Why Was the Cross Necessary? Part II

In this series, we are considering the meaning of the Cross, the central event in Christian teaching, practice, and life.  It is the thing that primarily separates Christian teachings from other religious viewpoints; so that is why, perhaps, I tell myself it is all right that I have somewhat belabored the point in writing fully five straight posts about it.

So far, as I’m sure you have noticed, I have really said very little in the way of discussing the questions that some of my readers have actually asked.  While your cynical belief that I would never do so is really so typical of you, I am here to blast such stereotypical preconceptions.  I want to tame that squirrel; ride that narwhal; sing like one of the “Wiggles.”  (OK – please forget that last part; those guys creep me out something fierce.   I have nightmares about tornadoes, snakes, and…the Wiggles).

Anyway, my point is that narwhals are awesome, and today, in this last post in the series, I will finally get back to the question of why on earth God saw fit to die for my sin.  Last time out we covered the not-very-intellectual practical psychology side; and I suggested that while it may not be strictly necessary for God to have died for my sin, its practical effects are hard to replicate in some other way.

This week we tread on footing less comfortable for me by discussing stuff more along the lines of philosophy (a glorious but mostly hopelessly doomed enterprise) or theology (the very definition of which in Webster’s says see: love/hate relationship).  In short, I aim to present a loose standard version of the typical Christian argument for the necessity of the Cross, and then elaborate on some aspects of it.

That typical argument goes something like this: (1) The just punishment for sin is death; (2) we sinned; (3) we deserved to die; (4) God is perfectly just; (5) therefore, He must kill us.  However, (6) God is also perfectly merciful and mercy dictates that He should not want to kill us, and thus (7) to meet the demands of both justice and mercy, He offered His own life as a ransom for our own.  The Cross is the logical intersection of God’s perfect justice and God’s perfect mercy.

I think that argument is true in as far as it goes – I believe everything in it in some form.  However, I’m not all that attached to it as a logical argument, and I think several of those propositions are assailable.  For example, while I do feel the weight of proposition 1 – the just punishment for sin is death – it isn’t obvious to me that every sin deserves death; on the surface, in fact, it seems that many of them don’t. (I do not think it would be just punishment to kill my daughter when she takes a little longer than she probably should in obeying my command to walk quickly across the street.)  And while I also understand and heartily endorse proposition 7 – that the Cross helps solve the problem created by propositions 1-6 – I similarly think, as a strictly logical progression stated as such, it isn’t on the surface super compelling.

I could talk quite a bit each of those propositions separately – but I think it’s very complicated and a lot of that discussion would be beside the larger point; so I’m going to save some of that for another post entirely.  (We will get back to those propositions as separate propositions – I’ve already written a fair bit about it for a future post).  Instead, I’m going to sketch out some pictures and ideas that, while not a strict technical defense of this logical progression to the mercy-meets-justice highway, are loosely consistent with it.  My hope in doing so is to simply make clearer why we Christians believe what we believe – why it was that God might think it important to die for our sins.

God can’t simply pretend like my sin is ok.  It wouldn’t be right for Him to call my stealing a good thing for humanity.  So given that it’s not ever ok to sin – that He can’t just wish it away and pretend it didn’t happen – what form would mercy take that didn’t fit the wishing away category?  The main starting point for understanding the Christian approach to mercy is this:  The doctrine that sin deserves punishment is something that, while not strictly axiomatic or logical, does seem built into us.  There is a somewhat sloppy tendency to think God should just overlook the horrible things we do; but we don’t apply that standard very often to other people, when they do those things to us. So I think we do already have the notion of justice that Christianity preaches in our collective heads; but it’s intuitively built into our own relational approach and has to perhaps be drawn out a bit when applied to God.

