hinchley.net

I have an issue with the central tenants of christianity. I consider the very core of christian theology to be completely nonsensical. However, i’m getting ahead of myself. I should not pay out on a system i haven’t yet described. I should first present an overview of the gospel message. And perhaps there is no better place to start than the Two Ways to Live system devised by Matthias Media. A simple six-part framework for summarizing the “guts” of christianity (which i have paraphrased below):

1. God made the world. He made dogs, cats, mosquitoes and legumes. He made you and me. And he put us in charge. We were to rule his creation under his authority.
2. We were mighty pleased to rule the roost, but not under God’s authority. We said, “stuff you God, we’re doing this our way”. Not surprisingly, we stuffed it up.
3. God got seriously cut, and punished us for our petty rebellion. He did this by giving us what we wanted - life without him. Unfortunately for us, God is the source of life, and when God walked away, death entered the world.
4. God continues to love us despite our insurrection. He loves us so much he sent his son Jesus to save us. How? Jesus lived a perfect life and died as a substitute for you and me. The punishment that we deserved for ignoring God was passed onto Jesus.
5. God raised Jesus back to life. He accepted his death as “payment” for our rebellion. It’s like we got busted by the cops and Jesus paid the fine on our behalf; justice is served, and if we acknowledge the payment, we are set free. With the slate wiped clean we can become mates with God.
6. We have two choices. We can continue to give God “the bird”. The result of this choice is death. Or we can trust in Jesus, and what he did for us. The result of this choice is eternal life with God.

The six points are summarised in the following diagram.

The rebellion talked about in the six-part summary really takes two forms. The first is what i call “daily sin”. The ubiquitous tendency of all people to actively ignore God as we seek to run our lives without him. The other kind of sin is what may be termed “original sin”; referring to the general condition of rebellion that we were born into following the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden. The disobedience of Adam and Eve brought the wrath of God upon us all, and the world has groaned under the pain of his judgement to this day; cancer, flood, still-born children, starvation - it’s all a side effect of original sin; a consequence of God walking away. And yet we shouldn’t be too harsh on Adam or Eve. As habitual sinners, you and i would have faired no better. We all would have chosen to stick it to God.

No one can be rightfully blamed for an outcome over which they have no control. We don’t punish a new born child for crying. And this is the point, sin is universal. It is unavoidable. Like tears are an intrinsic element of infancy, so sin is an innate attribute of humanity. The machinery of sin has been built into every one of us. And yet we are all punished by God for the rebellion that took place in the Garden of Eden. The world is bursting at the seams under the weight of his punishment. Every day we suffer the burden of disease and dysfunction that are the consequences of an insurrection that we were powerless to prevent.

I cannot accept this concept. If every single one of us, not just some, but all, would have sinned in the Garden of Eden, how can we be blamed for it? For surely a predilection for sin has been built into us. We have been manufactured by God for rebellion. If a company was in the business of making televisions, and every single television they ever made was faulty, as the manufacturer they would be held accountable. It would be a design fault. It would be their fault. And yet, despite being hardwired for sin, it’s not our wonderful God, not our blessed and perfect creator that carries the blame, it is us.

I am sure there are many christians who would jump up and down at this point and say that what i am calling the “machinery of sin” is nothing more than “free will”, and that ultimately, we are all free to choose God. This is partly right. We can choose God. But we are not free to choose a sinless life. Sin is inevitable. The fall of mankind unavoidable. And the punishment imposed upon the world by God is inescapable. Incidentally, i see no reason why free will and sin need to go hand in hand. After all, we seem perfectly comfortable with the idea that those in heaven live in perfect freedom without sin. Why could God not have created us that way in the first instance? Why put us through a living hell for 70 odd years before resigning most of us to eternal torment? It all seems rather unnecessary for an all knowing and all powerful God.

The second half of the six-part summary presented above outlines how God takes responsibility for our sin, and provides a way out, if only we should trust him. Noble? I don’t think so. This turn of hand does not make a wrong right. It’s a little like a husband beating his wife only to tell her the following morning that he loves her. God cannot be lauded for rescuing us from death when he is responsible for that death. He may give us free will, the freedom to choose him, but the point is he built us in such a way that sin is unavoidable, that the fall of mankind was unavoidable, that the punishment of all mankind is unavoidable. We live out the inevitable, he punishes us, and then in the midst of the suffering for which he is responsible, he offers a hand out, if only we should turn to him. Is this to be celebrated? No thanks. God is just like a wife-beater playing the “i love you” card.

The consequences of this theology are highly negative. God is praised. He is perfect. Wonderful. Majestic. You and me, we are evil. We are worthless. We deserve death. That is what christianity preaches. Every worship service is founded on this principle. God is good. We are not. We sing it. We proclaim it. We come to believe it. This is not a message that builds people up. It is not a message that rehabilitates. You don’t nurture healthy children by allowing them to think that wetting the bed, or the other unavoidable embarrassments of life, render them worthless. We would be horrified by any parent that treated their child with such contempt. And yet we are asked to praise an all powerful God who brings his children into a fallen world where they are punished for sins they are yet to commit, and punished for an imperfect life they cannot help but live. And to rub salt into already raw wounds, we are told that this is our fault, and if we plead forgiveness he will, in his great mercy, ensure the torment doesn’t persist for all eternity.

