A Person to Person Approach to Atonement

I know the Father personally. In my journaling I experience him. He is gentle and compassionate and also asks tough questions to challenge me. He asks questions that a good father would ask his son. Of course I don’t hear him with my ears. But through my mind and personality he lets me know what he wants me to know. How this happens is a mystery to me but, thank God it does.

 

To know someone personally, that someone has to be a person. Throughout Scripture God is presented as a person, who has personality.

 

• He has self-awareness (Ex. 3:140 self-determination (Job 12:13), Intelligence (Gen. 18:19), emotions (Ex. 3:78). he has several emotions – see:  Does God have emotions? | GotQuestions.org) 

  • God’s emotions are similar to those humans exhibit. But is it right to think of Him as “emotional” in that he is fickle and has lots of mood swings like we have? No.  In theological circles, personhood is often defined as “the state of being of an individual with intellect, emotion, and volition.” God the Father, then, is a person  in that he has a mind, emotions, and a will of his own. To deny God’s emotions is to deny that he possesses personality. Most Christians believe in the Trinity, that is, God is three persons in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That seems impossible, doesn’t it? It is another mystery that defies logic and science. But explaining that, would require at least another two or three articles or even books.  

• I do accept the authority of Scripture / the Bible. And I accept that that takes understanding, knowledge and a leap of faith. If you do not have faith, I ask you to suspend your disbelief for a while as you read the rest of this article. A description of God in Genesis 3:8 goes like this:

“Then the man [Adam] and his wife [Eve] heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”

 

Why were they hiding? Because they were ashamed of their sin. This passage speaks to me, because I too have been ashamed of my sin. I am human and therefore fallible. I mess up often. But it is the first part of that verse that most touches me. They “…heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” The reason Adam and Eve knew it was God, was because they had walked with him and knew the sound of his footsteps. This representation of the Father is human and beautiful to me. God is more than human but he encompasses our being.

 

Let me pause a moment for a story. A few years ago, I had a very hurtful experience with someone to whom my wife, Helen, and I were very close. Let’s call her Carol. I felt very alienated and separate from her due to my strong wounded feelings, including some fear of her. Then years later, my wife told me of a conversation she had had with Carol in which Carol commented to Helen “I really hurt Glenn back then didn’t I?” That question from her said to me that she was aware of how she harmed me, and her tone of voice said she seemed to feel compassion for me. Helen encouraged me to be open to one day meeting or speaking with Carol. Because Helen had created an opening in the wall separating Carol and me, I was eventually able to share a meal with her and members of her family, and we had a normal open conversation. I was able to let go of my anger, and my hurt and be open to Carol again as a person. Although I had forgiven her in my mind, I still had feelings of fear toward her for her former aggressive behavior towards me. But Helen had acted as a mediator of sorts in this relationship.

 

Why this long story? Because I have been trying to work out a slightly different way of looking at Jesus’ atonement for human sin that makes more sense to me. My view is different from the traditional view that Jesus had to die for our sins. That view seemed to me to be unjust. Why should Jesus have to die for the sins WE had committed? After all, he had done no harm to the Father or others. Later I will explain this seeming contradiction more fully.

 

Over the centuries of human existence members of our species, possessing free will, have decided to sin innumerable multitudes of times, that is they have violated God's law as summarized in the ten commandments. Some writers point out that Moses before receiving and then delivering the ten commandments from God to his people, had not made clear God's will for humans moral and righteous behavior and therefore they were not sinning. But even if you accept this argument, ever since Moses, we humans have still done terrible things; we have sinned millions of times.  

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For all of those sins, humans need to make amends to God for violating his trust in us. Christians have held different ideas about how Jesus saved people for their sinfulness by means of his death on the cross because in that act he substituted for us humans and made atonement for our sins. Different views still exist within various Christian denominations about this doctrine of atonement. The whole idea of substitutionary atonement addresses one approach to how Jesus saved people (humanity) from their sins. It is too complex to explain here, but for an explication of it, see the beneficial Wikipedia entry  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitutionary_atonement

 