I think this can be seen in two different ways, both of which are relevant to the Cross. (1) First, it seems natural to us that people seek punishment for crimes committed against them – someone has to be punished for the crime.  (2) But also, and importantly, someone has to pay back, to make restitution, for the thing stolen.  We want some person to be punished; but we also want for the wrong they did to be righted.
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Both feelings are somewhat natural to us; though often overlapping, they are not always the same thing; but both are intuitively necessary for completing our sense of justice.  In the movie National Treasure, the main character steals the original Declaration of Independence – yes, that Declaration of Independence.  When, at the end of the movie, he returns it, you might think that would be enough to clear the proverbial air and allow him to walk away.  But no; it isn’t enough.  When you take something like that, we understand that justice isn’t completely served by a simple (and successful) attempt to undo the crime; someone has to be punished.  In a telling moment near the end of the movie, Ben Gates (the main character), upon being asked what he wants from the negotiation process, says to the FBI agent in charge, “I really, really don’t want to go to jail.”  The agent replies, “somebody’s gotta go to jail, Ben.”  In other words, whether you or someone else, there has been a crime committed and the ledger isn’t balanced just by trying to pay it back. It does need to be paid back; but it also requires someone to be punished.

The flip side is equally intuitively true – and perhaps more important. If someone steals a million dollars from you via credit card identity theft, you’re not going to be happy if they catch the criminal but you don’t get your money back.  You might feel that part of justice was done – the criminal is going to go to jail, at least – but you might still feel a little shorted by the fates if you had to become a pauper and forego your retirement.  You’d feel a lot better if Visa at least paid you the million dollars back.

Well, in the bank account of our lives, we’ve stolen much more than a million dollars from God and from other people. And indeed, in some way we’ve metaphorically stolen more than we could ever pay back.  When I sin, I start a chain of events in motion that can never be undone by myself alone.  It is incomprehensible.  So there is a sense that if God just pardoned it, justice would not be completely done – even if you repented and the sin died, even if you were punished, you would not have re-paid the cost of your sin to other people. You cannot possibly undo all the bad stuff your sin caused.

That’s the logical point of the Cross.  God took both of these things upon Himself.  I deserve punishment – God took it for me.  There is in addition a legitimate and serious deficit on my side of the ledger that I can’t overcome – someone has to pay it – and God, in some wild way that’s hard to fully grasp, paid it Himself.  As the Bible says, He wipes the slate clean, so I can start over each day, free of my own burdens.

Now, we are reaching the limits of human comprehension when we talk about the Cross (which is a colossally arrogant way of saying we are reaching the limits of my comprehension, but I like to feel like it’s not just me).  We are talking about something that, if it occurred, must in some real way be beyond us to fully understand – God taking the form of man and ransoming us by His own sacrifice.

But yet – but yet – even when I can’t think through all the implications in a fully coherent manner, I can feel them.  I feel the need for a savior.  I feel the need for someone to take the weight of all my own sins.  I feel inside of me like I cannot possibly bear the weight of all that I’ve done.  I searched hill and dale, mountain and valley, to find a place that I could lay my burden down.  And on the Cross, I found somewhere on which, in a very real and very literal sense, I could lay it – because Jesus took it up for me.

And my experience is that sin is like that for everyone I know, in varying degrees perhaps, but still like that.  Everyone I know seems burdened by their own humanness, guilt, anger, shame – they seem like they need someone to take it for them.  They don’t seem capable of it – and if they aren’t capable of it, then it is necessary in some sense that someone carries it for them.  Christianity says God did it Himself through Jesus.  Now perhaps He could have carried it in many different ways, perhaps He could have removed it in many different ways, just like He could have killed it in many different ways – but I personally cannot think of any way more powerful than the one He chose.  So while the logical progression we discussed here does not seem like a strictly compelling argument stated as pure logic – and I’d grant that up front – the Truth it captures does compel me nonetheless.

“Come to me, all you who are burdened and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  Matthew 11:28-30

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8 Responses to Why Was the Cross Necessary? Part II

  1. Luke–actually, I had begun to be concerned by your lengthy silence, but attributed it to the force of arguments that had been marshaled against you; that is, I thought maybe your spirit, as opposed to your computer, was broken. I’m glad it was the latter.

