Atonement

[dairygirl4u2c]

it's also interesting, per why they decided to kill him. part of me sympathized with the killers, actually, cause jesus was jewish, so if he was, and everyone there was, what are they to make of a guy claiming to be God in violation of the law (which probably said to kill those who claim to be God, not that that was or was not the real law or the law of man. it was jewish in any case so.)? not that that justified them, cause even if he did claim that.... they need to consider whether he is, etc, espcially a miracle performer etc. (not that there weren't other performers i guess but...)
the only thing he did, was refer to himself as 'the son of God' and 'the son of man' when confronted on the issue. and when he admitted that, he quoted the old testament which said 'we are all gods', indicating it's hard to be against him when the old testament says that.
the only times he mightve been said to admit it, is not when he was in front of the jews, but in front of his friends in private. 'have i not been with you long enough for you to have seen God?' etc etc. i always say it's more complicated than 'jesus is God' but only cause we usually approach the trinity as a paradox, so that statement is loaded to some extent. (eg, jesus is God, the father is God... but jesus isn't the father-- that sorta paradoxy stuff)
the only thing he did admit, is to being the messiah, the one to come. they wouldn't havet hat, though. apparently they were like everyone else, thinking the messiah would be a guy coming in flames takiing justice out on everyone. that wasnt teh case at all, and so they wouldn't have it. not that they should have held it against jesus, when he didn't meet their expectations. haha
even pilate said that he could find no fault in him. the people didn't care though, and seemd to act more irrationally, out of hate, than anything. that's why they were ready to kill him, instead of a convicted criminal, barabas.


it's easy in all this, to see how jesus probably felt misunderstood, and how the people probably didn't fully grasp what they were doing, it's hard to just come into a realizatio of everything im sayibng, except in retrospect or over time like the apostles. not that they didn't act irreationally and out of hate, though.

Edited October 23, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning." "and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us"

even bible references that refer to jesus as god, are usually mystical. 'with god' and yet 'was god' as if it's conflicting, yet not. like the trinity.
jesus is the word.

Edited October 25, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]What was the point of the sacrifices, if it was not to appease?


There are in the Old Testament many types of sacrifices, only a few having to do with atonement for sin. There were sacrifices of thanksgiving, there were sacrifices of first fruits, there is was the passover sacrifice, and so on. In all of the sacrifices, the central theme is not appeasement, but representational consecration. That is, symbolically through the offering the worshiper says “this offering represents my giving to you my life”, or as you might hear in a love song "God I belong to you, here is my heart". It is not a statement of placation (as if God needed to be bribed into loving us), but an act of devotion, entrusting oneself to God, giving your life into God's hands. In the case of the thanksgiving and first fruits offerings it means that all that we have comes from God and so with these first fruits we acknowledge that it all belongs to God. The passover offering was about the birth of the people of Israel and marked the time of the exodus of God's people out of bondage, so the passover offering was about committing and aligning oneself on God's side against oppression. Finally along with all the other sacrifices the sacrifice of atonement for sin was saying “Here is my life, I want to live it for you Lord. I die to the sinful in me and give my life to you”.



In the same way blood was sprinkled to dedicate the temple, and dedicate the law to God. This was the case with the Passover sacrifice which originated as the people marked their house door showing their allegiance with God, consecrating their house as belonging to the Lord. Thus Jesus when he connects his death with the Passover speaks of a “Covenant” being established by his blood “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Lk22:20). It was the sealing of a promise, like signing a contract in blood. We can see here that whether a sin offering, or a thanks offering, or a dedication that in every case there is the common theme of consecration – dedicating to God. This sense of consecration is conveyed in the Latin root of the word “sacrifice” which means “to make sacred” or "to consecrate". We give ourselves, our lives, our need, our thanks, our allegiance to God vicariously through the ritual of sacrifice.



There is here the aspect of identification with the animal – you bring a part of yourself to the altar, in many cases laying a hand on the animal's head before it is slaughtered. Specifically in the case of the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement we can see also an aspect of transference as the scapegoat was sent off bearing the sin away (Lv 16:21-22). And as previously mentioned there is here a clear aspect of vicarious atonement specifically with the sin offerings - that animal that died was you. The consecration here meant that the sinner brought their broken life to the altar Yet in all of this the writers of the Old Testament are emphatic that the main object of sacrifice is not about a mechanical transaction detached from relationship, but the outward ritual effecting inner change, devotion, and repentance. As David says


“Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean wash me, and I will be whiter than snow...Create in me a pure heart, O God..." (Ps 51:7,10)

David's prayer here is that the outward cleansing of the hyssop would go down and cleanse his inmost being. God, David says, is not interested in outward actions, but in the state of his heart. This is a relational exchange not a legal one.

