We know Christ redeemed us, but what does that mean? The usual answer is: Christ paid for our sins on the cross including our original sin. A gruesome scene arises in the imagination of Christ being tormented by every sin I ever committed but most of all by the original sin we’re all said to bear because of the unfaithfulness of our ancestors Adam and Eve.
We clearly are in fundamentally in states of sin or — more generally — disorder. We clearly need to be rescued from this state if we are to be saved by any definition. But what is sin? We’ve mucked up the concept by reading Biblical stories in the light of a modern idea of sin as being very similar to culpable crime in the sense of modern jurisprudence but that is arguably a misinterpretation we inherited from some of the Fathers of Christianity. Some might think this strange but I believe that we can’t tackle the concept of sin until we settle some issues with redemption. We need to repent and do what we can to let God cleanse us of the effects of specific transgressions, but that only takes us to the foot of cross. A bridge into eternal life seems to be anchored there, but what is that bridge? It takes us from death into eternal life, but what does that really mean?
The concept of redemption might be our key to understanding salvation, but we have to first remember that the claim that our natural and moral sufferings must be due to some great primeval transgression — the rebellion of our ancestors Adam and Eve — was a human speculations of early Christian thinkers. This assumption might be due to the legalistic nature of just and admirable societies. Everyone could see that terrible things happened if punishment were not tied strictly to the crime. Surely, we’d not have to suffer disease and famine, war and poverty, unless we’d done something for which we were morally culpable. And the redemptive act of our Lord Jesus Christ becomes an act of atonement for specific crimes, including the Big One committed by our ancestors.
Now we know more about our ancestors. We know that those knuckle-draggers couldn’t have possibly committed any act of rebellion of the sorts which could shake the spiritual and metaphysical foundations of this world. A more plausible reading of the book of Genesis indicates its Hebraic authors were telling us that the awakening into a state of self-awareness brings both the culpability for our misdeeds and also the possibility of a struggle towards a better fate than life in a paradise which is such only to primitive men and women. Eden was not remotely like Heaven — Adam and Eve visited with God but didn’t live in a true or constant awareness of His Presence. They weren’t His companions.
We also know that most of those knuckle-draggers and all their human ancestors have endured some serious suffering if only the trauma of a normal birth. It would seem that God created a world in which disease and famine, war and poverty, are disturbingly natural. We are what we are, apes with weak and frail moral natures, and we are that by the will of the Creator.
The Lord Jesus Christ redeemed us by His death on the cross, but from what did He redeem us? Let’s start by asking: What does the Bible say about redemption? One entire book of the Old Testament, though short, is devoted to redemption — the book of Ruth. Remarkably, Ruth — though needing redemption — is one of the most admirable characters in the Bible. She’s not a criminal. She’s not a fallen woman in the way of the Israelites (and the Jews and Christians to follow) — see the prophet Hosea though many books of the Old Testament speak of various forms of idolatry as prostitution.
Ruth is a good woman who sacrifices much to take care of her mother-in-law after Ruth’s husband has died. The two women return to the Holy Land and Boaz, her husband’s relative, comes to admire her, redeeming her husband’s land — and also Ruth and her mother-in-law who is perhaps the first example of a human being saved by the actions of another. Those laws of Israel which led to this redemption are interesting but not of issue here, except to note that they had nothing to do with redeeming criminals. Ruth is redeemed from a bad situation which was not her responsibility. In her case, she was in that particular bad situation because of her moral courage, her faithfulness to her mother-in-law.
This opens the possibility that Christ redeemed us from a situation which isn’t our fault. This doesn’t mean I deny we’re sinners. I confess at least once a month and, while I sometimes struggle to come up with many specific sins — being a spiritual neophyte — I do have a strong sense of my character defects and general tendency towards various sinful behaviors and attitudes. While I feel a responsibility to do what I can to correct those problems, or rather — to respond properly as God corrects those problems, I don’t think those problems are what keep me from salvation. By this I mean that if I were to correct those problems, I would be some sort of baptized virtuous pagan, still headed towards the grave. Moreover — but this is an idea difficult to state in terms of language distorted to the needs of modern liberal individualism: we are responsible for who we are even though it was God who made us. I might well be trying to deal with the proper way to say that over the remaining years of my life.
This we know:
Christ redeemed us from death, a death which is our natural fate in the world created by God and created in this particular form.