    To the topic at hand: like you, I find it implausible that each and every sin deserves death, but I’ll grant for the sake of argument that, for each of us, our sins cumulatively merit that fate. Nor am I convinced that punishment is necessarily always part of justice–that is, I can imagine cases where restitution would suffice and where I, for one, wouldn’t insist on punishment. But again, I’ll accept that part of your argument as well. So where does that leave us? Human beings deserve to be punished by death for the totality of our sins, but God in His mercy dies for us instead–except, as has been brought up before, God didn’t really die on the cross; rather, Jesus/God went through the motions of dying only to rise triumphant on the third day.

    But let’s say that was enough: God died, sort of, temporarily, for our sins; he tasted Death for our sake. So now we are, what–free to sin without consequence? Christianity teaches otherwise; each of us will still pay a price for sin. In fact, Christianity teaches that God took away what had been the worst of our punishment (death) and substituted for it, depending on the severity of our sins and our willingness (or not) to repent and to embrace Jesus as our Savior, an eternity of suffering in Hell. Most people would be hard put to call that either “mercy” or “justice”.

    I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the burden that humans carry: the burden of guilt, of inadequacy, of selfishness and thoughtlessness, of petty cruelties and worse. I’d go further and point out that life is difficult, that people are burdened not only by their own actions but by the actions of others and by the circumstances of their lives, and that we are frail, limited, contingent creatures given only 70 years or so to make sense of our existence. Given all that, a God whose punishments even theoretically include eternal suffering strikes me as a monster.

    I’ve no argument with you or anyone else who has found a Savior to carry your burdens for you. But the empirical evidence is clear that Jesus does not carry those burdens for everyone, despite the Christian claim and Christian promise; certainly, he doesn’t carry them for me–I’m stuck with carrying them myself. Would Jesus carry them if I asked him? I don’t know, because I’ve never met him; I used to hang out in neighborhoods where he was rumored to live, but I never saw him. And, of course, the typical Christian response to that is merely to add to my existing burden sins called “lack of faith,” “spiritual arrogance,” or “rejecting your Savior”.

    Well, so be it. Here I stand in my unbelief; God help me, I can do no other.

  2. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Jack,
    Thanks so much for your thoughtful and incredibly powerful comment. I am truly moved by it.

    Actually, as is so often the case, I largely agree with you. I hesitate to respond because I don’t want in any way to sound like I’m invalidating your personal experiences. So I trust that my comments will not be taken in that spirit, but rather in the “let’s discuss this idea” sort of spirit.

    I’ll try to limit myself to addressing a couple of your key questions/points of agreement.

    (1) Actually, I think you are totally right that we often don’t feel a need for punishment at all, but something more like reconciliation. That point is well taken. I admit that I’m probably uniquely inclined to believe that reconciliation is less important than truth and justice. I’m taking a “peacemaker” class right now at my church, which I love, but I have to admit that the spirit of “I’d rather be reconciled than right” has never gotten me anywhere. And philosophically, it makes no sense to me as a starting point for anything. I want to be right — it matters to me in a conflict who is right.

    Of course, to be fair, the larger point of the class I’m in isn’t to reconcile with wrongness, but to follow Jesus’ advice and try to look at things objectively and fairly (take the log out of your own eye, He says). My point is to say that I’m probably unique and this doesn’t necessarily represent the mass of humanity — and I think you are right, so it was awfully gracious of you to grant the point for arguments’ sake! You might have won the argument right there otherwise! : )

    (2) A very fair comment about where this leaves us. And you are right that Christianity certainly doesn’t treat the Cross as a kind of “diplomatic immunity” to sin as much as we like. Rather, it treats it as a pardon for past crimes so that one can have a second chance to do the thing right.

    I think, to me, part of it starts with a nuance about the character of God. If we accept for the sake of argument that God is incredibly and passionately interested in our ultimate well-being in every way — that He truly, deeply loves us — then the Cross can be taken as an act of mercy. The fact that He is that way is an integral part of Biblical teaching, independent of the Cross.

