Where it all begins (or so you might think if you live around here)

If you live in the South (or in a “red” state, or maybe in any state in the States), you routinely come across all sorts of public expressions of religiosity. Around Asheville, N.C., somebody apparently has pretty steady work setting up life-size (”Crucify up to a 350-pound man right in your own back yard!”) talking crosses in church yards and along roadsides. A variation on “Jesus Saves” seems to be the most popular message, but my personal favorite is “Blood-Secured Redemption” (unfortunately, the “Blood-Secured Redemption” cross isn’t as photogenic as the one pictured above).

Now, these crosses are great as roadside folk art–but as theology, needless to say (I hope), they leave a little to be desired. Yes, according to the culturally dominant line of “atonement theory” (the branch of theology that deals with how salvation “works”), Jesus’s blood does indeed save: Jesus’s death pays the penalty for our sin, satisfying the blood-lust of a wrathful God who would cast us all into the fiery pit had Jesus not come along to take our place on the cross, &c.

Logically, legalistically, and mathematically, this so-called substitutionary atonement makes sense. But it raises some questions, chief among them this: If God is so blood-thirsty and angry as to require the death penalty for human sin, why would God send Jesus to save us in the first place?

Obviously you can get trapped in all sorts of circular arguments when you start thinking about these things, but maybe the problem lies simply in starting with these things–-i.e, starting with what’s in it for us. Maybe instead we should start where the ancient Hebrews started: