The Doctrine Of Substitutionary Atonement

[Brother Jeff]

This glorious article is on the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, which of course, is absolutely crucial to the Christian religion. In simple terms, it is the claim that one man's sacrifice paid the price for the sins of many and satisfied the judgment and justice of God. But, is this doctrine actually true, does it make sense and, separated from its religious context, how should it be viewed by modern 21st Century people?

 

I firmly believed for 15 years of my life that Jesus Christ had paid the penalty for my sins against God when he died on the cross some 2000 year ago. And, of course, I believed that his resurrection assured me of an eternal life in Heaven with him. I accepted this Christian "history" as factual for many years, but by the time I reached the age of 34 in late 1999, I had many doubts and many questions about my faith that I could no longer conveniently write off as coming from the devil. I got on the Net as it was in early 2000 and went looking for information critical of the Bible and the Christian religion. I was on an honest search for answers, since what I was hearing from the popular Christian apologists of the day wasn't satisfying me at all. I came across sites such as http://www.infidels.org and http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net and, of course, http://www.exchristian.net .The rest, as they say, is history. It wasn't long before I was free of the fundamentalist Christian cult, but I was left with psychological and emotional baggage that would take years to process and work through.

 

I have had fourteen years to think about and learn about the Christian religion and Christian doctrine from a non-believing atheist perspective, but it has only been recently that I have really seriously thought about the central Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement. My conclusions are that it is a barbaric doctrine by today's moral standards, and that in addition to that, it doesn't make logical, rational sense.

 

Christians believe that there is one God who expresses himself in three separate but equally divine Persons -- the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. This attribute of God is commonly known as the doctrine of the Trinity, but even it doesn't make rational sense and is difficult for Christians to explain, except through bad and very loose analogies such as the three physical states of water. As they explain it liquid water, steam, and ice are all water though they exist as water in different forms. In the same way, the three members of the Trinity are all God, in different forms.

 

But, at any rate, the reasons that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement no longer makes sense to me are that is barbaric, it doesn't make sense that the death of one man can pay the penalty for the wrongdoing (sin) of another, and the doctrine of the Trinity -- which is absurd in and of itself -- makes the doctrine of substitutionary atonement absurd.

 

Let's consider the sacrifice Jesus supposedly made in light of modern standards of morality. According to the Christian story, Jesus was God in the flesh (John 1:1, 1:14), and he came to this earth to teach us who God is and then, as Christians believe was prophesied centuries earlier in the Old Testament starting with Genesis 3:15, he was beaten and died an excruciatingly painful death on a Roman cross. This act, supposedly, was to pay the penalty for the sins of all of mankind and to satisfy the judgment and justice of God. This all sounded wonderful beyond measure to me for many years. I was awed that Jesus loved me so much that he was willing to go through the kind of pain and suffering that he is depicted as enduring in the Gospels and to die for me. The thought that "I am so bad and so evil and so depraved that I killed Jesus" never once crossed my mind. I was just awed by what I saw at the time as an incredibly amazing act of divine love. But now... I see it as simply <em>barbaric</em>. Consider the flogging and crucifixion of Jesus as it is so graphically depicted in Mel Gibson's 2004 movie "The Passion of the Christ."

 

 

 

According to the Christian story, Jesus was beaten and crucified to pay the penalty for our sins, and at least in churches that I attended, we were made to believe that Jesus had us personally in mind when he endured this brutal suffering and death 2000 years ago. But... it is an act of brutal barbarism that no longer makes sense to me. Supposedly, Jesus was God in the flesh, so God was sacrificing Himself to Himself to save us from Himself. The absurdity of that reality aside for the moment, how does the brutal beating and death of one man, Jesus Christ, 2000 years ago have any bearing on any of us living today? What meaning did it really have for those living even at that time? It no longer makes sense to me that one man can pay the penalty for the wrongdoing (sin) of another. And really, for an all-loving and all-knowing God, is the brutal beating and crucifixion and sacrifice of Himself to Himself as his one and only begotten Son the best way he could think of to deal with the problem of sin and to absolve us of them? This doctrine may have made perfect sense to the Bronze Age minds of men living 2000 years ago in a world much more brutal than our own, but to the modern 21st Century mind, when it is stripped of its religious context, it is simply brutal, and it makes no rational sense.

