is, after all, a fairly nebulous concept — tends to slip first from our minds, and then from their hearts. Jesus didn’t want that to happen. He wanted people to remember what he had done for them. So he made the means by which we are eternally forgiven as real for us as he possibly good — and that meant availing himself of the sheer, raw, dramatic magnitude of the crucifixion.
“Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself for his sake. He did it for ours. And so he made sure to do it in a manner that we’d never be able to forget. What Jesus did on the cross was compassionate, mercy, and love of the highest possible order. And we haven’t forgotten it yet.”
I now find that I want to add something to that answer, and figured I’d do it here. That something is this:
Jesus knew that people would always know that he knew that he was God. Time and again, he either flat-out says, or heavily implies that he is, in fact God; like, for instance, at John 10:30, when he says “I and the Father are one.” So there’s no question that Jesus knew he was God. How could God not know his own nature?
Now I’m no theologian — and I’m certainly not offering here anything having anything whatsoever to do with any Official Doctrine that I know of — but it seems to me that if Jesus knew he was God, and he knew we knew he knew he was God, then he also knew that a lot of us wouldn’t be able to help but think that, in a way we very definitely don’t, he had it made.
Jeus was God. It doesn’t get any better than that. And he knew he was God. He knew his story was going to end well. He knew that when his adventure here on earth was over, he was going back to heaven to take his place at the right hand of the Father. There’s no way that’s not a wonderful place to be.
None of us are quite that lucky, are we? We can say that we do, but the bottom line is that we don’t have anywhere near the assurance about our ultimate fate as Jesus had about his. It’s not possible that we could.
What Jesus wants, though, if for us to fully understand the complete depth of his identification with us. And that, I think, is why he let himself die on the cross in the horrible fashion that he did. Because he knew that we would always understand how terribly, terribly real that was. God or not, he got beaten. He knew that we would forever after that understand that he did become one of us. He did suffer the worst any of us could. That, too, is not in question.
And he didn’t even leave it at that. He actually gave us every last indication that when his final moment came — when his pain and suffering had reached its terrible crescendo — his identity with us was absolute and complete. We know that as he was dying, Jesus felt himself no more a God than we do. That, I think, is the sheer, knee-buckling power of his finally crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We know Jesus was God because he defied death. And we know he was mortal because of the way he died.
He did it. His point got across. It stuck. It’s as real now as the moment that our great hero, exhausted, breathed, “It is finished.”
(The follow-up post to this post — which I wrote in response to some of the very good questions raised in the lively comments section below — is Inquiring Atheists Want to Know: What, Exactly, Was the Sacrifice Jesus Made?)
Posted by Christopher McLaughlin on February 28, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Did you know:
The oldest books of the Christian Bible were written in Greek?
None of the characters or places in the Bible spoke Greek?
—More evidence of the truth of the literal word!
Bob are you seriously parsing the Bible? Get real.
Posted by Crudely Wrott on February 28, 2008 at 2:11 pm
You said,
“By dying as he did, Christ knew that he would be creating an image of that act that was so vivid, and so visceral, that it would forever last in people’s minds, hearts and imaginations.”
I say,
The image is not vivid or visceral to me. Also not to many others. My mind, heart and imagination are only momentarily moved by this thrice told tale. What really gets me motivated is when something new is learned. Or happens.
Thanks anyhow, I guess.
E Pluribus Unum
Posted by Andy Christensen on February 28, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Christopher, my understanding is that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, which was replaced as the colloquial language in Palestine by Aramaic in the centuries following the fall of the Northern Kingdom in the 8th century BC but continued to be the literary language of the Jews. The common dialect of Greek became an alternative language in areas conquered by Alexander the Great (4th cent. BC). The OT was translated into Greek in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC (the Septuagint or LXX). This Greek was the literary language for the New Testament writers. Christ spoke Aramaic but understood Greek. Paul knew all three of these languages (and Latin).
Posted by Christopher McLaughlin on February 28, 2008 at 3:17 pm
There is no evidence that Jesus or Paul could write. We have writings that may have been written as early as 70 CE that describe Jesus or Paul. We can’t even be sure that these person’s even existed. Any real person’s on whom these characters were based may have gone by other names, and they most certainly did not do any of the magical things that are attributed to them.
