God as Law vs. God as Love

Here is a perfect example of the error I've been pondering and writing about for several days now, in which the most fundamental characterization of God is thought to be Law, when in reality, the Law proceeds from, and is a function of, Love. Love is the most basic truth about God.

Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraph of the blog post I've just found:

In the beginning, when all was formless and void, God created all things giving it substance and form, establishing order out of chaos. He did so through the Law. By the Law is meant the eternal, unchangeable Law of God, which is the revelation of His will, the standard of perfection, and the mold and fashion out of which all creatures were formed and conformed, so as they would be happy. God is holy, and His Law is holy. His Law is the image of Himself; it is the word of Life and Truth declaring that of which He is the perfect pattern. ‘Be ye holy,’ He says, ‘for I am holy.’ ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’

Can you see how unbiblical this actually is? What does the Scripture say? That God created everything not through the Law, but by His Word. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and without Him was nothing made that was made." And that Word was Christ, Who took flesh and came among us.

In what image were we made? The image of the Law? No, the image of the Holy Trinity, the God who is Love. He Himself, not His Law, is "the mold and fashion out of which all creatures were formed and conformed."

Is the Law our standard of perfection? No, for Christians that Standard is a Person, Jesus Christ.

Christ is also the perfect "image of Himself"; Christ "is the word of Life and Truth declaring that of which He is the perfect pattern." He is the revelation of God.

And so forth. Read the whole blog entry to see further implications of this error.

It makes all the difference in the world.

Why Did Jesus Die? (14) To Despoil and Transfigure Hades

There are two seemingly conflicting images Orthodoxy uses most of all to describe Christ’s rescue of us from death: the destruction of Hades and the transforming of Hades. We use these images together, each complementing the other, each expressing the same reality. While these ways of speaking may seem contradictory, the deeper, underlying reality is that every evil, including Hades, is destroyed precisely by being transformed into good, as when a person’s ignorance is destroyed when he acquires knowledge, or his foolishness is destroyed when he acquires wisdom.

Jesus Died to Despoil Hades

On the one hand, we see Christ as the Avenger. He is taking His revenge upon death and the devil, and He has done it, paradoxically, by dying. He enters death’s dark domain to destroy it from inside. Christ died to go down into Hades, which could not contain Him, and burst it open, and release death’s captives. This began and was revealed the moment He died:

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:50-53.)

He pillaged Hades; He plundered the grave. He despoiled satan of his subjects and his chief weapon, death, by which he had kept us in slavery all our lives. “Having disarmed principalities and powers [names for ranks of angels; in this case, fallen angels, agents of satan], He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.” (Colossians 2:15) (Note: death is the devil's weapon, not God's!) Here is Christ, not the victim of God’s Wrath, but the one pouring it out, with His blood.

"...the gate-keepers of Hades trembled at beholding Me clothed with a robe spattered with revenge; for I being God, have vanquished my enemies with the Cross, and I will rise again..." ( Greek Orthodox Services, p. 386.)

Death ... not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also lets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour... Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, He came out as conqueror by resurrecting His temple like a beginning of our hope … and giving us along with it other blessings as well. (St. Cyril of Alexandria, 5th Festive Letter 1, 29-40 (SC 732, 284), quoted in Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent of Christ into Hades in Eastern and Western Theological Traditions, A lecture delivered at St Mary’s Cathedral, Minneapolis, USA, on 5 November 2002.)

"Truly, Hades was pierced and destroyed by the divine fire when it received in its heart him who was pierced in his side with a spear for the salvation of us who sing: Blessed are You, O delivering God!" (Greek Orthodox Services, p. 384.)

"For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil" (I John 3:8) Remembering that God’s justice is eschatological, that is, to be consummated only at the end of time, we know that ‘By descending into Hades, Christ did not destroy the devil as a personal, living creature,’ but for now has made the ultimate victory sure; He has ‘abolished the power of the devil’, that is, deprived the devil of authority and power stolen by him from God.” (Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, op. cit.)

Jesus Died to Transfigure Hades

On the other hand, we Orthodox say Christ died to tread that dark path before us, so that now, when we walk it, we find it full of His Light, full of His Love, full of His Life, full of Himself. His presence makes everything heaven for those who love Him, for to them, He is heaven. His presence destroys death as we had known it, by transforming it into the gateway to new life. The very next two verses of the hymn cited above say:

The tomb [another synonym for Hades] is happy, having become Divine when it received within it the Treasure of life, the Creator, as one who slumbers for the salvation of us who sing: Blessed are You, O delivering God!

The life of all was willing to lie in a grave, in accordance with the law of the dead, making it appear as the fountain of the Resurrection, for the salvation of us who sing: Blessed are you, O delivering God! (Hymn for Great Friday, Greek Orthodox Services, p. 384.)

Sometimes we manage to combine both metaphors in a single verse of a single hymn:

When You, Immortal life, came down to Death, you killed Hades through the dazzling brightness of Your Godhead; and when you raised up the dead from the abyss, all the powers of heaven cried aloud; Christ, our God, Giver of Live, Glory to You! (Greek Orthodox Services, p. 373.)

Jesus died to destroy Hades as hell, transforming it into the forecourt of heaven.

Miscellaneous Bits

Demetrios came home from the hospital this evening. He is resting comfortably in bed. He hopes to go back to work on Tuesday.

St. Francis is the best hospital, by far, we've ever experienced. The staff was obviously trying to emulate the attitude of their patron, Francis of Assisi - and succeeding. One nurse told us the staff had gotten their customer service training from - get this! - the Ritz Carlton hotel people! This hospital is operated much like a hotel, too, complete with room service. And the nurses and techs do NOT come in and bother you all the time; they let you rest and sleep.

The physical plant is elegant, too, beautiful. All except the chapel. It is UGLY. Go figure.

Some woman came around this morning to offer Demetrios communion. Catholic woman. Apparently they had some interesting conversation.

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Today I got a message that somebody had listed me as a friend in Plaxo Pulse, with which I am hugely unfamiliar. So I responded, to discover a whole page of people I was supposed to "confirm." Some of them I don't even know who they are, but I confirmed anyway. So if you've gotten one of those connection thingies from me, and you aren't sure I know who you are, how about please kindly introducing yourself? Thanks! Or else tell me I've made a mistake.

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Four parts left in the "Why Did Jesus Die?" series. Apparently I'm publishing 'em faster than most people can read 'em, so I'll gladly slow down and space the remaining installments out some. Thanks to those of you who have encouraged me by letting me know you read them!

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I can't even begin to express to you how much that Gallatin podcast has meant to me. It answers the riddle that has been plaguing and baffling me for YEARS, which is, why do Westerners interpret Holy Scripture, and especially the Crucifixion, in such punitive terms? And why do they so doggedly stick to that interpretation when another is offered them, and why would they even want to? And what's with this notion that punishment cures anything or helps anything?

Now I think I get it. And what a tremendous sense of relief there is in being able to explain what before had so vexed my mind!

This punitive stuff comes from a failure to understand that, although indeed God is absolutely perfect morally, yet true and perfect morality is not defined by any "code" or set of dos and don'ts. Instead, morality is ultimately defined by Love, is dependent upon Love, is whatever Love calls for.

When so-called "righteousness" is seen as and end in itself, not considered as a function of Love, and thought to be the most basic characterization of God, then suddenly, suffering makes some sense. Because then sin upsets the moral scheme of things. The sinner must be made to suffer, because that is felt to restore the balance in the moral scheme. Put plainly, it just doesn't feel right for a sinner not to have to suffer (unless, of course, the sinner is myself)! At least, in that context it doesn't; Love is a different context. That's why the Prodigal Son's elder brother was so upset. That's why the disciples wanted to call down fire from heaven to burn up the Samaritan village that would not receive them.

"But He turned and rebuked them, and said, 'You do not know what manner of spirit you are of.'"(Luke 9:55)

Why Did Jesus Die? (13) To Preach to the Dead

When Christ, upon the Cross, cried out, “It is finished!” He was referring to His sufferings and struggles. He was not yet finished, He was far from finished, working His once-for-all, saving, mighty deeds. Now He descended to Hades to reveal Himself with power to those whom satan was holding captive there and to bring His own Light to them and by it to lead them out of the darkness.

TIME OUT!

Hades? What is that supposed to be?

Hades is a term borrowed from Greek mythology, used by the Orthodox as a synonym for death. It is a way of speaking about death, which is otherwise very difficult to speak of at all, in which we make spatial imagery out of what is more literally a condition.

Everyone dies, or in this way of speaking, goes to Hades, even the righteous. This does not necessarily involve torment, but before Christ entered Hades, the souls there, separated from (and grieving for) their bodies, lived a sort of shadowy existence, gradually wasting away, heading toward annihilation.