 

When I hear the story of the brutal beating and crucifixion of Jesus now, I no longer feel awe or thankfulness or even guilt or shame. All I feel, quite honestly, is horror and disgust that such a brutal and barbaric doctrine is at the heart of an ancient religion that still dominates Western thought and culture in our modern 21st Century world.

 

LINK: http://religionisbullshit.me/doctrine-substitutionary-atonement/

 

EDIT: I wrote this late this evening while I was pretty damned tired and I've had trouble sleeping anyway recently, so I am open to any suggestions for corrections, clarifications, or additional thoughts. Thanks. Glory!

[DoubtingNate]

[Castiel233]

Interesting OP and well written. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement

is all a mystery until "after" you die and then "you'll know". How convenient 

[seven77]

What has bothered me over the years on this doctrine is not that it is brutal (it is and there's no way around that) or that it is irrational (without my Jesus glasses, I can't even entertain the "logic" of it all).

 

No, what really bothers me is that I have always sort of thought that Jesus deserved it all. He was punished, not for our sins, but for a crime against the Roman government. He was a rebel, a criminal who was encouraging an uprising against the Roman overlords. Or trying to rather unsuccessfully. All he really did was piss off the Jewish leaders, who were like "Seriously, we are not putting up with this shit. Another asshole who thinks he's the messiah, ugh, we do not need this shit right now!"

 

The core of Jesus' message in 2 of the 4 gospels (Mark and Matthew, imho) is for the Jews. He was a prophet of sorts, a doomsday messianic who wanted to change the system. He wanted to buck the Law that the Jewish leaders enforced. He was stirring the pot within the Jewish community by going from town to town, targeting women, children, and the disabled. If he would have had his way, the Jewish communities would have collapsed under his so-called enlightenment.

 

I've thought about this a lot due to my background of faith being in a Messianic context. We were taught that Jesus was the Jewish messiah, that his message was the ONE RIGHT MESSAGE. We were all supposed to live like Jesus, including embracing his Jewishness to the fullest extent we were able without fully converting to Judaism. Jesus called Yeshua was our leader, leading the Gentiles back to the ONE RIGHT WAY. Did I mention there's only ONE RIGHT everything, lol?

 

If the Jews had listened and believed that Jesus was their prophesied messiah, they would have openly embraced his message. They would cast aside the Law (the bullshit laws that were not "of the heart") and would have lived radically different lives. They didn't though, and I wondered why. If Jesus' message was provocative and was really the ONE RIGHT MESSAGE...then why did his own people in his own time reject him? Surely they would have been more versed in their holy book, Law, and prophesies than we are. They would have lived in the context, heard the words as they were spoken, seen and touched and literally walked with the Messiah in the flesh, which is far fucking more than any modern believers have ever gotten to do.

 

Somehow, we are to believe that his people got it wrong when they sent him to the cross. However, if they hadn't have sent him to the cross, the message likely would never have come to the Gentiles. We'd still be worshiping pagan idols or the sun or nothing at all. If Jesus Christ hadn't have died for those three days, it is likely that he would have faded into the fabric of time like the other 100 Jesus' of his time. That is ultimately where my problems with Substitutionary Atonement lie. What was so fucking special about Jesus Christ that his death and only his death could pay for the weight of the world's sins?

 

My answer: Nothing. He was just another ancient Jew put to death for speaking out against the empire and raising hell amongst the Jews. His blood doesn't cleanse us, his death doesn't save us. The Trinity is a bunch of bullshit cooked up by Paul to sell the package to the Gentiles.

 

In the end, Jesus' death didn't do and still doesn't do shit for us. He died for our sins, yet we keep sinning. He spoke against the system and would likely be a socialist in modern contexts, yet the system remains and his ardent followers are some of the tightest-assed right-wingers you'll ever meet. His death was pointless and his life was a fairytale. I'm sorry, but I think the ancients had better mythology and that the Romantic authors wrote better fairytales and fantasy works. Modern spec-fic and fanfic is far more entertaining and passionate than the gospels can ever hope to be.

[Brother Jeff]

My friend and brother in Kryasst, Richard, has some thoughts to share on this topic too:

 

http://reckersworld.jimdo.com/religion/christ-s-death-redundant/

 

Glory!