today's question

 

What If God Doesn’t Need to Punish Anyone to Forgive You?

Revisiting the idea that “someone has to pay” — and asking if it’s actually true

Every morning my email brings the Medium Daily Digest with a dozen or so "common interest" essays, the title (often an eyecatchingly sensational or titillating grabber to make me want to pay to read it, which I don't) and the first paragraph or two, fading off into a paywall. Today's issue includes the above. Seeing only the opening sentences, I have no idea where the author went with his/her proposition, which takes me back forty-five years to Theology-101 at seminary, reading Anselm of Canterbury, who wrote about the wrath of God, the substitutionary atonement theory that Jesus' death provided satisfaction to God for the dishonor caused by human sin (more so than the notion of paying a ransom to Satan to keep sinners out of Hell). C S Lewis does a marvelous job with his story of his Christ figure Aslan the Lion being stabbed to death by the wicked witch to ransom Edmund Pevensie from the witch's ownership after Ed's sin.

The artwork above is one of my favorite images from the 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ" and I chose it to show the horror and pain instead of selecting a picture such as this,

which is often used to image the wrath of God - - sure enough, God looks really angry, but the art is actually, in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's painting of God creating the sun and moon. A problem with it and all such images is expressed in another headline I saw this morning that read "we always create God in our image," a Truth that we usually miss. In human history and prehistory, ruling divinities are indeed whatever the thinking humans imagine them to be. My own image of God is not so much the wooly old man that is Daniel's (Chapter 7) Ancient of Days as it is an Incomprehensible who/that, visualizes and thereby stirs into Being a transient Universe that may only exist, as Thornton Wilder has it in a scene in "Our Town," in "The Mind of God."

Remembering my theology professor's assertion that Creation is the ongoing product of the Word of God, and that if/when God ceases speaking the Word, Creation will no longer exist, nor, outside the mind of God, will there even be memory that Creation ever did exist. I'm back to C S Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, a different book, the scene of total darkness when Polly and Digory hear singing, which is Aslan singing Narnia into creation, one of my favorite images of darkness dawning into light, land, creatures. 

Anyway, rambling again, Bubba, back to Medium's theological question of the day, "What if God doesn't need to punish anyone to forgive you?" In the first place, I do not visualize a God who has needs; first, remembering C S Lewis' little story "The Great Divorce" in which an Anglican bishop who has been in Hell but rides up on the overnight bus to have a look at Heaven, is invited to stay in Heaven: the bishop (called the Ghost in Gaiters) responds that he will stay if he is needed - - at which his host laughs and says "there are no needs here," God has no needs. 

Anyway, my image of God: surely not a God who binds "himself" to rules such as Anselm's theology asserts, a legalistic arrangement in which a law that absolute justice must be done outweighs even the power and love of God. So, no: God does not need to set up the crucifixion of Jesus in order to forgive my sins - - a theology that fits precisely into my oft-stated view that, as J B Phillips put it, "Your God Is Too Small"

Enough rambling on this beautiful morning when I have an age-related project to work on and complete. And miles to go before I sleep, eh?!

RSF&PTL

T90