There is now a profundity of archeological evidence that Nazareth and Jerusalem were, from about 1 to 35 CE, not as the books of the bible describe. For instance, Nazareth was uninhabited for decades before and after this time.
Bible scholars tend to the idea that the authors of the Christian bible wrote it assuming that things were the same in the past as were in their present.
Any way you cut it, any book with so many factual errors (and you know there are many more) cannot be relied upon as the basis for any truth about the universe. It is a book in the same category as the Illiad or the Odyssey.
Posted by Andy Christensen on February 28, 2008 at 7:36 pm
When you say “evidence” are you excluding the Bible? Why should the Bible not be considered evidence? How could Jesus read scripture in the synagogue if He couldn’t write? If you don’t think Paul wrote all those books in the NT, who do you think did?
I’ve got to go to work now.
Posted by Morse on February 29, 2008 at 8:31 am
“When you say “evidence” are you excluding the Bible? Why should the Bible not be considered evidence?”
The Bible is certainly evidence, just not terrible good evidence.
Independent verification from sources that were written during the time that Jesus was supposed to have lived would do a wonderful job of supporting the Bible.
It would also help if we had good evidence for miracles taking place. That would give the claims made in the bible some standing.
Posted by Christopher McLaughlin on February 29, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I would refer to the First Council of Nicea for an introduction to the credibility of bible stories. From there you may want to learn about the various later translations from scribe to scribe.
The earliest Christian bible stories were oral stories that were not committed to writing until long after the events that the bible purports to tell. Unless of course you count some of the various original sources, such as the stories of Mithra or Horace, which tell the same stories (only the names are changed) and pre-date the alleged birth of Jesus. At it’s heart, Christianity is a well known plagiarism of many other religions.
The truth is out there, look it up…
Posted by Marcy Muser on February 29, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Christopher, it seems to me you are grasping at straws here. First, the earliest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament date back to 125 A.D. That means the manuscripts were produced less than 100 years after the events they describe, and less than 50 years after the original writings. In contrast, the earliest copies we have of works like the Odyssey and the Iliad are from over 3000 years after they were originally told, and scholars still consider them fairly reliable in terms of what the original stories said. When it comes to ancient texts, copies as close as 100 years after they were originally told can be presumed to be extremely close to the original texts.
As early as 170 A.D., there are copies of the New Testament that include basically all the books in our modern New Testament. In 300 A.D. (still before the First Council of Nicaea), Eusebius lists “the holy quaternion of the Gospels; following them the Acts of the Apostles… the epistles of Paul… the epistle of John… the epistle of Peter… After them is to be placed, if it really seem proper, the Apocalypse of John,” and calls them “the accepted writings.” The remainder of the modern New Testament he lists as “the disputed writings,” but he clearly differentiates those from “the rejected writings” and even more so from “the fictions of heretics.” By calling them “the accepted writings,” and “the disputed writings,” he makes it very clear that Christians in his day had a solid consensus on the vast majority of the New Testament books, including as primary among “the accepted writings” the four gospels, which contained all the stories of Jesus’ miracles.
Now, as for the First Council of Nicaea – I’m not quite sure what you mean by referring to this as “an introduction to the credibility of bible stories.” Held in 325 A.D., all 1800 bishops of the Christian church were invited to attend (though only about 300 did). The primary purpose was to address the Arian question as to whether Jesus was in fact equal to God or whether he was created by God (and thus inferior to Him). Of the 300 or so bishops present, there were 22 who supported Arius – until they heard the substance of his writings, at which point they realized he was in conflict with the established position of the church through the centuries from the very time of Jesus Himself.
I just don’t see how the presence of one person who misunderstood the biblical teaching, or the agreement of the church that he was the one who had misunderstood, has any impact on the credibility of Bible stories across the board.
As for the stories of Mithra and Horace, did it occur to you that if in fact there is a God, and there is an enemy of God such as the Bible describes, it is only natural that the enemy would attempt to counterfeit God’s real work?
Posted by born4battle on February 29, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Googling ‘the authenticity of the New Testament’ returns some interesting results.
Posted by Andy Christensen on February 29, 2008 at 11:52 pm
There are sources outside the Bible and close to the time of Jesus which refer to Jesus’ earthly life and crucifixion, and circumstances surrounding it, including Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus’ (AD 55-120) Annals and Jewish historian Josephus’ (AD 37/38-100+) Jewish Antiquities.