"You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Ps 51:16-17).[/quote]

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]We left off last time with God saying through Isaiah "I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats". With that in mind, we turn to deal with the popular misconception that the saying “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” in Hebrews 9:22 means that God needs blood in order to be able to forgive, as if it were some sort of magical incantation or legal requirement. However reading the entire verse we see it says


“The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Heb 9:22)


Here the stated purpose of the blood is not to appease through punishment, but to be “cleansed with blood”. Cleansing, or purifying as it is sometimes translated, is associated in this verse with forgiveness. The full formula of Hebrew 9 is that without being cleansed with blood there is no forgiveness. God does not need a sacrifice to forgive us or love us, we need to be made clean inside. Notice below how the writer of Hebrews continually draws a connection between blood and cleansing,


“The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death,so that we may serve the living God!” (Heb 9:13-14)


What does it mean to be purified by blood? In the Hebrew thought, purifying, or sanctification (making holy), involved a purging of what is impure “You must purge the evil from among you” (Dt 13:5 et al). The blood represented, in the Jewish thought, the life of the animal “For the life of a creature is in the blood (Lev 17:11) So the temple sacrifices involved ceremonial act of purging oneself of sin, as Paul says by “dying to sin in us” (Ro 6) vicariously through the death of the animal on the altar. This is understood more broadly, again in terms of consecration, giving over to God “The blood... sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them”. The function of blood here is not to appease, but to “purge out evil” - to sanctify. A similar thought today would be the idea of removing a cancer from our bodies. The two ideas of consecration and sanctification are in fact closely related because the concept of “setting apart” (consecration) is similar to the idea of “purging out evil” (purification). This idea flowed over into their understanding of health conditions and the idea of a person being “unclean” or of certain foods as “unclean”.



This idea of devotion and purification through blood is still of course quite foreign to us today, yet it is a practice found in nearly every ancient culture and one that predates the Jewish temple sacrifice. Unless we want to write all these cultures and people off as “primitive” we would need to assume that there is something reflected in the practice that connects to a fundamental part of our shared human experience. The word “atonement” literally means “made at-one” and generally speaking, all of the various sacrifices can be said to be about connectedness. The first fruits offering expressed an acknowledgment that what we had was not ours alone. The Passover sacrifice expressed a solidarity with God's people in times of trouble. The thanksgiving offering expressed in gratitude an acknowledgment of our connectedness to others. Specifically in the case of the sin offering it was a sense of restoring a broken connection that had been severed by sin. Sacrifice was a ritual that allowed people to work through the very real guilt they felt and their desire to atone for it, not understood in the legal context of a requirement (as if God really needs a cow) or an appeasement (as if one could bribe God or buy his love) but as a way provided by a loving God to work through our guilt and restore our lost connection to God, ourselves, and others. Again, not in the sense of dealing with mere “guilt feelings” disconnected from reality, but of dealing with the alienating reality of a stained conscience. It enacted symbolically the faith that God could make us clean again, mending the bond we had severed.[/quote]




[quote]In the previous installements I've tried to explore how we might understand the Temple Scarifices by understanding mor about the culture they came out of and the meanings they connected to them. We need to keep in mind though that it is vital to understand the meaning and drama behind the Sacrifices rather than their functional mechanics. Being a part of the actual experience of the drama of temple sacrifice effected a person much more deeply that any explanation that can be given for it. In the same way, the crucifixion story can effect and move a person in a way that mere explanations of the atonement cannot. In watching Jesus carry that cross through spit and mud, in seeing the nail scarred hands, we become involved in his story, understanding it on a level that is often outside of our words to express.

