Word: jesus
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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...
...Susan Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, of her experience as a spiritual counselor: "Countless women have told me that their priest or minister had advised them, as 'good Christian women' to accept beatings by their husbands as 'Christ accepted the cross.' An overemphasis on the suffering of Jesus to the exclusion of his teaching has tended to be used to support violence...
...First United Methodist while living in a nearby shelter. "Can't a person benefit from someone else's suffering?" he asked. "My brother saved me from getting beat up more than once by taking the beatings himself. I'm going through suffering now," he said. "If I look at Jesus' suffering, I know I can do this." The other participants humored him for a few minutes but gave no ground...
...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...
...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...