In the above story I spoke of my being hurt and afraid, not stereotypical manly, masculine feelings, right? Many men would not admit to their fear because of possible kidding or worse from other guys. But the truth is that even God can be hurt. One reason is that he is the one who decided to become human in Jesus, he suffered horribly due to the injuries and humiliations cast upon him by the Romans and Christ Jesus’ fellow Jews more than 2,000 years ago. Besides that, because God has personhood, as explained previously, he has emotions. I realize that this idea seems to run contrary to the view that God is almighty and contrary to God's immutability. However, God’s power is the power of love and creation. Real love often involves feelings but is not defined by them. Even when we have been badly hurt, we can love ourselves and take care of ourselves without being aggressive and hurtful towards others. That is also true with God. After all, God is described as love. (1 John 4:8)

 

To repeat: because of the centuries of hurt experienced by God, he is justly due some kind of amends from humankind. Many of us Christians picture Jesus’ suffering and death as being bloody and brutal. An example of this representation is the crucifix. Several denominations use the crucifix to portray Jesus’ death on the cross including the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Lutheranism, and Anglicanism. Some Christians do not like or use the crucifix but instead use a simple cross, wanting to signal to people that Jesus did not stay on the cross or in the grave. They prefer to emphasize Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, thus they choose to avoid depictions of Jesus' body on the cross. I am fine with that determination, but I do not think we should completely avoid showing Jesus’ immense suffering, because it best illustrates the agony our Father God experienced over the long history of our species on Earth. I believe that Jesus went through his suffering and death to show humans how much their sin hurts God. I believe that was one of Jesus' missions on earth. And that sacrifice by Jesus the Christ is redeeming to and for me. 

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A "Free Will" View of Redemption

Let me give an illustration of my view of redemption.

A father whose son has murdered someone makes the decision to confess that he, the father, actually killed that person, thus substituting and sacrificing himself so the son might live and go free.

In my view that scenario describes the way God the Father, God the Son (Christ), and God the Holy Spirit made the decision to sacrifice his son Christ by becoming human (to be named Jesus of Nazareth) and therefore being subject to the same death that is part of every human life. But in addition to that sacrifice, the the Trinity wanted to show the human species how much "they" (the three persons in one God) had suffered throughout the history of mankind. That is humans, granted the gift of free will, had made millions of decisions to abandon and turn away from the one true God and to make themselves into gods or idols and to  ignore the will of the Trinity, to abandon God for their own pleasure and delight and thus willfully give up the eternal life they would have lived if they had chosen to live righteous lives in union with the Holy Trinity.  The humans used their freedom to depart or run away from the God who had created them and given them the brilliant, glorious gift of freedom, that is, free will.

 

And since Jesus Christ was/is God become human, it is accurate to say that Jesus lived, suffered, and died for our sins, that is, his mission of atonement was fulfilled. I prefer to break that word down to its original meaning: at-one-ment, because Jesus helps us to bridge the gap between being sinful and hurtful humans and humans' Father God. God, of course loved us humans all along. He never stopped loving us. However, I must say that I am skeptical about the idea of substitutionary propitiation [6] , the doctrine that would require the person making the atonement to be human if he were to substitute for us humans and our sins. 

 

The history of Christianity has been an ongoing attempted at-one-ment with God. This process is the part of the work of the followers of Jesus Christ. All God really wants is to be our friend. He wants us to open ourselves to his generous grace by our faith and trust in him. He wants us to repent of our sins so that we will be able to plug into the force of his grace / graciousness.

 

To finish on a personal note, as long as I continue to mess up, allowing my pride and ego to take me into the darkness of sin, then I will continue to need to repent and seek any way I can to experience the healing energy of God’s love. I decide to do this through my church membership, through reading and studying Sacred Scripture and other spiritual literature, and my work to recover from ingrained personality patterns created over the long history of my turning away from God.

Glenn Currier, 1-10-24

 

[6]   Meaning of propitiation: pro·​pi·​ti·​a·​tion prō-ˌpi-shē-ˈā-shən. Synonyms of propitiation. 1. : the act of gaining or regaining the favor or goodwill of someone or something.  

Propitiation in the Bible: The word propitiation appears in the New King James Version of the Bible in four verses: Romans 3:25; Hebrews 2:17; 1 John 2:2; and 1 John 4:10. In each case the word is used to express the grace of God, which allows Jesus’ sacrifice to be the means by which our sins can be forgiven.

Reference:

https://lifehopeandtruth.com/change/grace/propitiation/#:~:text=The%20word%20propitiation%20appears%20in,our%20sins%20can%20be%20forgiven.