Human Sacrifice
Ready for a shake up?Where do you think this passage came from, and what do you think about it?
Those evil humans down on earth. I hate what they are doing. All this sin...
Since I am all-knowing I know exactly what the humans are doing and I understand exactly why they commit each sin. Since I created the humans in my own image and personally programmed human nature into their brains, I am the direct author of all of this sin. The instant I created them I knew exactly what would happen with every single human being right down to the nanosecond level for all eternity. If I didn't like how it was going to turn out, I could have simply changed them when I created them. And since I am perfect, I know exactly what I am doing. But ignore all that. I hate all these people doing exactly what I perfectly designed them to do and knew they would do from the moment I created them...
So here's what I am going to do. I will artificially inseminate a virgin. She will give birth to an incarnated version of me. The humans will eventually crucify and kill the incarnated me. That will, finally, make me happy. Yes, sending myself down and having the humans crucify me -- that will satisfy me. I feel much better now.
I Give You This;
Hi Chris
The quoted passage in your original post was a straight parody of what is fundamentally a parabolic and paradoxical story.The 'big picture' of God, love, pain and the whole darned thing as drawn in the Bible is not so ridiculously framed.However, I don't think the usual way of interpreting the story is entirely correct either and so I will agree that some common Christian teachings lead into absurdity. Emergent thinkers are trying to reframe aspects of the story so that it will be better understood in or times and be more internally consistent and so better reflect (what we hope are) the true qualities of the Deity.Of course we could be wrong and God could be as capricious and demanding and uncaring as natural disasters, disease and poverty and fundamental preaching seem to imply that He is. Or perhaps as others suggest maybe He doesn’t exist at all. That could be true but that position doesn’t eliminate paradoxes, it replaces some of them with the mysteries of why any life at all, why intelligent life, why innate feelings of right and wrong in human kind, why love, why beauty, why the need to ask why?Let’s start looking at some of this big picture story stuff.Would you agree that there is a difference between contradictions (irreconcilable positions, logical absurdities) and paradoxes (things appearing contradictory in one point of reference or one dimension, but which can be profitably understood and utilized in another)?Is it possible that if higher dimensions exist they could intersect and interact with lower ones and that a relationship between the levels may be mutually beneficial? (I am going to run a foul of much traditional thinking but this is an exploration and if Columbus never was allowed to leave port we might be still living in the flat world.)Is it possible that from a higher reference point man's freedom and God's sovereignty are not incompatible? That we have to work as if everything depends on us, while praying as if everything depends on Him. Could it be that an Omnipotent God may require something from us that He cannot provide or create without us? Is it possible that the cross was not really a blood sacrifice to an enraged, insulted psychotic dictator? Can it be that the cross might have been a two-way reconciliation, God towards man because of our failure to love Him and those made in His image, and Man towards God because of the process set in place by God in making the world and allowing (I think ordaining) our Fall into conscious choice which naturally leads to sin and separation and suffering. I would say that creating Sons of God was God’s first last and only plan. The Garden was not the hoped for ending point. It was only the beginning. The plan apparently had to include free choice, sin and consequences (I cannot imagine that God would not have chosen another way if one were available. The suffering of innocents cannot be reconciled if there was a fiat way to make the Sons of God)). Because God could do it no other way He may have been asking us for a sort of forgiveness (reconciliation) because He had unilaterally required our participation in the creation of the Sons of God through suffering. As Billy Joel aptly said, ‘I didn’t start the fire’, but it’s a burnin’. God does have something to answer for and he answered in Jesus and we all will accept the answer when we see the culmination of the plan, namely the revelation of the Sons of God.In this exploration of story the cross becomes more than a sin sacrifice. It becomes the cornerstone of the foundation or the linchpin of a mysterious mechanism that makes possible the creation of the Sons of God.In this telling of the story the Fall is seen as the necessary ‘one step back’ in order to facilitate the ‘two steps forward’ that will allow us to transcend Adam’s estate and to enter into close kinship with Jesus Christ and God Himself.It would seem senseless for scripture to say that Jesus was crucified from the foundation of the world if Adam’s fall wasn’t foreseen, and even foreordained. I cannot believe that the Fall was a surprise to God and that Jesus was a patch-up job rushed on the scene to cover God’s oversight. If freedom did not exist, and so sin never entered the world, then Adam would be the end point. Humanity would be at ease roaming the fields as unconscious as the animals and God would have to content Himself with getting out the leash to walk the human pets in the cool of the evening. God had a higher purpose for creation and it is found in plan A (The old way of telling the story makes Jesus a backup, a plan B, if you will). I don’t want to abandon belief in a Good, Loving and Powerful God (the Christian God), but I have had to abandon a telling of the story that declares a simple blood sacrifice for Adam’s sins as the whole story of the cross and of human suffering and human history.The retelling I have hinted at here seems (at least to me) to be internally consistent and not outside the biblical narrative. What do you think?The story of human life may be paradoxical but it does not have to be nonsensical and absurd. I chose to believe that life in all its ugly unfairness has meaning and purpose and a hope for redemption,I am a follower of Christ. A doubting, suffering one, but nonetheless a Christian. That is of course is if other Christians will have me and my idiosyncratic approach to telling the old, old story.
LH
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