Story and ritual have an ability to immerse and involve a person that no analysis can capture. In trying to understand the rites of a culture long ago, it can be helpful to explain the meanings and motivations of the sacrifices; but at their core, they were likely understood in the wordless language of drama, just as we today connect to both ritual and story on a gut level. We are moved by it, but do not have words. No amount of musical theory can explain why a Bach recital will move a person to tears, or for that matter what it it's like to be in the middle of a mosh pit at punk rock concert. To truly understand we need to be immersed in it. Understood in this way, the ritual of Sacrifice enacted the drama of re-connection. It was more than anything understood on a gut level, not on a mechanical one.

The drama of the Temple Sacrifices - like all story - spoke to people a the core of who they were. It acted out the profound longing in the worshiper for connection. The book of Hebrews tells us that the temple sacrifice was a “copy and shadow of what is in heaven” (Heb 8:5). The true picture is found in Christ who is both the perfect mediator, and the perfect sacrifice. In other words, the reality that the story of the sacrifices pointed to was the cross. The cross is, in the words of C.S. Lewis “a myth which is also a fact” that myth - meaning a story that defines us as people - has “come down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history”. The story of our deepest yearnings rooted in the reality of who we are, came and lived among us, died on a cross, and rose again. The temple sacrifices were an earthly symbol for the heavenly reality enacted on the cross. God in Christ takes our place, does what we could not do, breaks us out of the grip of guilt, and makes our hearts clean again.

As much as we can try to understand the Temple Sacrifices, the fact remains that it is still pretty upsetting to think about. Perhaps this gut reaction we have tells us something important. Quite plainly, we are reminded in Hebrews that in the temple sacrifice a real animal was slaughtered and died. In the same way, the fact of the crucifixion was that Jesus really died a horrific death. We should be wary of any theory of the cross that makes the death of Jesus either “self-evident” (like a rational legal theory can), or “romanticizes” the crucifixion into palatable and noble metaphors (as a Christus Victor theory can). Any metaphors and meaning we might see in the cross are not abstract images, but refer to the real and bloody death of Jesus on the cross. Yes it was necessary, and yes it is about God's love, but it also is a shock. When we today find the idea of animal sacrifice to be something shocking and primitive, this is in fact exactly the reaction Paul describes to his preaching of the crucified Christ by both Jews and Greeks who saw the cross as “a stumbling block” and “foolishness”.

The cross as practised by Rome was by no means a symbol of the “fulfilment of justice”, it was a symbol of great shame and failure. If we want to understand the cross, that is where we need to begin – in its shame and failure. The cross was to the people of Jesus' time something horrific, and one cannot get around that by trying to frame it in detached legal terms that call a scandal “reasonable”. Likewise, as much as we may be tempted to have a “bloodless cross” and only focus on God's love and good news, this we also must not do. Life begins at the cross. One must face its horror dead on, one must have the courage to look at its ugliness and at our own ugliness. There, in the shadow of the cross, we will find life. [/quote]

Edited October 30, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[dairygirl4u2c]

at the most basic level of my understanding... i always understood the sacrifice of animals back when i was younger, in the same way we see 'first fruits' sacrificed, or 'guilt sacrifices'. people are trying to give to God what they have, they're trying to do what they can. 'i offer you my heifer because i can'. also 'my sins and life are represented in this heifer' also, and that part of me is slayed and given to God to deal take and/or deal with.
it doesn't 'vibe' with anything ive ever felt intiutively, until i started hearing that's teh way it was by legalists, that they and we are 'doing a legal exchange' for the sake of appeasing justice.

[dairygirl4u2c]

this concept is clarified when one thinks of a priest walking down the aisle sprinkling everyone with holy water. back in those days, they did it with blood. the point is about cleansing though-- the life of the animal to cleanse, the life of the people will be cleansed. this is being said in terms of cleansing and relatinoship uilding and sanctifclessation, not really about appeasement for legalistic justice.

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]Propitiation is a word that in not in common use today. Proponents of Penal Substitution use it frequently, primarily referring to Romans 3:25

"(Christ Jesus) Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God"

This is the passage that Luther was struggling with in yesterday's post and begins with Paul's statement "Now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known... This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe". We saw that this righteousness "apart from law" was about God setting things right when we trust in him to work for us and in us. It involves a fundamental change in how we understand righteousness and justice, not as performance, but "apart from law" as something God does for sinners. But how does that work? All are "justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus" but how did it come? In the next verse (3:25) Paul says it was through the cross. And here we find that word (at least in King James) "propitiation".

