I’ve always struggled connecting the dots between Jesus’s death and mankind’s redemption. I’d heard “Jesus died for our sins” but never understood how one influenced the other. Where I’ve landed is that human beings did something truly unforgivable, that is, persecuting, humiliating, torturing and murdering the son of God, a literally perfect human being, who did not deserve any of that. And yet, he forgave them anyway. This provides us a model and gives us permission to forgive those who trespass against us. If Jesus forgave his own crucifixion, we can certainly forgive our fellow man, and ourselves. Not sure if that falls under one of the theories of atonement, or if it’s correct, but it feels right to me.
I feel like there’s a through line between that and Luke forgiving Space Hitler for all of his crimes, the primary one being abandoning him to fight it out alone in a chaotic galaxy.
Appreciate that Peter. And yeah I think that's a pretty solid way to think about the cross. I'm not sure either exactly where that would fall in theories of atonement, but it's definitely a fair reading. The beauty of the cross is it's such a robust, central event in the faith that there will be a number of angles of looking at it that are different but still true.
I’ve always struggled connecting the dots between Jesus’s death and mankind’s redemption. I’d heard “Jesus died for our sins” but never understood how one influenced the other. Where I’ve landed is that human beings did something truly unforgivable, that is, persecuting, humiliating, torturing and murdering the son of God, a literally perfect human being, who did not deserve any of that. And yet, he forgave them anyway. This provides us a model and gives us permission to forgive those who trespass against us. If Jesus forgave his own crucifixion, we can certainly forgive our fellow man, and ourselves. Not sure if that falls under one of the theories of atonement, or if it’s correct, but it feels right to me.
I feel like there’s a through line between that and Luke forgiving Space Hitler for all of his crimes, the primary one being abandoning him to fight it out alone in a chaotic galaxy.
Appreciate that Peter. And yeah I think that's a pretty solid way to think about the cross. I'm not sure either exactly where that would fall in theories of atonement, but it's definitely a fair reading. The beauty of the cross is it's such a robust, central event in the faith that there will be a number of angles of looking at it that are different but still true.
For my part, the way I've been thinking about the atonement in the past number of years can be summarized here: https://atberg.substack.com/p/jesus-died-on-passover-not-yom-kippur
“Forgiveness is merely the vehicle to bring humans out of our captivity to the kingdom of darkness.” Great read!