Christ suffered as He did, freely and out of love for us, to offer us a bridge to eternal life, to help us escape the fate that He and His Father and Their Spirit had ordained for us when they created this particular world. We should remember that we are embedded in this world in the deepest possible way — we’re not characters just passing through this world the way an actor passes across a stage. We’re made of the stuff which is the stuff of this world and we’re shaped by our responses to this world, especially our responses to our fellow human beings. We’re also shaped by our responses more directly to God, but I’ll leave that aside in this entry.
There are many Christians, including Luther and his followers, who’ve had the intuition that we can’t do anything to save ourselves, but they missed the target completely in trying to understand why this is so. We are called to works by God and we should offer up works in gratitude just for our mortal lives, but we can’t earn salvation just because a righteous man is still a member of a unique species of ape — a mortal creature by his very nature. The point that Luther missed, but St. Augustine saw, is that it’s very unlikely but possible that an ordinary man could escape the chains of sin. It’s even more likely when we talk specifically about women with strong maternal instincts — there are many who’ve sacrificed themselves and poured out love in the way of the Virgin Mary herself. The Virgin Mary had a sort of guarantee of sinlessness but that came because she had a share of divine life from her very conception. Her immaculate conception was not a scouring of original sin as much as it was a gift of a purer and truer sort of life.
It isn’t pious to define Mary’s uniqueness in terms of her freedom from sin, it’s a sign that we’re not fully free of the errors of those labeled as white sepulchers by the Lord Jesus Christ. It was the indwelling of God that made Mary immaculate in human terms. But Mary’s unique path of salvation raises a big question. Why it was that the Son of God had to suffer so to offer us eternal life as His companions? Couldn’t God have made us suited to that greater life from our conception as He did to the Mother of God, Mary who bore Christ in her holy womb? It’s not likely that there is an explanation to be built as if a mathematical proof. Most attempts at explanations, even those by great theologians and saints, have sadly compromised God’s all-powerfulness. Some have proposed atonement theories which, in the manner of a higher paganism such as Deism, bind God to rules which are somehow greater than the Almighty. Some have proposed semi-manichaeistic theologies in which fallen angels are somehow powerful enough to take things away from God.
Read carefully this hard truth:
If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then the world was created for the purpose of Christ rescuing us by His suffering, death on the cross, and resurrection.
This is clearly a falsehood if God is all-powerful and all-knowing:
God created a world inhabited by men who were truly God-centered and filled with grace. Those men fell and then God had to scramble for a way to save them.
Moreover, God in His chosen role of Creator is bound only by truths which He created, that is, truths which He manifested in Creation. The Son of God was not bound to atone for our sins because of some transcendental rule of justice which binds even God.
Rather than starting from some abstract truths to explain Christ’s death on the cross, we should look for a true story, a morally ordered narrative. I think it’s hard for us to see just because we modern liberal creatures have so much trouble seeing the moral purposefulness which is inherent in the very telling of a story, especially that giant story which God is telling — His world. Rather than seeing the world as being morally-ordered, though that order is fully visible only to God, we tend to see chaos which can only be disciplined by the proper political policies and the proper forms of economic organization.
I’ve said elsewhere that we’re products of this world and wouldn’t have been us if God had chosen to make a better world with better creatures. I won’t argue this in detail here but think of it this way: we’re not just processors of experiences but rather are shaped by those particular experiences and the memories they leave in us. There’s more to it than this but the words are hard to find. I struggle to form a coherent concept in my mind, knowing from experience the error of those who believe a human language is transparent and capable of expressing all truths. The language we modern Christians inherited from our liberal ancestors isn’t adequate for speaking the truths of God nor those of God’s Creation. Our language isn’t adequate for theology or philosophy or science. Our language has been reshaped so that it keeps our minds from dealing with the truths of human nature and of our relationship to Creation and of our relationship to our Creator. Our language is appropriate for textbook learning and for justifying ourselves in court.
Our ideas of sin and redemption, even those of Christian theologians who read the Fathers, are shaped by the needs of our modern bureaucatic systems including our systems of jurisprudence. There’s much good in those systems, however much we deformed them under the delusion that our major goal is to be safe and comfortable. Still, though we can imagine those systems in their better forms, their concepts don’t match up with Biblical ideas of crime/sin or of redemption, nor do they allow us to readily move towards concepts which can handle the modern empirical knowledge about God’s Creation — genes and evolution and matter/energy which are frozen forms of some strange stuff which we can’t even yet describe mathematically.