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly were disobedient... (1 Peter 3:18-19)

For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God. (1 Peter 4: 6)

St. Maximos the Confessor teaches us that these verses mean Christ, when He descended into Hades, gave a chance to everyone there, those who had never heard of Him and even those who had rejected God during their lifetimes and were chastised during their lifetimes accordingly (“judged in the flesh”). (St. John Maximos, Questions-Answers to Thalassius 7. )

St. John of Damascus, similarly, taught that Christ revealed Himself in Hades to those who had been ignorant of Him in their lifetimes.

The soul [of Christ] when it is deified descended into Hades, in order that, just as the Sun of Righteousness rose for those upon the earth, so likewise He might bring light to those who sit under the earth in darkness and the shadow of death: in order that just as he brought the message of peace to those upon the earth, and of release to the prisoners, and of sight to the blind, and became to those who believed the Author of everlasting salvation and to those who did not believe, a denunciation of their unbelief, so He might become the same to those in Hades: That every knee should bow to Him, of things in heaven, and things in earth and things under the earth. And thus after He had freed those who has been bound for ages, straightway He rose again from the dead, showing us the way of resurrection. (St. John of Damascus, The Exact Exposition of Orthodox Faith 3, 29.)

The Orthodox do not permit themselves to speculate upon how many of the residents of what had previously been Hades were persuaded, repented, and chose Christ. The point we make is that all were given the chance, and that all henceforth were made (willingly or unwillingly) to live in a place Christ now and forever fills. Death is no longer what it once was! It is no longer separation from God (even if some might wish it were), and it is no longer permanent separation from our bodies, either.

We do not know if every one followed Christ when He rose from hell. Nor do we know if every one will follow Him to the eschato¬logical Heavenly Kingdom when He will become ‘all in all’. But we do know that since the descent of Christ into Hades the way to resurrection has been opened for ‘all flesh’, salvation has been granted to every human being, and the gates of paradise have been opened for all those who wish to enter through them. This is the faith of the Early Church inherited from the first generation of Christians and cherished by Orthodox Tradition. This is the never-extinguished hope of all those who believe in Christ Who once and for all conquered death, destroyed hell and granted resurrection to the entire human race.
(Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, lecture, Christ the Conqueror of Hell)

There are those in the Church (of whom I am one) who believe Christ still preaches to those who die, and in this way, people who during their lifetimes had never heard of Him or to whom He had been misrepresented have their chance truly to know Him and embrace Him. The Church permits such a pious belief, without necessarily endorsing it.

Hades truly ruled the race of man, but not forever, for You, O mighty One, when You were placed in the grave, demolished the locks of death with the palm of Your hand, O Element of Life, proclaiming to those sitting yonder from the ages a true salvation, having become, O Savior, the First-Born of the dead. (Greek Orthodox Services, p. 381.)

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A Gall Bladder...

...is what Demetrios is minus one of tonight, and he doesn't miss it one bit. He says he feels sweetly drowsy and relaxed for the first time in days and is glad he isn't suffering the bloating he was expecting. (They have to pump your belly full of gas to do the procedure.)

I told him after supper last night we ought to go to the emergency room, but he was very tired, from two nights of being kept awake by pain, and didn't want to. By bedtime last night, he said he was feeling much better.

That lasted until about 2 a.m. My darling dear waited until 6:00 to awaken me! We were in the ER by 6:45. By 10:00 they had confirmed his self-diagnosis and had put him in a room. The surgery began at 7:00 this evening and lasted forever because, the surgeon said, "the gall bladder was completely rotten" and crammed full of gallstones, not a space left in it. It's a wonder he managed to get it all out through the laparoscope and didn't have to do open surgery.

Demetrios fell asleep as I was leaving, saying, "Everybody's so wonderful. Don't know how to thank them..."

Thank you, God!

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Don't Complain About What?

Earlier, I wrote that if we could only learn to stop complaining, even inwardly, then in the process we would have succeeded in becoming saints. And I still say that's true.

It just won't work in my case. Why not? Because I really don't, myself, have anything to stop complaining about! When it comes to bearing afflictions with a saintly attitude, I just have no material to work with. (External material, I mean. There's always the inner mess with which to struggle.) Millions of people would fall on their knees in tears, blessing God every moment, to have it as good as I have in this life.

And if I ever think I have a complaint, I'm just being a grossly deluded, spoiled brat. Period.

And if I stop complaining, I shall simply have stopped being quite so absurd and assinine. It takes considerably more than that to be a saint.

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Yet More Joy!