    But if we approach it with the notion that God is mostly cold to us, that His justice is cold and that He doesn’t really care — in other words, if I don’t believe the independent revelation of His goodness — then I think the point of the Cross can look like a rather arbitrary act to save us from a rather arbitrary punishment. I’m not actually making an argument here, Jack — if so, it would be an absolutely terrible argument by fiat. Instead, I’m trying to identify the point of disconnect. I may be wrong — don’t want to put words in your mouth! That’s just the feeling I get from reading your excellent comment. I think maybe we have different views, not of the logic of the thing so much, but simply on whether we accept the revelation of God’s character, which I admit now that I think about it probably presages and colors my view of the Cross.

    Now, why say all that? I say it to say this: It is a perfectly legitimate question to wonder if God can really care about us if he is offering us a choice between repentance and Hell. (I think the topic of eternal punishment is complicated and worthy of discussion another time. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to largely leave that aside). I’m not claiming to have a perfect answer — though I do have much to say on the topic — but at the moment, I believe the independent revelation that God is good, and therefore I interpret the Cross in light of His goodness. I believe that if God sends someone to Hell, He does so in perfect love, and that He wants everyone to be saved. And yes, I don’t think those statements are in contradiction — ultimately — though like all honest people I know, I find them definitely contradictory on the surface!

    A terrible answer: But I think I’m going to write a blog piece to explain my views in more detail. I feel that the real issue here is what inference to make about a God seemingly arbitrarily setting up an eternal punishment and then seemingly arbitrarily “saving” us from it — and I haven’t addressed that at all. Sorry for the poor fare! More to come at a later date.

    (3) BTW, I do believe that God died for everyone’s sins — that’s what the Bible teaches. How that plays out is debated among Christians, but the spirit of it is more or less what you said (although I would say it with a different nuance): God offered a sacrifice for us to bear our burdens, and anyone can have that burden borne, if they acknowledge their need for it, repent, and ask. To me, a gift is still bought even if it is ultimately rejected.

    (4) About this comment:

    “And, of course, the typical Christian response to that is merely to add to my existing burden sins called “lack of faith,” “spiritual arrogance,” or “rejecting your Savior”.”

    Yes, that is the typical Christian response, but I’m not sure it is Jesus’ response (I don’t recall that He treated Thomas or the unbelieving father that way), and I’m sorry you have had to deal with that. Truly, Jack. I want to be sure my comments in #3 are not taken that way, so: For what it’s worth, I do not believe that you are arrogant, and I do not view your lack of faith as a sin, because I think it’s honest. At the very least, it isn’t my place to say one way or the other. You can’t reject Jesus if you haven’t met Him!

    OK, I have to go and looking back at my comment, I can see that it TOTALLY sucks! I apologize for that…gotta get to work. I’m tempted to delete my comment because it is so bad, but I don’t want to keep “not responding.”

    Thanks as always for your awesome comments, Jack — keep them coming! I actually didn’t think this was one of my better posts, to be honest, so I appreciate pushing the ideas and making me come to brass tacks.

  3. Luke–I appreciate your response. I actually had second thoughts about my post–I felt it was too defensive and too melodramatic (nothing wrong with a little melodrama, of course, but one has to draw the line), and also that I seemed to be responding as if your articulation of your faith was somehow a challenge to my own lack of faith. In any case, the conversation continues; I’m just beginning a series (on my renamed blog, “Howdy from Montana”) about the doctrine of Original Sin–that’s sure to attract a vast readership…

  4. Uh-Oh says:

    Perhaps it is a heretical viewpoint, but that doesn’t really matter to me very much given my atheistic position, however I’ll offer it here. A few years ago I had the pleasure of reading a new translation of the Job story that gave at least a different perspective on some of its points.

