‘Five: Minority Opinions’
Part 5 of our reading through ‘Did God Kill Jesus’ by Tony Jones
Read Part 5 ‘Minority Opinions’ of ‘Did God Kill Jesus’. Read the short reflection below, then comment about either Part 5 or the reflection!
There are more than one theory of the atonement. Even though the Payment Model may be most familiar to you, there are several really good alternatives, each of which have strengths and weaknesses.
The Victory Model
Which includes Ransom Captive and Christ the Victor, this is the model most familiar to the the spiritual warfare set or those who read C.S. Lewis. Here, it is all good versus evil, God vs. Satan. Jesus takes on the mantle of spiritual warrior for the good guys to defeat the forces of evil.
Unlike the payment model, this one doesn’t paint God in a way that makes him look abusive to Jesus. Instead, he comes off looking like a hero. Albeit a violent one.
Of course, it does restrict God in much the same way as the Payment Model. This time, not only is God not in charge of everything, Satan and the forces of evil are raised to near co-equal status.
The Magnet Model
An attractive alternative argued by Peter Abelard, the Magnet Model is not centered in the logic of Platonic philosophy, but in devotion to the creative spirit of poetry. And unlike the warrior or bloody sacrifice in previous models, this one is fixated on the love of God who draws humanity to God’s self.
As a model, it’s strengths are the previous models’ weaknesses: it is the antidote to the visions of God as warrior or passive aggressive manipulator and embraces free will and the logical manifestation of what would make “God is Love” into an honest statement.
It’s weakness is that it doesn’t deal with the philosophical problems the other two solve.
The Divinity Model
Tony Jones then highlights the Eastern approach is completely different. It, like the Magnet Model, starts from a place of God is Love, but does so with a major difference. In the Genesis story, it isn’t that we got original sin handed down to us by our Dad’s sperm, we lost our pure divinity.
Here, the place of Jesus is to help us restore the divine place with God lost from the Garden and deal with our biggest problem: death. It therefore doesn’t deal with sin, or the question of Jesus’s relationship to us, as it better maintains Jesus’s relationship with God (and the Holy Spirit).
But perhaps the most damaging flaw is that it doesn’t seem to satisfactorily deal at all with Jesus’s death. Because if Jesus’s death conquered death, not sin, then why do we still die?
The Mirror Model
This model, born out of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, deals squarely with the problem of violence, arguing that God is revealing in Jesus the lie of sacrificial violence.
Rather than focus on sin in the abstract, or use the violence of the world to explain God, the Mirror Model invites us to to see violence itself as contagious and the source of our separation from God. And humanity learned to use the scapegoat as a means of getting temporary relief from the scourge of violence.
Jesus, therefore, becomes the way out of a never-ending cycle, by revealing the sin of sacrificial violence for what it is. That it didn’t really work because it was the people who were violent to bring an end to violence. That the sacrificed were innocent. That God came in the form of a human to accept such a fate reveals the fundamental error in the whole system. That God never wanted these sacrifices, and in giving them, humanity became the evil it sought to eliminate.
The problem with this theory is that it isn’t dependent on God at all. God has no role to play. And worse, we still have violence. In Jesus’s crucifixion, violence didn’t stop occurring. It is still very much with us.
Other Models
As every atonement model begins as an idea which is then built into something bigger over time, new questions and ways of thinking have led down interesting paths, including:
The Trillion-Dollar Coin which puts a spin on the Payment Model which makes Jesus into a never-ending currency.
The Lynching Tree, which names the mirroring effect of Jesus’s crucifixion on the American church’s support of racism and lynching.
Overcoming Disgust, which names the boundary-breaking character of Jesus, which made even God disgusting to the pious.
Violence Against Women, which picks at the foundation of a male-dominated atonement which often overlooks violence, rather condemns it, particularly from the position of a minority often subjected to domestic violence.
A New Reality for the Trinity in which the Holy Spirit is released in the death of Jesus.
Jesus Killed God, which is part of Radical Theology, often called The Death of God theology, highlights the way Christian faith can exist without an omnipresent God.
