The Sacrifice of the Son of God
April 27th, 2008 by JohnO
Click here to listen to The Sacrifice of the Son of God as delivered by Alex Hall, Apr 27, 2008 in Atlanta Georgia. Commentary by John Obelenus
In the introduction Alex brings up a good point about assumptions and how they guide how we assimilate information into our pre-existing belief structure.
Next he brings a strong counterpoint to the common belief that Jesus had to be God to die for our sins. Based on a survey of the New Testament, it is in fact Jesus’ humanity that was a necessity for forgiveness, not any divinity.
The Gnostic dualism of matter vs spirit influenced the doctrine of the Person of Jesus needing to be God. God, that is spirit, which is good, must be present to “save” the flesh, matter, which is bad. Only by God becoming Jesus (not Jesus being God) was anything accomplished.
Instead the Biblical picture is a good creation which has “been subjected to futility”. In which a “damaged relationship between humanity and God” has occurred. Then, to “save” means to fundamentally solve this relational problem.
Alex adds a nice comment on Rom 5.15 saying: “Adam was not divine though he had divine parentage being a direct creation of God. Why shouldn’t the same conclusion be sufficient to qualify Jesus?”
Even the wonderful picture of a victorious resurrection of God’s suffering messenger is marred by a God-man picture. Rather than Jesus being rewarded for his innocence and obedience, the resurrection now only means that he could not have died, as a result of his divinity. It isn’t a miracle, nor victorious, just an attribute of his being - an inability to die.
Alex reminds us that Adam Christology is the foundational marker for understanding Jesus’ identity. Jesus succeeds in the garden where Adam failed in the garden. Only because of Jesus’ success is he resurrected, and empowered as the Son of God, on the throne.
He goes deep into the comparison of a spirit-filled human with a God-filled body. In each case, what is left on the cross? A human, or a body. The narrative seems to tell us that a human was left on the cross, not just a body. In the case of a God-filled body, the God part did not die for sin, it does not die, it did not die, only the unimportant body was left. Not the identity of the actual person died, the part that lived on in eternity past. Just a body thirty years used. This is exactly what Hippolytus, an early church father stated.
“Only a ‘merely’ human Jesus could give up everything he is, completely offering his whole self, pouring out his soul to death. Only for him could that surrender be a genuine step of faith, into the unknown, as opposed to the return to a prior state of existence in a far better place than the troubled streets of an occupied land”
“… the continuing insistence that Jesus had to be God in order to do this is incompatible with the framework provided for us by the New Testament and does violence to its fabric.”
I really enjoyed this talk. One of the staggering points made was that the unitarian view of atonement actually results in thinking higher of the sacrifice of Christ than the trinitarian position. This is counterintuitive at first, but makes perfect sense. Typically, ‘orthodox’ Christian sneers down his nose at the biblical unitarian because the trinitarian believes that God the Son died, not a ‘mere’ man. However, when pressed to explain the death of God further, the trinitarian inevitably retreats by saying that only Christ’s body died, while his immortal soul (his divinity) survived. Yet, this is much less than our viewpoint. We believe that a human being, both body and soul, died on the cross. This is much more significant than mere human nature dying. Great job Alex!
Thanks Sean. It was fantastic meeting up with you guys again. Now I just need to sleep for about a week and everything will be hunky-dory.