Religion: Why Did Jesus Die?

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A little while later, Ramey reflected on the meeting. "It's not that these people are not nice people," he said politely. "But they have a different reality. You get so high up, you don't have a clue as to the real truth of the Gospel, which is that suffering is part of salvation."

Another testimony to the fizz still in this debate is that it remains a good marker in the culture wars. Political scientist John Green of Ohio's Akron University notes that the sense of sin integral to substitution theory informs the religious right's politics of individual morality. Indeed, substitution's top-down nature reaffirms conservatives' scorn of any rights that they feel lack God's biblical imprimatur. "The substitutionary understanding is humbling," says Mohler. "It has the Father in the position of satisfying his righteous demands of us through Christ's atonement. We don't have the authority to define our own existence or to claim rights such as a woman's right to abortion."

By contrast, Randall Balmer, head of the religion department at Barnard College in New York City, says exemplarist Christians might support issues like gay rights on the ground of "Jesus' compassion for humanity, which we ought to emulate by being gracious and accepting and inclusive and noncondemnatory." Martin Luther King Jr.'s affirmation that "an unearned suffering is redemptive" was exemplarist, although his theology didn't boil down to just that.

MIXING, MATCHING, SEARCHING

In fact, the majority of Christians are neither purely substitutionary nor purely exemplary in their outlook. JoAnne Terrell, author of Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience, has faith in a substitutionary atonement through the death of Jesus. It is, she affirms, "one of the cornerstone beliefs of the African-American church." But she believes in some other things too. Some years back, sitting in a seminary class, she had a flashback. She was a girl again, and her mother had just been murdered by her boyfriend. Once more Terrell saw the blood-soaked mattress and her mother's bloody handprint on the wall. And suddenly, "I had to find a connection between my mom's story and my story and Jesus' story," she says.

The Christ connecting those stories was not just the one whose death had delivered her from sin. Terrell says he was also the Christ who generations of African Americans have believed suffered with them as well as for them. And, she adds, the Christ who in his life had "stood up to abusive authorities and an abusive culture and taught people how to do that." These Christs, rolled into one Christ, stood by her in her pain, enabled her to see her mother as having died standing up to her abuser and helped Terrell find her place as a person "trying to live unto God." And so, she says, "Jesus is really for us not substitutionary only but also the one who truly identifies with us and goes with us in suffering and can provide us an example of how to live our lives."