The problem with the soteriology of penal substitutionary atonement is that it glorifies punishment. Punishment is not just glorified, it become necessary. Because punishment is both necessary and right, when one does bad thing, one must be punished and this punishment is both right and therefore good.
The inverse must also be true. If something bad or unfair happens, it must be a punishment and if one is being punished, it must be for a reason.
This is a soteriology I reject with my whole mind; but it is the soteriology of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. After two years in seminary, I was kicked out of a small group at the church I was attending because I questioned this understanding of Christ's death on the cross and it's devaluation of the human person.
Specifically, the church I was attending was offering a course, "Christ-Life Solutions," to its congregants. I had several issues the course material, beginning with the poor grammar in the workbooks which made the readings damn near impossible to get through.
My issues extended beyond that, however, to the theology of the material itself. The overarching theme of the course was that we, as sinful human beings, are filthy, awful, irredeemable creatures without value or worth, completely unlovable as we are. We are deserving of nothing but God's righteous anger and punishment. But Jesus, who was perfect and sinless and deserving of nothing but God's love, was crucified to satisfy God's wrath against our ultimately sinful nature, and if we only accept Jesus and his sacrifice, then God will look on us, wearing the cloak of Jesus's blood, and finally we will find "His" favor and be spared the punishment we so rightly deserve.
Pardon my language, but this is FUCKED! The final week before I was kicked out of the small group the reading was one in which the author compared humans to a cooler.
Specifically, he wrote that he had once gone on a business trip. At the end of the trip, he had been gifted with rather a large quantity of high quality steaks. He loaded the steaks into a cooler full of ice, in the trunk of his car, and headed home.
He parked his car in the garage, unloaded his luggage from the backseat, and went about his weekend, in the southern United States, in the middle of August. Monday morning as he readied himself for work, he remembered the cooler of meat in the trunk of his car.
Opening the trunk, the stench of rotten meat hit him. He pulled out the cooler, carried it to the edge of his lawn opened it. The steaks had completely liquefied and there was a soup of rotten liquefied meat and maggots in the cooler. He dumped the content and cleaned and sanitized the cooler, and left it int he sun, hoping it would be deodorized over the course of the day. Returning home from work that nigh, the stench still stained the walls of the cooler. It was a total loss.
THIS, the author declared, is what humans, in their sinful state, are like to God. We reek of the stench of death and rot and it is so embedded in our nature NOTHING can ever make us clean. Except Jesus, if only we accept his sacrifice on the cross.
In the middle of the small group discussion that week as people talked about how meaningful this anecdote was to them, I seethed with anger. What kind of loving God would want people to value themselves so little? Wen it was my turn to speak, I said, "I'm sorry! But I'm calling bullshit on ALL of this! The Bible declares that God created humankind and saw that it was very good. I refuse to believe that anything can so change or alter the work of God as to make it completely other than what God declared it to be. If God called us good, and sin can make us so other than what God declared, how can God be the omnipotent deity we claim? If we really can, by an act of disobedience, utterly corrupt what God has called not just 'good' but 'very good,' how all-powerful can such a God be?"
I was asked to leave the group and not return.
I have actively rejected this soteriology. I have replaced it with a vastly different, more holistic and ultimately loving soteriology which I might fill out at some point. However, the remnants of my early Christian education remain. And, like a bad habit, kicked and replaced with a new, healthier habit, in times of stress, it is the default to which I return on an emotional level, even though intellectually I reject it completely.
Last week, I wrote about the panic I experienced when Doc sighed. It goes back to a terrible time in my life when the Singer died, and despite the unfairness of that loss and the unbearable pain, my early exposure to penal substitutionary atonement popped up and I felt that his death was punishment for some terrible sin I had committed and if only I could figure it out and repent, maybe, just maybe things could be made right.
So, even though I reject all of this, Doc's sigh, having brought it all back for a moment, and still aching from the loss, I knew deep down in the pit of my stomach where horrendously fucked up theologies that damage people still reside, I knew I am still deserving of punishment.
And so I was tempted to ask Doc to beat me. With his belt. I did not want it in a fun, sexy, exciting way. I did not want it in a way that would press me in ways that go beyond my comfort zone in a BDSM context. I wanted a brutality that was abusive and punishing and which would, ultimately, destroy my belief that I have anything good or valuable within me and which would confirm absolutely the fears first instilled in me by penal substitutionary atonement - that I am, in my essence, unworthy, without value, unlovable, and ultimately deserving only of abusive punishment and even death as payment for the sin of even existing.
Some part of me simply wanted to be destroyed to rectify the impossible to rectify sin of being.
This is one problem with penal substitutionary atonement. There are others, including the othering of in-group/out-group, the saved and unsaved, the one-size-fits-all theology that narrowly defines God's love as only for the few because they believe the "right" things.
It is rooted, I believe, in the mistaken understanding of sin as disobedience to God's expectation of perfect obedience to any number of mysterious demands.
Recently, I've been reading Marcus Borg's The Heart of Christianity. I agree with much of what Borg writes concerning the central tenets, the heart, of the Christian faith. I agree with Borg's treatment of the Christ event in the person of Jesus. I agree with Borg's discussion of the reasons for Jesus's crucifixion.
However, I believe Borg's treatment of sin is lacking in one profound way. Borg offers a number of common and historical understandings of sin, including: disobedience, breaking the rules, being bad, hubris, estrangement, unfaithfulness, or idolatry. In all of these, "forgiveness" become the response to sin.1
Borg, however, offers biblically based alternatives to our single understanding(s) of sin and instead calls out: blindness, bondage, exile, closed hearts, hunger and thirst, lost-ness. The resolution/response to these is: sight, liberation, return, open hearts, food and drink, found-ness.2
What Borg fails to mention, however, is the actual meaning of the word "sin." Sin is an archery term that literally means "to miss the mark." As such, the correlate response to sin would be "correction." This understanding of "sin" as an all-encompassing term addresses all biblical notions. Blindness is corrected by sight. Bondage is corrected by liberation. Exile is corrected by home-coming. Closed hearts are corrected by opening. Hunger and thirst are corrected by food and drink. Being lost is corrected by being found.
Salvation, then, Borg writes, "In its broadest sense... means becoming whole and healed. The language of 'wholeness' suggests movement beyond fragmentation, and the language of 'healing' suggests being healed of the wounds of existence."3
Or, in preserving the term "sin" and radicalizing our understanding of what that means, the appropriate way to correlate sin and salvation - missing the mark and correction - is clearly seen. Salvation in a context of healing and wholeness is the correction of what went wrong, why we "missed the mark" in the first place. This entire process, then, can be understood as the work of reconciliation - the restoration of all things to their rightful state, the work God is doing in partnership with us, through the person of Jesus as experienced in the Christ event in which God is reconciling the whole of creation to God-self. And the WHOLE of creation does not leave room to exclude some based on their rejection of a narrowly defined orthodoxy.
I reject any theology based on in-group/out-group, exclusivity, or narrowly defined and often vague but no less stringently enforced rules.
This weekend, I explained the soteriology of penal substitutionary atonement to Doc. "That's fucked up," Doc said. Yes. Yes, it is!
I brought this up in the context of sharing my thoughts with Doc concerning the previous weekend. I explained that I was not asking him to beat me brutally, nor do I ever imagine doing so, no do I imagine he'd ever be comfortable with such a thing. "Mostly because if I did, I think the effect would be to validate that theology I've worked so hard to reject and replace," I explained. I like when Doc spanks me; I like the idea of him beating me with a belt or a rubber hose (thank you vanilla friends for thinking of me!).
I enjoy the idea of Doc hurting me, so long as he does not harm me. And anything that validates punishment or penal substitutionary atonement can only do harm. I am grateful that I can recognize that truth and that Doc, having little church experience and no training, can declare with even greater certitude than I, that penal substitutionary atone is FUCKED up. God bless that sexy, sexy man.
*****
1. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 166.
2. Ibid., 168.
3. Ibid., 175.
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