Grace and Aaron are planning, come February, to increase the size of our family. Grace is my sister Wendy's second daughter.

Okay, well, there is a downside to this. It will put Wendy neck-and-neck with me in the Grandmother Stakes, with four grandchildren apiece. Are my own children really going to allow this to happen?

Another joy: it's only about two more weeks now before Wendy, out in California, moves back in with her husband, Roy, in Arkansas, after some six years apart. They are going on a retreat together first, during which they hope to renew their vows, and then they are driving to Arkansas together.

Go for it, Grace! Go for it, Wendy and Roy!

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But How Does God Want to be Worshipped?

Pr. Hall has a good commentary about church music on his blog.

It's not about pleasing us, moving us, making us feel good. Nothing wrong with feeling good, but that isn't what it's all about. We aren't supposed to go to church to serve ourselves. We are supposed to go there to offer prayers and praises and selves and each other to Him. If He is pleased, our goal is met.

And in the Old Testament, God is incredibly particular about how He wants to be worshipped, spelling it out in great detail. Christian worship (well, Orthodox worship, at any rate; I cannot speak for the non-Orthodox) is a Christianized continuation of that worship, which He Himself specified. It's all about pleasing Him, worshipping Him not only in our minds, not only in emotions, but above all on His terms, "in spirit and in truth."

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God of Perfect Love = God of Perfect Justice

God's absolutely perfect morality stems from and is the expression of His perfect love.

Listening again to Matthew Gallatin's podcasts, I thought this one in particular (#6 in the series, "Sola Scriptura and the Philosophical Church") was so important that I took the time this morning to transcribe the whole podcast for you.

Last time, I characterized the fundamental difference between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity like this:

For the Christian East, God is most essentially a God of absolute, self-denying love. For the Christian West, God is most essentially a God of absolute order, most especially absolute moral order. This understanding of God in the West is a legacy it inherits from Augustine of Hippo, who began to develop this picture of God as he began to marry platonic philosophy with Christian theology. That legacy has been carried on by men who stand as his successors, like St. Anselm or even St. Thomas Aquinas. Even the Reformers carry on this same, platonically influenced view of God in their various theologies. When I closed, I said that Christians in the various Western traditions are by and large very unaware of how this view of God impacts their faith. They don’t know how significantly this view alters the apostolic understanding of who God is and what He is like and the role that we human beings play in His life. As I say, this goes back to Augustine, and let’s investigate that a little bit.

First of all, Augustine’s God is not one who is by nature selfless and other-directed. Instead, he is very much like the “Ultimate Reality” of the Greeks, like the already- mentioned ”Good” of Plato or Plotinus’ “One” or even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”. The God the Christian West inherits from Augustine is one who ultimately is focused upon Himself, upon His own perfection. And everything He does is motivated by His need to preserve the absolute order that His perfect nature demands. This understanding of God permeates Western Christian life. I found it exemplified on an Evangelical Christian website that I visited just earlier today. In his teaching about the nature of God, this particular minister proclaimed, “Above all things, God is jealous of his own holiness.” Now if you’re paying attention here, you’ll notice that I’m equating holiness with perfect order here. But in truth, that is exactly how the West has come to understand God's holiness. What makes God holy is the impeccable moral order of His being, his absolute moral perfection.

As we shall see shortly, this view of holiness has powerful implications for the Christian West’s basic understanding of salvation and of the believer’s relationship with God. And I think that again our investigation here of these implications may be helped by first having a look at the contrasting Eastern Christian understanding of divine holiness.

Now certainly, Eastern Christians know that God is absolutely morally perfect. That is an aspect of His being not just that we understand, but it is an aspect of His being that we experience in our ascetic and sacramental embracing of God. We often literally tremble in the presence of His perfection. But our experience also teaches us that His moral perfection flows from His self-denying, self-forgetting, other-directed love. It is this love which is the Source of His perfect moral virtue, of His truth, His absolute goodness, His ultimate righteousness.

Jesus makes it clear in the Gospels that perfect morality flows from perfect selfless love. As He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart all your soul and all your mind This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:37-40) You see, the Lord tells us plainly here that one who loves fulfills all of God’s moral commandments. Why? Because such a person is like God – completely selfless. I mean, if I love God with all of my heart and all of my soul, and with my entire mind, there is not a smidgeon of me left to focus on myself. I become wholly other-directed, just like my morally perfect Creator. The selfish desires of my own will, which are the source of all my moral imperfections, disappear. The fulfillment of the second command, to love my neighbor as myself, naturally follows.

