Leaving the Altars of Sadistic gods
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Leaving the Altars of Sadistic gods
On gods we can't get jiggy with.
Let me start by saying that I believe in Christ & Him crucified. That is where my faith lies. I believe in the Gospel of Jesus.
But I think a lot of Christians have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad theology of the cross. Legitimately harmful stuff. I’ve often heard it said that Jesus took our place on the cross. That it should’ve been us instead.
I am writing this post to state, without equivocation, that I do not want any part of that sadistic theology.
I get that the wages of sin is death. I’m not here to argue about that. But the reality of crucifixion is much starker than that. Everybody dies. Crucifixion is more than just death, though. It was state sanctioned torture. Brutality. Shredding flesh on a living human before piercing them and leaving to suffocate over a period of hours (or even days) in public spaces. Crucifixion was a matter of asserting dominance and intimidating people into submission.
No. I absolutely do not deserve that fate. Neither do you. And that is one of the points of the story!
When Jesus “took our sins on that cross,” he confronts us with the reality of how depraved our world has become. That even the innocent could be subjected to such a course of action reveals that we have no concept of righteousness.
Any theory of atonement that takes such brutality as a given—where the only problem with the crucifixion of Jesus is that it should have been us instead of him—is a bad one.
I find inspiration in Jesus’s commitment to the wholeness of a people that he knew would lead him to the death of an insurrectionist. But I do not find any liberation in the death he suffered.
I find my path to wholeness in the life that he lived leading up to that brutality. I find liberation in the Resurrection he embodied on the other side of that brutality.
When I shared the tweet above, I found quite a bit of resistance from some people.
I’ve posted my fair share of provocative tweets before, but I thought “no, we actually do not deserve to be tortured, brutalized, and publicly suffocated” was something most of us could agree on.
One aspiring church planter (and PhD student at one of the seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention) dropped a bunch of scriptures to support his very firm conviction that we do indeed deserve to be “crushed by the cross.” The scriptures he listed included Gal. 1:6-9, 1 Tim. 1:3-4, 1 Tim. 6:3-4, and 2 Tim. 3:1-9. I will save you the time: none of those passages suggest that anyone should have been “crushed” by any crosses. You will not find any passages in the Bible affirming the cross as a valid expression of justice & righteousness. They do not exist.
What those passages—and his objection in general—illustrate is something very common. We have elevated many extra-biblical concepts and interpretations of God to non-negotiables. And some of those concepts and interpretations of God stink.
I’m not very concerned with debating all of the various theories of atonement in this post. But if we’ve gotten to the point where “you do not deserve to be tortured, brutalized, and executed in public” sounds heretical, then you serve a cruel god.
If “no one deserves to be lynched” is bad doctrine in your religion, then your religion is bad.
Jesus doesn’t tell us to pick up our cross because crosses are good. Jesus tells us to pick up our cross because he knows that The Way will upset those with the power to wield death as a weapon. The Resurrection is the condemnation of the cross. In the Resurrection, crucifixion is stripped of its power.
The name of this publication is The Son Do Move, because I believe that Jesus leads us to liberation. Leading requires moving. As we fix our eyes on Jesus and follow The Way, we must leave the dark places we once called home.
Viewing the cross as the primary place of our liberation and transformation is one of those dark places. BecauseI believe The Son Do Move, I’m getting the hell outta that dark place.
I’m choosing to find my liberation in the Resurrection instead. Instead of marveling at the brutality someone told me I deserved, I will pursue the life that Gods said I should have.
Them lil’ sadistic gods some folks keep tryna tell us about can kick rocks.
Leaving the Altars of Sadistic gods
Occasionally I think that a Christianity of the mind is no Christianity at all. Who cares what someone thinks? I can't see thinking; I can see only action.
And yet sometimes what we think can change almost all our understanding of life and the concomitant actions that follow. A cruel God inflicts a cruel salvation, and the people under that cruel salvation then use cruelty as a means of achieving righteousness.
We have a system in our land where cruelty is the meaning behind our criminal justice system, our systems of supporting people, our systems of providing benefits, our systems of forming tax policies, our systems of education, of politics, of business, of entertainment. And of religion.
Because I grew up in America where I was treated as a member of the class who should by divine right and the Constitution be given full rights at the expense of all those who were created and designated as people with conditional rights, it was formed in me—and when I became aware I chose that formation—that cruelty is justice, dominance is truth, and privilege & power are duty for people like me to hold and wield against all others.
We can talk about that kind of social epistemology some day and somewhere else, but my point is that having cruelty as the basis of a religion inevitably sets the ground rules for everything that follows. We serve a God of cruelty who is only reluctantly kept from smashing us to the ground as worms because the Beloved Son (!) was there to stand in place much as a battered wife protects her children from an abusive husband who is just *waiting* for another chance at a smackdown. That kind of God is waiting for us to step out of line by a millimeter so that God's wrath can "finally" be set free to destroy us as unwanted and unloved. Salvation is entirely conditional upon our good behavior, and even the fact of Jesus' death is only barely enough to deflect God's wrath but we can step out line and see a taste of what Jesus faces from this God of wrath.
Who we are then told "loves" us.
Not going to say that every family on earth would not have abuse if they didn't believe in such a God, but it sure seems like having such a religious belief would tend to give abusers an incentive to act like God in righteous fury. And those of us who grew up in such a family can understand a God like that, a parent like that, one who is just waiting for the right moment to let fly the fists when the protector isn't around to serve as a shield with their body against the physical, emotional, and mental abuse.
So yeah, it does matter what we think about ourselves and our God, and what we think about how God loves us and what that love means.
It's hard for me to understand a God who says I am fully loved while simultaneously keeping in the back of my head "but given a chance, God would go right back to abuse, and only the Beloved Son (!), eternally watching out for a recurrence of that abuse, will save us from that abuse—as long as we stay on point.
I have a hard time with the idea that the ideal parent is one who is consumed with wrath and fury *and* who also wants to embrace me with those same arms that would be loosened against me if I were not protected by another.
Such a belief, such a religion would make me feel disconnected, unsure, unwanted, unloved, no matter the words and even no matter the actions.
A belief in a God who originates from love and love only is a far different God than the one under which I was taught to obey "in fear and trembling." Such a God who delights in love and who abandons wrath is a God *worth* knowing, loving, and serving *with a whole heart liberated by love*.
It's a turning point, to know such a God.
I'm grateful to the people who have been saying this for years even while I wasn't listening. At some point in time, God is good and will break through to free us from those false beliefs that twist our minds and push our behaviors.
I'm grateful to you for the reminder, and for the realization again that God is good, all the time. To know that is to know peace in times of trouble.
You are a gift, Trey, and your heart and transparency and trust are a gift. I appreciate that you are here to be speaking and thinking and acting in ways to show what happens when we let go of the God of abuse and turn to the God of eternal, undying (!), consistent, faithful love to those of us who stray and seek to come home.
Until recently I didn't even know that I was raised to believe in "penal substitutionary atonement" (learned that from Kyle Howard) but MAN is it a deep root to dig out! Everything down to God's character and my identity got tied to it. I'm grateful for your preaching in protest; it is very much needed!