The resurrection is a miracle that is hard to dismiss. Only the Bible offers a satisfactory explanation for why Jesus’ tomb was empty after three days, as incredible as it may seem. This is just one example, I have many other reasons for my belief that the Word is Truth.
Most of the writers of the books of the OT claim to have witnessed the events they describe or they present the book as an authentic history taken from contemporary accounts. They appear to have been serious people, possessing historical information corroborated by other ancient sources which someone just making it up would not have known, who believed that what they were writing was true, and who expected it to be taken seriously. A dispassionate historian who approaches such a historical work as he would any other such work is, admittedly, going to take the supernatural events with a grain of salt. But he will also take everything else seriously unless he has other evidence which contradicts it. It’s true that the earliest surviving manuscript copies for the OT only go back to the 3rd cent. BC. But this does not prove that the books were not written until then. When it comes to a serious historical work, such as the Bible, the burden of evidence is born by those claiming that the work is not accurate or authentic or is otherwise not what it purports to be.
Posted by Morse on March 1, 2008 at 10:28 am
Andy,
Last I checked, those historians you mention only confirm the existence of Christians, not the historicity of Jesus. Nor do they confirm the miracles.
Posted by Andy Christensen on March 1, 2008 at 3:37 pm
This is from Annals 15.44 (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Tacitus/TacitusAnnals15.html); the context is the aftermath of the fire in Rome during Nero’s reign:
“But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.”
From Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3(http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/ant-18.htm):
“Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”
The parts of the above which I have italicized are those which Josh McDowell, in his Evidence for Christianity, says are “Christian additions” which “have been made to the text that are probably foreign to it…”
Nevertheless, even looking only at these two sources, the historicity of Jesus appears to be firmly established.
Here is at least one supernatural event to consider, on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion: “It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining.” (Luke 23:44-45, also mentioned in Matthew 27 and Mark 15) McDowell provides a couple of additional references to this event in Evidence for Christianity, pp. 173-174: (1) A history written by Thallus around AD 52 is cited by Julius Africanus around AD 221; it mentions darkness at the time of Jesus’ death. Phlegon, in a history called Chronicles, also says darkness came upon the earth at Jesus’ crucifixion. Both Thallus and Phlegon tried to provide a natural explanation for this event; both explained it as the result of a solar eclipse. Africanus disagreed with this explanation on the grounds that a solar eclipse could not take place at the time of the full moon, which was when Christ died (Chronography, 18.1).
Posted by Morse on March 1, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Andy,
Again. All those really do is show that people knew of Christians and knew the Christian stories. And again, I don’t see a single historian who wrote about Jesus while he was supposed to have been alive.
Now, I’m not trying to say that Jesus didn’t exist. Some would argue that he didn’t. I happen to think he probably did. But he almost certainly didn’t perform any real miracles, and he almost certainly wasn’t god.
Posted by Andy Christensen on March 1, 2008 at 8:37 pm
They both mention Jesus as an actual person. More importantly, Matthew, Peter and John knew Jesus personally during His earthly ministry and wrote about Him, albeit after His crucifixion. True, they were not historians and were close to their subject, but that by itself is not reason to dismiss their testimony.
As for secular sources remember it was only three years from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to His crucifixion, and His was one of many religious movements in the area at that time. So it’s not too surprising that it was generally overlooked by writers or that its significance was not appreciated.
People can obviously believe whatever they want about Jesus but this idea that we don’t really know anything about Him is, to me, mind boggling.
Posted by Jim on March 1, 2008 at 9:19 pm
“It’s interesting how you are so easily angered that I believe in God. I don’t expect you to share my beliefs, but I would appreciate it if you had the decency to respect them, just as I respect your right to believe there is no God.”
I’m late to this conversation, but Natanis perhaps your last sentence above is a mistake, yet it is confused and confusing. You complain that an atheist doesn’t respect your beliefs and seem to feel justified because you respect the atheist’s right to believe there is no god. Clearly, these are two different concepts. As a freethinker first, atheist by reasoning, I respect your right to believe there is a god, acknowledge it, and will defend it, but I can not respect the belief itself because I think it is mistaken and has led to great suffering throughout history.
