Why Jesus Had to Die: Part I

Was God angry with the world or was it all in the name of love?

It’s holy week — which, for Christians the world over, is seven days to meditate on the life, work and death of Jesus, a poor Palestinian itinerant teacher. As faith and tradition go, you can’t get to Easter and resurrection madness without going first through the torturous madness of death on a cross.

I spoke a little about this in my Palm Sunday sermon this week — the cross was some seriously horrific business.

The Romans crucified more than Jesus and those two criminals that hung next to him on Golgotha — a scene we will lean into this Holy week. The Romans crucified thousands upon thousands of slaves, pirates, and bandits — or terrorists as we would call them today. The cross was first reserved only for slaves, or supplicium servile as Seneca described. It was then extended to the lowest classes, or humiliores — the humble folk as they were known then.

Ordinary citizens in Rome? They were hardly ever sentenced to death, let alone on a cross.

Death on a cross was public, shameful and took between a couple hours and a couple days. The condemned would die from heart failure, asphyxiation, dehydration or even sepsis, as the infection from the nails and elements would settle in.

And so many of those who died on two pieces of wood with three nails or rope, were completely innocent, just like Jesus.

When Jesus was a young boy, word spread throughout the villages and towns in Galilee that the Empire had crucified 2,000 so-called zealots who had taken over the city of Sepphoris just a few miles up the road.

Young boys growing up in such times could never not know the fear and torture of the Roman cross.

Crucifixion was the most shameful way to die. The instrument of the most powerful to remind the powerless.

The fact remains: folks that try to follow Jesus, or simply admire his message for a life well lived, have been looking to a poor, first-century executed so-perceived terrorist. The question is: why?

Why Jesus died: some say to satisfy the wrath of an angry God

When I was an undergraduate student at The Ohio State University, I hung out with a few different campus ministry groups — particularly of the evangelical variety. And it turns out, evangelicals like to talk about nothing more than what happened with Jesus on that fateful cross.

I was a leader in the Navigators, which was founded in the 1930s by a young, rather uneducated fundamentalist lumberyard worker named Dawson Trotman. By all accounts “Daws” was a person of sincere faith, seeking to make the world a better place — he actually died saving a young woman who was drowning in an upstate New York lake. His work helped spur on the greater evangelical awakening of the 1940s-1960s, inspiring more notable leaders as Billy Graham and a lesser known Bill Bright, who went on to establish Campus Crusade for Christ (or Cru as they are now re-branded), one of the largest and most influential evangelical para-church ministry groups the world over.

What Trotman and the Navigators have gifted the world is a rather particular image of Jesus’ death on the cross — namely “the Bridge illustration.”

As the Navigators describe, “There is only one way to find peace with God, and the Bible says it is through Jesus Christ. We were stranded without any way of getting back to our Creator, and we needed a way to pay for our sins and be clean again so that we could be welcomed back to be with Him. Romans 5:8 says, ‘But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’”

There are nearly a dozen cherry-picked Bible verses (written by really different people, in very different contexts, over the span of a very very real 300–500 years).

Essentially, in order to have peace with God — or the good life — folks are required to have some honest inventory of one’s life, and a sort of confession, or prayer rooted in a specific belief: “that Jesus Christ died for me on the cross and rose from the grave, conquering death and sin.” This sort of reflection then requires a special sort of prayer.

They suggest that the prayer can go something like this:

“Dear Jesus,
I know that I am a sinner and that I need You to forgive me. I know that You died a painful death so that my sins could be washed clean. Thank you. I want to make You the Lord of my life, and I will trust and follow You. Everything I have is Yours now.
In Your name, Lord.
Amen.”

This theory of the atonement — the Christian doctrine that addressed humanity’s reconciliation with God through the death of Jesus on the cross — was not invented by a well-intentioned, charismatic American evangelist.

It was popularized in the year 1098 — yes, essentially one thousand years after the death of Jesus on a Roman cross.

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), a Benedictine Catholic theologian who was the Archbishop of Canterbury (back when England was Catholic), wrote how the wrath of an angry God with human creation was satisfied by sending his only son to die a horrific death on a Roman crucifix.

In 1098, Anselm wrote Cur Deus Homo (“Why God was a Man”) which explicitly outlined that Jesus death was a ransom paid to the devil — to assuage the anger of a heavenly father. Basically, women and men since the very beginning (ie. the Garden of Eden) had been sinning terribly — bringing about disharmony and injustice into the cosmos and offending God. Or as Jesus called him, Dad.

And Jesus’ dad was angry as hell.

So, in order to get our heavenly father to cool out, Jesus went to the cross on our behalf. And died. For our sins.

Now, coming up through the Navigators, this essentially meant sins like cheating on that Physics exam, having your friend’s cousin buy that 24 pack of Natty Light and consuming it all with 2–3 of your housemates on a Thursday night, and having premarital sex. Left out were sins of omission like doing nothing when the black kid got beat up in the gym locker room, not helping the homeless mom with two kids on the corner of High Street and saying that foreign wars over oil had nothing to do with you or me.

You get the point: the private sins were the ones that royally ticked off the Judge in the skies. Corporate, social “sins” like racism and war were never really factored in. The sins that mattered in the heavenly court were the personal ones.

As J. Denny Weaver has pointed out in his excellent book The Nonviolent Atonement, Anselm’s theology of the atonement sounded very penal:

Anselm’s satisfaction atonement image likely originated as a reflection of the penitential system and the sacrament of private penance that was developing throughout the medieval era, and also reflected the image of the feudal lord who gave protection to his vassals but also exacted penalties for offenses against his honor.

Anselm and 20th century American evangelicals have popularized this idea that God is very angry with the world, and the only way to get Him to be at peace with us is to have one son named Jesus pay the sins once and for all as a sort of all-time cosmic sacrifice. Your brother-in-law or the preacher at the Bible church up the road might describe this as “penal substitutionary atonement.”

The Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world — something Jesus’ cousin John the Baptizer said either in all seriousness or jest or something in-between.

Where Is That Written: God’s wrath is hard to find

The funny thing is, the early Christ-followers would look at Brother Anselm over their ale or bad wine and say, “Dude, what gives?”

Anselm’s view of the atonement, which unfortunately is the dominant view of too-many followers, seekers and doubters of Jesus, was not shared by the earliest Christians. In fact, they would think it was downright abusvive.

Or as my friend Steve Chalke, the founder of Oasis, says, it is essentially cosmic child abuse.

The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse — a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offense he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement: “God is love”. If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil.

For six hundred years the early church mothers and fathers — the ones burdened with carrying the radical message of Jesus forward — believed that Jesus death was not the result of an angry God, but a Divine presence of absolute loving sacrifice.

There is an alternative to “penal substitutionary atonement” out there called Christus Victor, written by a Swedish Lutheran bishop named Gustaf Aulen (right about the time Dawson Trottman was getting Navigators up an running) which argues that Jesus died because of God’s love for the world.

That Jesus’ death on an instrument of State sanctioned torture was actually the Divine confronting the scurrilous ways of an Empire hell-bent on conquering, acquisition of land and people, and victory at all costs.

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. — Mark 10:45

Mark, the earliest Gospel (one of the four official semi-biographic testimonies about Jesus), talks about this one who came into the world simply to bind the strong-man — the devil / the powers that be — and show us a better way, which was love and not wrath.

But we’ll get at that tomorrow.

Adam Phillips is the founder of Christ Church: Portland (Ore.), an open, active & inclusive community.