    Remember that Job is set up as the most righteous guy on Earth, and God particularly likes him. But God is convinced to screw with him (or at least let his agent screw with him) in order to test Job’s faith. Job stays faithful of course, never once cursing or disbelieving in God, but he sure complains about the nature of human life. One of the major points he makes in questioning God is that in life, good people often suffer, and horrible nasty people often get worldly delights. His friends tell him no no, that isn’t how God works, and the bad people really will get punished and the good won’t, but Job sees that isn’t true and God (or whatever is speaking for God) tells Job he’s right – good people suffer or prosper just as the bad, seemingly independent of their righteousness.

    And that’s that – In Jewish belief there isn’t a Hell to go to in order to be punished, which Christianity introduces to solve that observation. And the deity doesn’t solve that problem for Job directly either, though he seems to get some kind of idea about the answer himself by the end. Sinful people often prosper and good people often suffer – that is a fact of life. More accurately to say that everyone suffers regardless of station or morals to some degree or another.

    What then is the point of not sinning? I’ll ignore the Christian answer of Hell for that one and ponder it about life itself, since there SHOULD be a reason not to in life. The bible says that the just punishment for sin is death – dissecting and interpreting that statement, we could say the natural or built-in consequence of sin is the death of some aspect of humanity, be that the whole or an important piece. Would it not be possible that God wouldn’t be directly punishing sin so much as sin itself wrecking parts of a person?

    Take for instance greed, a nice one to tackle since we have an economic system that rewards greed rather nicely. A greedy person will often accumulate more wealth than a generous person, and with more wealth often live more lavishly at the expense of others, while the non-greedy will often occupy a less lavish position. This is simply a natural consequence of greed – they will be more likely to accumulate and possess more wealth. There is also another natural consequence of greed in that the person will pay far more attention and pay far more interest to personal wealth than other matters they wouldn’t deem as important, like charity and connecting with the plight of others. The natural consequence of that is the death of empathy, since such a greedy person would not exercise it too much and thus likely become a rather shelled person unable to connect well with his fellow man.

    Now, has he died physically? No – and likely he’ll die far less quickly than the poor people around him (or at least less miserably). But is he ‘paying’ for his sin? I’d say he would be, just as a poor person will ‘pay’ for their poverty. Each condition and outlook comes with its natural set of benefits and drawbacks, consequences which arise from the nature of that condition.

    Technically it doesn’t require a god to work at all (which is probably why I personally like to think it is closer to the truth than not), but if you did add the Christian/Jewish God into it, his initial action would be akin to a parent warning a kid not to run in the halls: The kid might disobey and run anyway while God watches them run right into a wall themselves, or they might obey and walk around the wall without trouble.

    As for the severity of sins, the bible is pretty clear that all sins warrant death – it’s pretty cut and dry there, and the simple arguments for many Christian sects run with the proposition that everyone has sinned somehow, regardless of ‘how badly’, and thus deserve to suffer. So the Christian view doesn’t get a lot of wiggle-room. This view however could say that while all ‘sins’ or rather particularly troublesome conditions and actions we may adapt (what makes ‘troublesome’ is completely up for debate) will cause natural negative consequences of some kind and thus all cause ‘death’, they do not do so all on the same levels or even in the same areas. Vanity causes selfishness and blindness to others, similar to but not the same as Wrath causes harm and blindness to both others and to oneself. And what we as individuals and as a culture call ‘Virtues’ are not that different from what we call ‘Vices’ – the difference being that we have judged the Virtues in a mostly positive light and the Vices in a negative. Some virtues and vices have such potent consequences that they are nearly universally considered good or bad, like generosity or kin-slaying.

    Granted, this perspective doesn’t even consider saviors or the transfer of sins – in fact I don’t think it can. The only thing a savior could do is redirect the focus of a person, alleviate guilt possibly, and then allow them to ‘start over’ and redefine their moral conditions. Which is basically what Jesus’ role is in the Christian system, and any moral figure’s role is in this alternate system. But savior implies a direct sort of ‘saving from something’, and Christianity has this perspective beat when it comes to providing a hero to save people from themselves and their sins.