Brent offered a comment that I came to independently, wording it this way. I do not find it at all reasonable that a multi-omni god would send himself to sacrifice himself to himself to correct the mistake he himself had made. And as others have aptly pointed out, it isn’t much of a sacrifice if you know that after 3 days you spend the rest of eternity in bliss. This latter also raises the interesting question of heaven, which has been described as a place of eternal joy and bliss. But the problem of evil and suffering on earth have been defended as necesary so we can understand joy. Seems contradictory, no?
Finally, I interpret the bible to say Jesus and the Father are one and the same. As an example, at the burning bush god says his name is “I Am.” At his trial Jesus says “Before Abraham, I Am.” To me this indicates that Jesus is just as responsible for the pervasive violence of the Old Testament as Yahweh (to say nothing of the violence of the new Testament). For all of jesus compassionate teachings, I don’t find either book presents a god worthy of worship.
None of the above is meant to be offensive to any one, just a straightforward expression.
Jim
Posted by Morse on March 1, 2008 at 11:27 pm
“They both mention Jesus as an actual person”
Incorrect. They both mention Jesus as someone who Christians believe to have been an actual person.
Posted by Bruce on March 2, 2008 at 7:41 am
John wrote:
Intellectualizing and religious faith go together like oil and water.
I appreciate your honesty.
Andy wrote:
A price had to be paid for sin. Either we would pay it or God would.
This doesn’t make sense. Why would God have to pay a price? He’s God, isn’t he? I thought he could do no wrong?
Posted by natanis on March 2, 2008 at 8:05 am
Hey Brent:)
I didn’t read your whole last entry (no time) but did get so far as to read the part about some people are born without the belief in God and you’re absolutely right! I am well aware of this fact and had forgotten that some people just don’t see it the same way as I do. My apologies.
Nat
Posted by Andy Christensen on March 2, 2008 at 9:51 am
God didn’t have to pay the price for sin because He was obligated to, but He did have to pay it if He wanted to save us, which He did.
God doesn’t make mistakes, we do. He didn’t have to correct a mistake He made, He wanted to correct the mistake we made. Still, we must want to be reconciled to Him. The reconciliation is on His terms, not ours. And they are very generous terms.
If we say that God was wrong to give us the choice to rebel or not, and wrong to require us to accept His peace terms, then what we are saying is that an all-powerful God can only do one of two things: 1) just create a bunch of creatures who are incapable of making moral choices and therefore incapable of being in a relationship with Him or having discussions like this one (or just not creating the universe to begin with) or 2) simply wipe us out as soon as we mess up, with no hope for redemption. We are saying that these are the only two choices He has; no other possibilities exist. That is a pretty big assumption, isn’t it? The Bible says God created beings He could have a real relationship with, and He provided the means for that relationship to be possible even after we messed up.
Posted by Bruce on March 2, 2008 at 10:27 am
God didn’t have to pay the price for sin because He was obligated to, but He did have to pay it if He wanted to save us, which He did.
So then God is not all-powerful if he was forced to something he didn’t want to do. Thanks for the explanation. I’d be interested to know what other things God doesn’t have control of as well.
And I think you are misrepresenting our views. We are not saying that God could only have done two things. It’s my understanding that God is all-powerful and thus can do whatever he wants. If this is the case, then obviously he can do anything, which means he didn’t need to do the whole Jesus thing because he could have handled it a variety of other ways as well. It is you who seem to be restricting God’s choices by saying that his only option was to kill Jesus.
Posted by Andy Christensen on March 2, 2008 at 7:52 pm
God cannot do anything contrary to His nature. He cannot let us sin without holding us accountable. That would be a violation of His righteous nature. It seems that some are saying that if God was good He would let our sin slide. But because God is good He cannot let our sin slide.
I realize that this is what Christians are saying, not what you are saying.
You may not realize that God is unable to do this, unable to simply sweep sin under the rug, to let sin go unpunished. So what I meant was that perhaps without realizing it, you require God to either not create us with moral choice or to create us then wipe us out. You may believe that God could just let it ride, but Christians deny that that is an option for God.
That does not mean that God is not all-powerful. He could have just not created us in the first place. He has done things, made decisions which have constrained His options in the future. For example, after giving the first humans a choice to obey or disobey, and after they disobeyed, He could not let them remain in the same relationship with Him; He banished Adam and Eve from Eden. He has voluntarily made commitments to us and given us a degree of freedom to interact with Him. But He has never at any time stopped being sovereign over everything. God’s sovereignty means He doesn’t ask anyone’s permission to do anything and no one can do anything without Him allowing it. It’s sort of like how a parent can give a child some freedom without relinquishing their authority or waiving their right to ever in the future require that child to do something. We do not all have to be puppets on a string for God to be sovereign and all-powerful.
The relationship between God’s sovereignty and our responsibility is one of those issues which God through His Word has given us some insight into but has withheld much that would allow us to fully understand it.
God was not forced to do anything. He wanted to save us, and He gave His Son so we could Be. Jesus is the Way, the mechanism, the mediator that God provided for our salvation.
Posted by Bruce on March 3, 2008 at 1:09 am
God was not forced to do anything.
Really??? Because after reading what you just wrote it sounds like God has a limited number of options:
“God cannot do anything contrary to His nature.”
“He cannot let us sin without holding us accountable.”
“because God is good He cannot let our sin slide.”
“You may not realize that God is unable to do this”
“He has done things, made decisions which have constrained His options in the future.”
You’re placing an awful lot of qualifiers and limitations on God’s sovereignty. Whoever made God must have had the same sorts of problems that God has with us.
Posted by Michael Card « Questions and Challenges on March 3, 2008 at 8:25 pm
[...] Reclaiming the Mind, and also by the latest posts and comments in Johnshoreland such as this and this. Lord willing, I might be able to find some time to write on this next [...]
Posted by mand3rd on August 6, 2008 at 11:56 pm
John Shore,
Are you sure you are biblically sound?
Posted by John Shore on August 7, 2008 at 4:22 am
Are you sure I’m supposed to care about what you think is “biblically sound”?
Posted by mand3rd on August 7, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Sir, it’s not what I think, but what the Bible says. If you are saying that you are a Christian, you should base your arguments on the Word of God. You may not be directly quoting verses from the Bible but your reasoning should not divert from it and not base it on your personal whims and rationality.
Posted by mehoman on December 14, 2008 at 7:27 pm
John, I see your motivation for writing this article in response to the atheist but I feel that you did not hit the nail on the head. I believe it is a weak argument in response to the atheist that Christ came so that we could remember. While that may have truth to it, there is a primary answer that Scripture tells us. Romans 3:25-26 speak of the justice of God in his righteousness as the reason why Christ had to come. If God were to simply just wave sin off and say to people, “You are forgiven”, then he would not be God. It is out of his nature to do so. The attribute of justice requires that he punish sin. The cross dealt with sin. Christians often get caught up in the thinking that God in his love looks over our sin when he forgives us positionally at justification. This is heresy. God did not wave over sin at all. Christ became sin for us on the cross and then God punished sin. It was not the mere mutilation of his physical sufferings that caused God to turn away but Scripture tells us that God had forsaken Christ in Mark 15:34. In Isaiah 53:10, we are told that it was God’s will to crush Christ. In Isaiah 53:11, we are told that God was pleased to see Christ’s soul in anguish. Notice that it says “soul” not body. The most grueling thing about the sufferings of Christ were his spiritual sufferings, not his physical sufferings. I fear that your article gave too much emphasis to his physical sufferings and it takes away from what God did to him spiritually. Christ became sin and God forsook him. The wrath that was meant for you and me for our sin was placed upon Christ. This act at the cross fulfills God’s attribute of love because he sent his son to die for the sin’s of mankind but it also fulfills God’s justice because he punished sin by his wrath. So the answer to the atheist is that God did it to appease his wrath. He is a consistent God and to not punish sin would mean that he is not God.
Another deep thought to consider is that the cross was God’s choice in an alternative substitutionary atonement. An absolute substitutionary atonement would be Christ at the judgement seat about to condemn sinners into the lake of fire and then he takes off his robes and throws himself into the lake of fire for an eternity! If he took our exact punishment for sin that is what he would have done. But the point is that God in his soverignty, chose the cross as an alternative substiutionary atonement in order that the wrath of God would be appeased. With this alternative atonement God places the condition of faith upon it. If we believe, we receive atonement. This understanding prevents us from understanding the atonement as either limited or universal. It simply means he did it so that regeneration would even be possible. If Christ threw himself into the lake of fire for an eternity for the sins of mankind, even Hitler would be in heaven. This is universalism and requires no response in faith. God ordained a moment in history for a substitutionary atonement which is known as the cross, where he maintained his attributes, maintained the trinity, and maintained the responsibility of man to respond to the gospel.