To be fair, i’m only telling one half of the story here. If the first three chapters of our six-part summary relay the “bad news”, the next three chapters speak of the “good news”. It is here that we are offered salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. What i want to know is this: how does this system work? How does the death of Jesus actually solve the problem of sin? We are told that God is a just God. He cannot let evil go unpunished. If he just turned a blind eye, or said, “don’t worry about it mate, shit happens”, he would be subverting justice. It’s kind of like a cop letting a murderer off scott free. It wouldn’t be “fair”. So when we stuff up, something needs to give. God needs justice. And this is the crux of the system. He doesn’t get medieval on you and me. No. Instead he takes it out on a substitute; his own son Jesus Christ. Now that Jesus (who incidentally lived a life perfectly pleasing to God) has received the punishment for our crimes, the sentence has been served, justice delivered, and you and i, the criminals, are set free. Impressive; but I just don’t get it.

A non-christian may exclaim at this point that in sending his son to die for a crime he didn’t commit, God is committing child abuse. There are others that would rebut this heresy by claiming that Jesus “offered” to go (even though the bible clearly uses the word “sent” in 1 John 4:10). A third group may appeal to the concept of the trinity and say that Jesus was in fact God, and therefore God actually took upon himself the punishment that we deserved. As strange as this may seem - a perfect God punishing himself for something we did - let’s just assume for a moment that it’s true. How does this work?

Let’s try placing this system into a more familiar context. Let’s pretend that an evil man kills your partner. In the midst of your anger and grief, you catch the killer, but instead of venting your anger on him, instead of taking his gun and returning like for like, or instead of turning him over to the cops to be locked up for the next 30 years, you decide to punish yourself. With the killer in hand, you turn his gun upon yourself, and let the criminal go free. What does this achieve? Sure, in some weird sense, a penalty has been paid, but no one in their right mind would say that justice has been served. Nothing has been restored. Your partner is still dead. You are now dead. And the criminal is allowed to roam free. There has been no rehabilitation. There has been no restoration. And yet this is the heart of the gospel. We are to believe that the death of God (in human form) on a cross, and his subsequent resurrection (which is not particularly amazing given that he is God and can do anything), somehow makes us right with him. We are to believe that God’s punishment of himself, to satisfy his own desire for justice, somehow makes us worthy of knowing him. Huh? The fact is that this event does nothing to remove the record of my past sin, and it does nothing to alleviate my future sin (for all christians continue to be plagued by sin, despite trusting that the resurrection of Christ will bring them salvation). So if sin is the problem, and Christ’s death does not obliterate sin, how does this work?

The best explanation i’ve received is that on the day of judgement, when standing naked at the pearly gates, Jesus will stand in front of the christian, such that God will not see a sordid life of wicked sinfulness, but rather the perfect life of Jesus. As such, the christian will be granted entry into the kingdom. On the other hand, the non-christian will be left standing in isolation; their wretchedness in full view, for they will not know Christ, and Christ will not know them, and he will therefore not shield them from the full wrath of God’s judgement. The result? They are left out in the cold… or should i say the scorching heat of an eternity in a lake of burning sulfur.

Although this rather convoluted scenario is indeed an explanation, i’m not sure it’s entirely biblical, for the bible is strangely quiet in disclosing the nuts and bolts of this crazy system. However, whatever the explanation, it is clear that the death of Christ does little to address the core issue of sinfulness. God may as well have taken out his anger at our rebellion on a heavenly boxing bag; the end result would have been the same.

There is much more to say on the issue of salvation, but for now it is sufficient to say that the gospel is frankly absurd. We all sin. It is built into us. It was built into us by God. And in booting us out of the Garden of Eden he punished us for it. He tells us we are worthless. He tells us that he is wonderful. He is so wonderful, he offers us a way out of the despair that he has brought upon us. He entered the world as Jesus. He sentenced himself to death. He raised himself to life. This is a story that has everything to do with God and nothing to do with us. A story which does nothing to address our sin, does nothing to restore us, does nothing to rehabilitate us. A story which does nothing to alleviate the sinfulness of the christian, does nothing to undo the brokenness of a world in pain. And yet somehow, it’s a story sets us right with God. There is only one condition. You’ve got to trust that this crazy system works.

I will finish by preempting those that will point out that the bible tells us the gospel will appear as nothing more than utter stupidity to the non-christian. For example, 1 Corinthians 2:14:

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.

This statement is anything but convincing. To prefix a foolish story with a disclaimer that preempts objections of foolishness does nothing to support the authenticity of the story. The idea that God would rest our salvation on a system that is completely nonsensical to anyone who isn’t already convinced of its truth is surely even more absurd than absurdity of the gospel. That, however, is a topic for another post.