    On one last note, something that Jack mentioned and which I’ve heard a ton from the atheist side of the debate, which is the argument that ‘if you have grace, doesn’t that mean you can sin as much as you want now without consequence?’ But I think it is simply a matter of a certain understanding of what ‘grace’ is, and I could apply it to the alternate model easily enough. In that light, which is likely a shared light, the condition you set yourself in by the actions you perform will inevitably inflict their consequences on you, be they righteous or sinful, good or bad, positive or negative. It isn’t that a person mainly becomes righteous by doing a certain thing, but that a righteous person will do certain things as a consequence of their righteousness. So really a person isn’t ‘in grace’ by simply going through the motions – it might assist them, but calling the actions the grace would be like saying the tree grows from the fruit. And like the bible says, you’ll know them by the fruits they bear. So with that understanding in place, a person who has truly accepted Christian grace would have accepted a moral condition, and from that condition would act accordingly and thus not perform too many sins. One who would go out and sin all over would be definition not be in grace, because the grace condition would not produce sins – like soil but not concrete will produce flowers.

  5. Uh-Oh: You refer to “something that Jack mentioned and which I’ve heard a ton from the atheist side of the debate, which is the argument that ‘if you have grace, doesn’t that mean you can sin as much as you want now without consequence?’ ” But I never used the word “grace”. My question was this: if we are “saved” from our sins, why do we still have to worry about sinning and its consequences? Why do we have to worry about hell if Jesus already took the burden of our sins and thereby saved us? What sort of salvation leaves people still in eternal peril?

    Setting aside the question of what precisely we are supposed to be saved from: I don’t feel saved. Do you?

  6. The Apologetic Professor says:

    I have only 10 minutes to respond and I need two hours, so I’m going to briefly respond to each of your comments in turn. First, Jack: Thanks for your gracious response as always. Actually, your original comment went out of its way to be kind to my belief system, so I never felt anything other than warm thoughtfulness. As you said, the conversation continues — and I plan to check out that blog series of yours (I’ve tried to swear off too much blog-reading to keep myself employed, etc., but that one’s gonna be hard to pass up)!

  7. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Uh-Oh,

    Wow, that was fantastic! I’ll let the two of you continue discussing the issues around grace (my answer to Jack’s question, for what it’s worth, would be “yes, I do feel saved” — but I assume that both of you know that already, and that the question was directed at you and not me).

    I don’t have time to comment extensively on your new model, but actually, I think most of that model is consistent with much Christian thought. It is certainly largely consistent with my own thought. There is a sense that what sin does to us is self-inflicted exactly in the ways you suggest (beautiful pictures, BTW), and despite what I said in my post about the logical progression, I don’t typically think of God as saving me from His own just punishment — I rather think of Him as saving me from myself. I believe in Hell, but it hardly ever enters my mind (and doesn’t that often enter Jesus’ own recorded teachings — at least, not compared to his mentions of Heaven).

    I haven’t thought through it too deeply (though I have thought about this issue before at some level) and don’t have time to do so now, but at first blush, I would say the two things don’t seem mutually exclusive to me — in some sense, if God decides to let me suffer the “natural” consequences of my sin instead of stopping them (which He of course could, if He exists), there is a sense in which He is making a decision to “punish” me.

    But of course, you are certainly right that the models differ in that no God is required for the natural consequences model, at least not logically speaking. I have some comments on this, but I will have to save them for another day due to time constraints.

    And of course, the Bible does use “punishing” imagery in addition to the “natural consequences” imagery. So it’s more complicated than just agreeing with you (which I largely do — I found little to quibble with in your comment). There is much to be worked out in terms of how all these various angles might coherently fit together from a Christian point of view, and I’m not pretending that I’ve done that here!

    Thanks for the prodding! Most appreciated. When I have more time next week, I hope to respond in a little more depth. Meanwhile, happy thanksgiving!!!

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