Religion: Why Did Jesus Die?

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For relief, they turned to a source as old as Anselm. The French theologian Peter Abelard had also worked in the Middle Ages to address Jesus' role in reducing sinful humanity's distance from God, but he did so without recourse to tit-for-tat transaction. His atonement took place less as a compact between God the Father and God the Son and more in the hearts of believers cleaving to the message of Jesus' life--and the love most dramatically expressed in his willingness to die rather than renounce his calling. "Love answers love's appeal," Abelard wrote. With Jesus' example before it, humanity, its deaf ear reopened, could now gain salvation and reconciliation with God.

Notes Yale theologian Serene Jones: "In substitution theory, the problem between humanity and God is one of debt. In Abelardian theory, the problem is one of ignorance. We don't have enough information." This fit in nicely with the Enlightenment spirit, and it took wing. The Hartford, Conn., minister Horace Bushnell, its great 19th century proponent, declared that atonement's new location was not in "remote fields of being" but in humanity, as "a moral effect, wrought in the mind of the race." Jesus' death became less central, because it was no longer the price for lifting the burden of sin; instead, Bushnell's successors took to preaching the Saviour's life, exhorting their congregations to strive toward reconciliation with the Father by emulating the Son's healings, his scourging of the money changers or his precepts of love and tolerance.

This theory is known as exemplary atonement, and it was expounded with vigor a few weeks ago by the Rev. Shafer at Rutgers Presbyterian. Shafer, having just seen The Passion of the Christ, felt moved to respond to what he regarded as its assumption that "the central purpose of Jesus' existence [was] to offer himself as a sacrificial ransom to a God made angry by our sin." The pastor disagreed. "The mission and purpose of Jesus' life and ministry," he preached, "was, first, to model for humankind the fullness of mercy and forgiveness that God offers to us sinners and, second, to model for us the perfection of love that God is and that those who accept God's forgiveness are invited, by God's grace, to become." Thus, Shafer concluded, "it is not Jesus' death that can save us but his life!"

BATTLING VISIONS

It is still possible to have a really good fight about the meaning of the Cross. In 1994, for example, when a participant in a national feminist conference paid for in part by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced that "I don't think we need a theory of atonement at all; I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff," the backlash to the remark and other controversial aspects of the conference resulted in the resignation of one high Presbyterian official and a cost in contributions that the denomination estimated at $2.5 million.