When I became Orthodox, I discovered that I had spent much of my life misinterpreting this commandment of Christ. Like so many others, I’d taken Jesus to mean that I should love my neighbor with the same fervor and to the same degree that I loved myself — and I love myself a lot. But what Jesus is really saying is that I should be so selfless that I live only for my neighbor. In my neighbor’s presence, I recognize only one existence: his or hers. All my concerns are for him. I keep none for myself. When I empty myself of me, I become my neighbor. God commands us to love Him and our neighbor like this because this is the way He loves us. We are everything to Him.

Certainly, we are creatures who have dishonored Him by our sinfulness. We have willfully chosen separation from Him and willfully embraced the death that comes as a result and we can never measure up to God’s flawless morality. But that doesn’t make God stand aloof from us in disdain. He does not retreat from us, hotly displeased by the way we have marred His perfect universe. Instead, he responds just like the Good Samaritan, who brings healing love to a wounded Jew, a Jew, who just like the rest of his people, hates Samaritans, as we can read in Luke 10:25-37. By the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, the Holy Trinity selflessly reaches out to heal us of our great disease of death and sin, restoring us to intimate communion with the godhead and with each other.

I’ve heard Western critics of Orthodoxy say that Orthodox Christians do not recognize the holiness of God. They say that in our Orthodox focus on God’s love we forget about God’s justice. But that’s not the case. It’s just that, for us, God’s holiness IS His selfless love – which is ultimately concerned with healing and redeeming us. As for justice, well, justice is a devotion to setting matters right, restoring things to their proper state and their proper relationship. In our Eastern perspective when God unselfishly empties Himself for our salvation, that’s just what He is doing: He makes it possible for us to be right again, to return to the mystical union with God that we were created to experience. Of course, the reason Western critics accuse the Orthodox of not paying enough attention to God’s holiness and justice is that they have a much different view of both, holiness and justice, an outlook that comes from Augustine and his successors. The West interprets God’s holiness as his unapproachable moral perfection, and what’s more, God is first and foremost concerned about preserving His moral perfection and protecting it from all infringements. As for justice, well, the Western understanding of that also comes from the Greek philosophers. To the Western mind, God's chief goal is not the healing of broken human creatures. Instead, it is the re-establishment of the moral order which He conferred upon the creation in the beginning, an order which Adam and Eve messed up.

Let me once again make the contrast plain and clear before we continue. In the Christian East we find a God of perfectly selfless love whose supreme objective is to heal humankind and restore it to intimacy with him. In the West, we discover a self-concerned God who is above all things protective of His own righteousness. When it comes to humanity, His main concern is righting the wrong human beings have done to Him. True, even in this Western view, God’s saving of His own honor results in the salvation of at least some human beings. But their salvation is secondary to healing the wound they have given God. This understanding of God and the nature of salvation is evident in the teaching of Augustine, and we’ll begin to examine that next time.

Why Did Jesus Die? (12) To be our Immanuel

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were [our] faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3)

“Immanuel,” in Hebrew, means “God with us.” The Lord was not only with us, but was and is one of us. Born as one of us, He lived as one of us, accepting even hunger and thirst, fatigue and temptation. Now He also accepts torture and death, both to experience and to display complete solidarity with the human race. In fact, He accepts even to die as a criminal, between two real criminals.

He even, as a Man, shares the feeling sinners have of being lost and alone, which they interpret as being godforsaken. Quoting Psalm 22:1, He cries, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34)

We may rightly interpret this in several ways, for instance:

* that Jesus was praying the first words of the Psalm (which ultimately becomes a Psalm of victory)

* and/or that He was reminding the onlookers of that prophetic Psalm

* and/or that, humanly speaking, He was referring to God’s having let this happen

* and/or that He was sharing sinners’ experience of feeling lost and godforsaken

What we must not do, however, is suppose God the Father could ever in truth reject God the Son. That same Psalm 22, the one that begins with, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" later on (v. 24) tells us explicitly that from the Father's point of view, this did not actually happen.

For He has not despised nor abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted;
Nor has He hidden His face from Him;
But when He cried to Him, He heard.

When He cried to God (not later), God heard Him. Nor is it even possible that the Father should have abandoned the Son in the sense of turning away from Him in anger or disgust and separating Himself, for Father and Son share a single essence. Moreover they share a single, divine will, meaning if the Father had turned away from Him, the Son would also have had to turn away from Himself. Nor could the Father and the Son together be abandoning the human Christ only, for in Christ, humanity and divinity are united inseparably and without partition. Whatever is done to Christ is done to the Person, the Bearer of both natures.