So we must move on from a conceptual framework which is near collapse. This is one of the reasons for young people drifting away from Christianity. They don’t have well-formed minds because of their upbringing, but they have normal raw intelligence and — at some level — they often suspect they’re being taught untruths about some matters in their Christian instruction. Their suspicions are verified every time they see a TV documentary about the evolution of man and those suspicions are reinforced by the ideologically distorted versions of evolution, of science and mathematics and all other subjects, which they hear in the public-school classrooms. What happens in modern classrooms is little different from what happened in the classrooms of public schools in those Lutheran immigrant communities in O. E. Rolvaag’s classic novel, “Peder Victorius”, where thoughts of God were systematically replaced by thoughts of Abraham Lincoln. Now, the idea of a saint is being replaced by the image of a violent ape who’s incapable of controlling his sexual urges.
The problem is still worse than that in the sense that evolutionary theories free of ideological distortions are still in conflict with Christian speculations about human nature and even about God’s actions as Creator. The Catholic Church and several main-line Protestant churches endorse the teaching of evolution in the school systems but apparently neither the theologians nor the spiritual leaders realize that their views of human nature and of sin and of redemption are not consistent with evolution but are rather consistent with the anti-evolutionary teachings of the so-called Fundamentalists. This is easily seen by an intelligent reading of “The City of God” by St. Augustine of Hippo and also other similar works of the Fathers of the Church. Their knowledge of science and history was such that they interpreted the story of Adam and Eve in a way similar to the interpretation of the modern-day Biblical Literalists. Those interpretations were plausible in terms of their empirical knowledge and also their general outlook which was biased greatly towards interpreting the Creator in terms of human systems of justice. Whatever the merits of the great moral theologians of recent centuries, few have seen the need to update the anthropological theories which underly Christian moral teachings.
Those teachings are no longer plausible because our view of God the Creator doesn’t allow us to restrict Him to that role of a human-style Judge. Our empirical knowledge has not only shown us a vast universe, without a Heaven above the moon or a Hell below our feet, it has also forced us to see time and space as creatiures — an insight also found in the letters of St. Paul. We have expanded our views of the nature of infinity and eternity, yet theology and philosophy students are taught ‘proofs’ of God’s existence which depend upon invalid understandings of infinity which the Fathers took from the pre-Christian Greeks.
The bones found in the sands of Africa are not to be feared and they’re not to be denied. They’re empirical facts from God’s world. They’re evidence of past chapters of the story which the Almighty is telling.
And so I return to my claim that our sins, while important, are a lesser matter than our mortality. We were first shaped by God as members of a certain species of ape, shaped in such a way that we could conjecture the existence of a Creator and even hear His word. This is all within the context of our ability to hold the memories and develop the concepts which allow us to tell true stories, morally-ordered narratives. The Son of God was able to take on our nature and come to offer us His friendship. This is to say that, as a true man, He was able to perceive His environments in such a way that He could imagine a plausible version of the story His Father is telling — the world. And the Son suffered, died, and rose from the grave to conquer death for our sakes, but also for the sake of God. The instant before His conception in the holy womb of Mary, the Son understood the story fully — including the need for His to learn discipline as a man, to suffer, die, and rise from the grave. At some time during His development as a human being, He was able to see and understand the story which is the world well enough that His mission began.
The rest of us can develop to a state where we can also see and understand a plausible version of God’s story, but our story is far from complete and we come to realize we are God onlyif we are insane. In fact, our version of that story should include an awareness of our own mortality, of the giftedness and contingent nature of our existence even from one second to the next. Death is the fate of all mortal animals which have evolved on earth. Modern physics teaches us that it is nearly certain that some sort of death is the fate of the universe as a whole. It might be a great implosion or it might be a whimper in which all fades away to a state of absolute quiet. But we’re mortal and so is our universe. Creaturely existence is a gift from one second to the next.
Our Creator made us this way. And the Father sent the Son to suffer, die, and rise from the grave to save those who belong to the Son. And He knew this outside of time and space. Given God’s omniscience and all-powerfulness, it’s not wrong to say that He created the universe in order that our Lord Jesus Christ might die on the cross. We didn’t become mortal because of the sins of the rebellious ancestors of mankind. We aren’t capable of surprising God, aren’t capable of forcing Him to change His plans. Jesus redeemed us from the death which He, along with His Father and their Spirit, had given us in first giving us mortal life.