Propitiation literally means "to make favorable". It is similar to words like appeasement (Lit "to make peace") and Pacify (again to bring peace). However with all of these the context is placed on the idea of turning aside another's wrath usually through a gift or offering. The immediate difficulty with such as idea is that God does not need to be "made favorable" since he is the initiator of reconciliation. God is the one who "first loved us". It is vital to note that virtually no major proponent of Penal Substitution sees the cross as God's favor being purchased through sacrifice (which is what propitiation means) since this represents a pagan idea of sacrifice. John Stott writes that propitiation "does not make God gracious...God does not love us because Christ died for us, Christ died for us because God loves us" (The Cross of Christ p.174) Calvin writes "Our being reconciled by the death of Christ must not be understood as if the Son reconciled us, in order that the Father, then hating, might begin to love us"(Institutes II 16:4)

Secondly, since it is God who makes the propitiation this amounts to "God paying God". You cannot propitiate yourself any more than you can steal from yourself or bribe yourself. What it amounts to is a word being stretched beyond the breaking point until it no longer fits. Propitiation is a concept that comes from a pagan understanding of the sacrifices where the sacrifice purchased the gods favor and humor. That is not the case here since it is God who makes the offering of himself.

So how did the word "propitiation" get into Romans 3:25? The original Greek word is hilasterion. Hilasterion is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew kapporeth which refers to the Mercy Seat of the Arc. Luther in his translation of the Bible renders Hilasterion as "Gnadenstuhl" which is German for Mercy Seat. In context this means that "God has set forth Jesus as the mercy seat (the place where atonement and expiation happen) through faith in his blood". Jesus is thus "the place where we find mercy". Many new translations render Hislateron for this reason as "expiate" because the Temple Sacrifices to not have an element of appeasing of wrath in them and thus this seems to be a more fitting translation if it refers to the Mercy Seat in the Temple. Expiation literally means "to make pious" (similar to sanctify) and implies either the removal or cleansing of sin.

The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means. We are "made favorable" (propitiation) when our sin is removed (expiation). The problem is not that God is unwilling or unloving (propitiation), but that our sin causes a real break in relationship. As with any relationship, that break must be mended. This is what expiation refers to. Expiation is about cleaning or removing of sin and has no reference to quenching God's righteous anger. The difference is that the object of expiation is sin, not God. Grammatically, one propitiates a person, and one expiates a problem. You cannot expiate (remove) a person or God, nor can one propitiate (make favorable) sin. Christ's death was therefore both an expiation and a propitiation. By expiating (removing the problem of) sin God was made propitious (favorable) to us. Again not because God then suddenly loved us, but because the break in the relationship was mended.

Theologians stress the idea of propitiation because it specifically addresses the aspect of the atonement dealing with God's wrath. Leon Morris for instance argued for the translation of "propitiation" in Romans 3:25 because he said the thrust of Paul in Romans up til then had been on God's wrath. This is true. However the way that that wrath was dealt with was not though the anger of God being pacified through a gift (propitiation) but rather though God actually solving the problem by removing our sin as a doctor remove3s a cancer (expiation) thus making us "right".

Given then that virtually no proponent of Penal Substitution uses the word propitiation (or appeasement) as it is actually defined in English, it seems a bad word to use that leads to a false understanding of God as one who demands to be paid before he will love us rather than a God who pays what he does not owe because he loves us so much and gives his own life for us. God is not "made favorable" to us through a gift, rather God makes us favorable by giving his life.[/quote]

[dairygirl4u2c]

"(Christ Jesus) Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God"

read, 'expiration' or 'removal of our sins', instead of 'propiation' in a legal sense.

[dairygirl4u2c]

from the above quotes.
not appeasement, which is a pagan concept. it was a sacrifice of consecration. jesus consecrated himself to God, on the cross.
this avoids all the confusion like, 'so the people weren't intending the sacrifice, so how could it count?'. per legal type thinkers.
i'm not sure what to make of the fact that the people also were not like old testament folks, who at least also intended the sacrifice. maybe it was just jesus' sacrifie, his consecration, not so much what we had to do with it. and, as said before, those who consecrate themselves to him also consecrate themselves to jesus' life and death, and then will become part of hte body of christ, and like jesus be resurrected.

Edited October 30, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c