So from God the Father’s point of view this forsaking did not happen. God, in His infinite love - infinite! knowing no limits - never forsakes anyone. He is sometimes said to give sinners up to uncleanness, as in Romans 1:24, or to give them over to reprobate minds, Romans 1:28; but in none of these cases is God abandoning anyone. He is allowing them to go their own way, abandoning Him. St. Paul also writes that God “delivered Him [Christ] up for us all…” (Romans 8:32) but again, this means He allowed wicked men to crucify Him. It emphatically does not mean, cannot mean, God somehow withdrew from His own, incarnate Self!

In fact, paradoxically, the fact that God never abandons anyone is the very point of Jesus’ cry -- for if, in His humanity, God shares even this, the existential loneliness of sinners, worse than death, then it is certain that God is with us forever in all things. Even in this, we are never abandoned. Christ died to share our human lot to the last, bitter dregs, and to redeem it. “Whatever is not assumed,” say the Fathers, “is not healed.” But Christ shares every single thing it means for us to be fallen human beings, except blame. (Hebrews 4:15)

He is with us always and in every way, as our beloved, our hope, our joy and consolation, in all sorrows, in all trials, even in death, even in our feelings of godforsakenness. In life and in death and beyond, He is our Immanuel, our God-with-us.

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me,"
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.
(Psalm 139:7-12)

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Why Did Jesus Die? (11) Jesus Didn’t Have to Die to be our Scapegoat

Ever wondered where the term “scapegoat” came from? No? Well, please allow me to tell you anyway.

In the Old Testament, we read of Aaron, Moses’ brother, being commanded to

take the two goats and present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle…Then Aaron shall cast lots for the two goats: one lot for the LORD and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat on which the LORD's lot fell, and offer it as a sin offering. But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make atonement upon it, and to let it go as the scapegoat into the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:7-10)

Then Aaron was to sacrifice the goat upon which the Lord’s lot had fallen, according to specific instructions that occupy the next ten verses of this story, and after that was done,

Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, concerning all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and shall send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a suitable man. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to an uninhabited land; and he shall release the goat in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:21-22)

As a model for Penal Substitutionary Atonement, the scapegoat has its pros and cons.

One of the cons is that this passage, running through verse 26, is the only mention of the scapegoat in the whole Bible (that I have found, at least). The scapegoat simply isn't a very big deal. He provides a minor type of Christ, in that he carries away sins. But there is no major prefiguring going on here, no big billing given the scapegoat, as you would expect if it were to be a central way of thinking about Christ. Nobody says, "Behold, the Goat of God, that takes away the sins of the world!" even though the scapegoat did. This is very little here to make into Pen-Sub Atonement.

Here indeed is a clear instance, unique as far as I know, of symbolic transfer of guilt to the goat. (Does anyone know whether the meaning of the priest laying his hand on the head of sin offerings is anywhere specified?) But the scapegoat wasn’t ritually slaughtered for that guilt! His flesh was not offered up on the altar and he gave no blood. He was released alive. Granted the goat’s life-expectancy in the desert was short; still, the point obviously wasn’t whether he lived or died. The point was to get rid of the nation’s sins by taking them off into never-never-land (as it were).

Death has to be combated by death, specifically by the death of the God-Man, who alone can destroy it; but guilt is something God simply takes away. He is the Scapegoat. He is the King in the parable, who forgave his servant’s great debt. He is the Owner of the vineyard, who paid his late-coming workers more than their bargain called for; in fact, there wasn't actually any bargain at all! He only said, "You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right you will receive." (Matthew 20:7) He is the Father of the Prodigal Son, who required no payback or punishment, but immediately ordered up a feast and said, “Let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!'

And they began to be merry. (Luke 15:23-24)

Shall we?

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God, East and West

Matthew Gallatin has an outstanding series of podcasts with the not always applicable title of "Sola Scriptura And Philosophical Christianity." Part Six of this series is especially excellent. In it, Gallatin, as an Orthodox believer and a philospher, gives his own "diagnosis" of how the Western view of God diverged from the Eastern one. He says it goes back to St. Augustine's thinking about God in overly Platonic terms. For Plato, the "One" (God) was "the Good". What was this ultimate, perfect Good? It was perfect order, specifically perfect moral order. In St. Augustine's marriage of Plato to Christ, God creates mankind because man, like rocks or rivers, is needed to fill a specific niche in His perfect order of things. When man sins, he upsets the perfect moral order which Plato conceives as the ultimate Good. God's concern, in response, is to restore the perfection of His creation. That indeed involves saving some men, but their salvation is secondary to the main objective of healing the wound inflicted upon God by our having messed up His creation.

All this, of course, is very different from the Orthodox understanding, in which the ultimate Good, the perfect holiness, is perfect love. For us, the God of perfect, selfless, self-denying, self-forgetting Love created us because of this overflowing love, so that we could participate in the very life of the Holy Trinity. In Orthodoxy, when man sins, God's immediate objective becomes to restore man. He never turns away from us; never seeks anything for Himself.

Matthew Gallatin fleshes all this out very clearly and succintly, far better than I am describing it, supplying the appropriate Scriptural quotations, too.

Please, please, take 10-12 minutes to listen to it. It's terribly important!

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At our Dinner Club the Other Night

Nick: I suppose I'm a hypocrite, same as many other people...

Daphne: No, you're not!

Nick: Well, thank you, but --"

Daphne: Gimme a break! Nick, you have to be religious before you can be a hypocrite!

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Why Did Jesus Die? (10) Substitutionary Themes in the Atonement

A certain theme of substitution runs throughout all the ways of thinking about the Cross. That is, since Christ has died for us, we no longer have to die. "I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus said. “He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die”. (John 11:25-26) He means souls and bodies that have become separated will one day be reunited, having first been perfected and glorified. He also means, by saying “shall never die,” that neither our souls nor our bodies will ever be separated from God.

He died to rescue us from death, as a fireman might die to rescue a child from a burning house. This is how we read such verses as:

4 He bears our sins, and is pained for us: yet we accounted him to be in trouble, and in suffering, and in affliction. 5 But he was wounded on account of our sins, and was bruised because of our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and by his bruises we were healed. 6 All we as sheep have gone astray; every one has gone astray in his way; and the Lord gave him up for our sins. 7 And he, because of his affliction, opens not his mouth: he was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth. 8 In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken away from the earth: because of the iniquities of my people he was led to death. (Isaiah 53:4-8, Septuagint)

Another place in the Bible where we can discern an element of substitution – or at least role reversal – is 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Christ remained righteous at all times, else we could not become “the righteousness of God in Him.” That is why St. Paul is careful to add, “who knew no sin.” We do not imagine that a person, especially a divine person, could literally morph into a thing, especially into sin. Rather, St. Paul means that in Jesus’ dying, sin died. He and sin died together on the Cross. (See Part 04 of this series.) St. Peter means the same thing when he writes of Him “who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness--by whose stripes you were healed.” (I Peter 2:24)

If we are circumspect about it (circumspection being necessitated by heterodox teaching), we can also describe this same thing, the necessity of dying to destroy death, metaphorically and say Christ bore the penalty of our sin upon the Cross. We do not mean the Father was literally punishing the world through the Son; for this is not the kind of unmerciful God we worship.

We do mean that what happened, like what happened to a sacrificial animal, had the same effect as if it had been for punishment; that, together with the fact that we indeed deserved punishment, is why the metaphor is apt. God allowed His sinless One to suffer and die exactly as a sinner would; in fact, the same way a criminal in those days did die. (Indeed, He was crucified with two other men who really were criminals.) This, although we were the ones who deserved to suffer and die, while He did not.

Christ assumed our nature; He voluntarily submitted to all the consequences of sin. He took on Himself the responsibility for our error, while remaining a stranger to sin, in order to resolve the tragedy of human liberty and in order to bridge the gulf between God and man by leading him into the heart of His person where there is no room for any division or interior conflict. (Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church, p. 153)

Another verse whose irony gives us at least a hint of substitution is, "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree')." (Galatians 3:13, quoting Deuteronomy 21:23)

The curses here are prescribed by the Law of Moses. Again, they do not have to do with God the Father blaming His all-righteous Son for our sins. St John Chrysostom explains:

In reality, the people were subject to another curse, which says, ‘Cursed is every one that continues not in the things that are written in the book of the Law.’” (Deut. xxvii. 26.) To this curse, I say, people were subject, for no man had continued in, or was a keeper of, the whole Law; but Christ exchanged this curse for the other, ‘Cursed is every one that hangs on a tree.’ … It was like an innocent man’s undertaking to die for another sentenced to death, and so rescuing him from punishment. For Christ took upon Him not the curse of transgression, but the other curse, in order to remove that of others. (St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Galatians, Chapter 3, emphasis mine.)

God the Father, then, is not transferring our curse onto Christ. Christ is taking upon Himself a different curse. He subjects Himself to one curse in the course of freeing us from another.

It was indeed “like an innocent man’s undertaking to die for another sentenced to death, and so rescuing him from punishment” – one readily sees the simile – but this is a simile, a figure of speech, for besides such a substitution being legally unacceptable, punishment is not in question where there is forgiveness. To forgive is to rescind the punishment, to overrule the penalty, to cancel the debt, to give up ones claim against another. Forgiveness and punishment are opposites and mutually exclusive. Where punishment is exacted (except in the case of chastisement), there is no forgiveness. And no loving either, but only self-serving, which is something in which our God never indulges. "God is love," and "love seeketh not her own."

Let the Pharisees grumble if they think it unfair, or let the elder brother of the Prodigal Son howl for “justice”; the unkindness is theirs. (And so is the error regarding the nature of justice.) As for us, let us simply fall before Christ’s cross in tears of overwhelming, grateful, joyous repentance.

“For scarcely in behalf of a just man does one die; yet perhaps one might bring himself to die for a good man. But God demonstrates His love towards us, because when we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-9)

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St. Cyril of Alexandria on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

What then is the object of the parable? Let us examine the occasion which led to it; for so we shall learn the truth. The blessed Luke therefore had himself said a little before of Christ the Saviour of us all, "And all the publicans and sinners drew near unto Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and Scribes murmured saying, This man receives sinners and eats " with them." As therefore the Pharisees and Scribes made this outcry at His gentleness and love to man, and wickedly and impiously blamed Him for receiving and teaching men whose lives were impure, Christ very necessarily set before them the present parable, to show them clearly this very thing, that the God of all requires even him who is thoroughly steadfast, and firm, and who knows how to live holily, and has attained to the highest praise for sobriety of conduct, to be earnest in following His will, so that when any are called unto repentance, even if they be men highly blameable, he must rejoice rather, and not give way to an unloving vexation on their account.

For we also sometimes experience something of this sort. For some there are who live a perfectly honourable and consistent life, practising every kind of virtuous action, and abstaining from every thing disapproved by the law of God, and crowning themselves with perfect praises in the sight of God and of men: while another is perhaps weak and trodden down, and humbled unto every kind of wickedness, guilty of base deeds, loving impurity, given to covetousness, and stained with all evil. And yet such a one often in old age turns unto God, and asks the forgiveness of his former offences: he prays for mercy, and putting away from him his readiness to fall into sin, sets his affection on virtuous deeds. Or even perhaps when about to close his mortal life, he is admitted to divine baptism, and puts away his offences, God being merciful unto him. And perhaps sometimes persons are indignant at this, and even say, 'This man, who has been guilty of such and such actions, and has spoken such and such words, has not paid unto the judge the retribution of his conduct, but has been counted worthy of a grace thus noble and admirable: he has been inscribed among the sons of God, and honoured with the glory of the saints.' Such complaints men sometimes give utterance too from an empty narrowness of mind, not conforming to the purpose of the universal Father. For He greatly rejoices when He sees those who were lost obtaining salvation, and raises them up again to that which they were in the beginning, giving them the dress of freedom, and adorning them with the chief robe, and putting a ring upon their hand, even the orderly behaviour which is pleasing to God and suitable to the free.

It is our duty, therefore, to conform ourselves to that which God wills: for He heals those who are sick; He raises those who are fallen; He gives a helping hand to those who have stumbled; He brings back him who has wandered; He forms anew unto a praiseworthy and blameless life those who were wallowing in the mire of sin; He seeks those who were lost; He raises as from the dead those who had suffered the spiritual death. Let us also rejoice: let us, in company with the holy angels, praise Him as being good, and loving unto men; as gentle, and not remembering evil. For if such is our state of mind, Christ will receive us, by Whom and with Whom, to God the Father be praise and dominion with the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever, Amen.

St. Cyril of Alexander, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, Sermon CVII.

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Some people still cannot accept the thought of God not punishing all sinners, even repentant ones, at least vicariously in Christ (and again, directly, in hell, if they do not repent; apparently the torment and death Christ bore are still not sufficient in those cases). They are the ones who will tell you, "But this parable isn't the whole story." No, but the Father's disposition toward sinners is the main point of the story.

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