The Hawk or the Dove: beginning thoughts on non-violent atonement

April 19, 2009

4 comments

1 Sue { 19 Apr 2009 at 4:09 pm }

“If there’s one thing I want you to remember from our talk today, it’s that you killed Jesus.” This was a K-5 assembly. He said this to kindergarteners.

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Cool! Then when those kids grow up with major mental illness from dissociating from themselves, then he can condemn them again about how God is going to send them to hell forever and ever.

I really get fucking angry at this kind of milk faith. I wish they would just shut the hell up.

Anywya, I was so angry I had to stop reading your article and come here and complain. Now I am going back to read the end :)

2 Sue { 19 Apr 2009 at 4:17 pm }

Okay, I’m back now. Hallelujah for more and more voices seeing things and speaking what they see :) Wheee!!

Yes, I do subscribe to this view of the cross and what it means. It is amazing what follows after that, when the dissonance is gone.

I was thinking the other day about him hanging there and saying, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Of course, the commonly held consensus is that God had turned his back because Jesus was hanging there with the sin of the world on him and God could not bear to look upon him, being holy and just and all.

But Wayne Jacobsen and George Macdonald and others cast a different light on it when they suggest that God did not go anywhere. He was exactly where he was, where he had always been. But Jesus for the first time experienced separation from his Father. It was in Jesus’ PERCEPTION that the Father had left which gives me so much hope now. Because now, when I feel that way myself – and who doesn’t? – then there is this amazing sense of peace even when I am walking with very little sense of God’s presence. He has been even here in this space. Jesus knows what this feels like, this disconnect, this aloneness. It is so comforting. Amazing.

Sorry about swearing before. I am sick of living in a world where so many people see something so amazing through such sick eyes. Really jacks me off :)

3 Bethany { 19 Apr 2009 at 5:12 pm }

Your post and those you linked to prompted a really good conversation with my husband about Easter, atonement, and all that jazz. He, having grown up in a loving and “functional” Christian family, has a lot of balanced views of the Bible that he tends to take for granted until I tell him some of the INSANITY that was my religious upbringing.
I was kindergarten-age myself when I was first given the play-by-play of Jesus’s suffering. When my mother started describing the cat-o-nine-tails, I was so traumatized that I began to laugh, hysterically. I couldn’t stop laughing even though my heart felt mangled, and I was severely punished for the incident. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to watch “The Passion of the Christ” when it came out several years ago. Obligation. I think that’s why so many people converted after seeing the film. “My sins made Jesus suffer; the least I can do is follow him.”
I love your phrase “intuitive dissonance,” because that is exactly how I felt sitting in that movie theater wanting to run away from all the gore. A focus on the violence of Jesus’s death does little to enforce his teachings of grace and reconciliation. Plus, if you grew up believing as I did that God made Jesus pay in pain for everyone’s sins, guilt is not the only unfortunate by-product. It produces anger at God. Disenchantment with the Christmas story. An incredibly warped understanding of God’s kingdom.
My husband agrees, with some amount of shock at what I grew up learning. For him, Easter has never been about the concept of “atonement” or what a horrible price God required of Jesus. Easter is about Jesus handing himself over to Evil so that he could kick its ass for us.
Thanks for writing this column and sparking some great discussions… as well as an intense relief [and I say this in all seriousness] that I never need to watch “Passion of the Christ” again.

4 Anj { 20 Apr 2009 at 3:13 am }

Thank you – I think I have waited my whole life to read someone write something like this.

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