Word: jesus
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...Graham, pastor of the Prestonwood Baptist megachurch in Plano, Texas, a full understanding might still elude us. "There are many mysteries of atonement that we won't understand this side of eternity," he says. Discussion is also stunted by American Christianity's ongoing romance with a friendly, helpful, personal Jesus, which has made detailed discussion of his violent death an increasingly difficult pulpit pitch. Says theologian and broadcaster R.C. Sproul: "You don't hear people preaching about the atonement anymore. I don't think there's any great difference there between Protestant evangelicalism and the mainline churches either...
Well, not until six weeks ago. Thanks to the Gibson movie, "the atonement is back on the agenda of American culture," says Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University and author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. "This is a major shift. Atonement has been Belief No. 10 for Americans. But they care more now. This is Crucifixion Christianity...
Behind those questions is A sense of tragic estrangement that predates Jesus' life and death by thousands of years. Since religion has existed, God has (or the gods have) always been defined by otherness. But for just as long, humans have feared that the alienation was increasing. "Why, O Lord, do You stand aloof?" cried the Psalmist, eventually concluding that the reason was human disobedience and sin. By Jesus' time, Jewish temple ritual included regular sin sacrifices freighted with hopes for reconciliation, or atonement, with God. (The word's original English meaning of unity is evident in its three syllables...
...book Hebrews, for instance, directly appropriates the Jewish sacrificial metaphor, except this time, Jesus is both priest and sacrifice, spilling, "not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption." The Gospel of Mark favors Roman legal language for the freeing of slaves: "the Son of Man came ... to give his life as a ransom for many." The First Epistle of Peter, meanwhile, takes a radically different tack, posing Jesus' trials as occasion for imitation: "because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." And Paul...
...early church fathers did pick up on the scriptural language of Christ's death as a ransom, the payee was not God but the devil, who some felt had legitimate claim on humanity because of Adam's fall. But others preferred another scenario: to see the Crucifixion and Jesus' subsequent descent into what they called Hades as a kind of divine bait-and-switch scheme, whereby the devil thought he had claimed a particularly virtuous human victim only to discover he had allowed into his sanctum the power that would eventually wrest humanity back from his grasp. St. Augustine likened...