History and faith

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There’s an interesting post in The land of unlikeness on WWJD Christians:

At the end of spring term, I had my students sit for a conversational final, during which I had the appalling realization that the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ made absolutely no difference to them in terms of the way they view humanity or ethics. That is, when asked what difference Jesus makes, they all basically invoked WWJD (who was Jack Daniels?). After tearing out large chunks of hair in front of them because it had taken me until the end of the semester to pick up on this tragedy, I pulled myself together and started asking questions tailored specifically toward trying to understand how they could’ve adopted such a superficial perspective.The best I could gather is that even as (indeed because of his being) a historical figure, Christ bears no relationship to the WWJD Christian. His historicity places him in a group that has been sealed in a tomb of metaphysical irrelevance.

I was reminded of a group that had been invited to lead a Vacation Bible School in a church I was in, not realising that the invited group were extreme Calvinists. They denounced bumper stickers that said “Smile, God loves you” on the grounds that “God doesn’t love you, he’s very angry with you, because you are a sinner. He was so angry that he killed His Son.”

Our teenagers argued back at many points, and it stirred up a lot of theological questioning. But in discussions with them I came to see that the visiting group did not really believe in the resurrection of Christ. They acknowledged that it took place because they believed in the plenary inspiration and verbal inerrancy of Scripture, and so if the Bible said that Christ rose from the dead, then it must be true. So for them it was a fact, but not a significant fact. They seemed, in a strange inversion, to believe that the resurrection bore testimony to the Bible, rather than that the Bible bore testimony to the resurrection of Christ.

So in a way the “penal substitution” and “moral influence” theories of the atonement end up being two sides of the same coin — Anselm and Abelard, Calvin and Rashdall, end up leading people into a kind of a-historical moralism. As Christos Yannaras (1984:35) says:

Starting from such a concrete and existential concept of sin, the Orthodox tradition has refused to confine the whole of man’s relationship with God within a juridical, legal framework; it has refused to see sin as the individual transgression of a given impersonal code of behavior which simply produces psychological guilt. The God of the Church as known and proclaimed by Orthodox experience and tradition has never had anything to do with the God of the Roman juridical tradition, the God of Anselm and Abelard; He has never been thought of as a vengeful God who rules by fear, meting out punishments and torment for men.

Bibliography

Yannaras, Christos. 1984 The freedom of morality. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

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Filed under Christianity, religion, theology

Tags: atonement, Christianity, history, penal substitution, religion, theology, WWJD