Conventional Theology

In conventional theology Jesus Christ takes the sins of the entire world - past, present and future - upon himself. Through his sacrificial death he achieves forgiveness for all sins; through his resurrection we are assured of eternal life. Since Jesus Christ is "fully God and fully human", the second person of the trinity, according to the orthodox position he can accomplish redemption: as God he has the power to do so and as man he stands for and includes all human beings in his saving death and life-giving resurrection. ....
Personally, I have never been able to believe it.
Sallie McFague: Life Abundant, p. 157-158.

Almost had you going there, eh? According to McFague this is a theology that today, for North-American Middle-class Christians, is "not believeable and bad theology". It does not correspond to today's understanding of reality. This kind of theology, she says, puts the "offense of Christ in the wrong place", that is, it makes faith about a conflict with science rather than with a conflict with a sinful way of life.

It is bad theology only from our particular perspective of course. It is bad because in this kind of Christology "Jesus does it all". It does not engage us in creation, it does not motivate us to get involved in the "project in which we join God in Christ to help all creature's flourish".

The Body of Christ

It helps to understand that the bread and wine used in the Eucharist is my bread and wine. As I already mentioned, in the early church it was customary that everybody brought a piece of bread to the Service.

It is my bread and wine that is turned into the body and blood of Christ. It is not something that I am a only a witness to, it is something that involves me directly. This is why I feel it is helpful to speak of a transformation in the Eucharist. The point really is that something changes.

A friend of mine taught me this (if anyone know where he got it from I'd be happy, although I may have modified the original idea): The bread and the wine represents, respectively, my work and my play, my seriousness and my joy. When I bring my bread and my wine to the altar, and break the bread, the Spirit descends on it and turns it into the Body and Blood of Christ. The Spirit changes its meaning. In the Eucharist my whole life (not just the serious part, but also all that stuff I do for joy only) into something meaningful. It is as if God takes my life looks at it, smiles and gives it back to me with approval.

Of course, when my work and my play is turned into the Body of Christ it also becomes the Church. I realize that my work and play becomes meaningful only when I recognize how it relates to other people. By itself it lacks spirit.

The Church, then, is the community of persons that want to see their lives connected to other persons. The Eucharist is there to help us recognize that our lives really are holy, to help us overcome sin by recognizing who we really are.

The Problem of Death (Part II)

Part I

We see in the life of Jesus what true freedom means. Perfectly secure in his identity, he does not fear death and is thus beyond the power of all outside forces.

Now, when I say that the purpose of Christian faith is to live life in the same way, I am note merely proposing a kind of imitatio Christi, though it is certainly about this. Faith is not only about imitating Christ, it is also about becoming one with him. I will discuss this further when I address the sacraments.

I think this can be a way to understand what salvation is. It is becoming free from sin, and thus being able to live a life in the kind of freedom that the life of Jesus shows. How is this a victory over death? Paul says in 1 Cor 15: "The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law." The death we are saved from is not the physical death, death in the sense of an end to biological activity in the body, but is death as something we need to fear. When we are freed from sin, the "sting" of death is removed, and what is less is only death as a part of life, and we no longer have to fear it. That Jesus dies without fear, he shows us that death is not something we need to fear, and that by accepting one's being-mortal, one in fact can overcome death already in life. This is how resurrection is something that can be experienced in this life already.

But does not victory over death concern the afterlife? Yes, but as I argued in an earlier post, life after death is not something we can say that much about. But the way we live here is an expression of our hope for the future world. When we live "resurrected" here, without fear of death, and thus free from the forces that try to control us, we are really expressing what our hope is. Here we are not able to realize this freedom completely, but it can be real enough for us to experience what we believe will be perfect in the next world.

This is all very abstract, I know. But maybe it will be clearer what I mean if I discuss these "forces" I talk of a bit more. I have on purpose been very general with this so far.

The point is that the forces that want to control us by triggering our deep fears are the same forces that are destroying our culture and world. These forces are nothing else than the complex system of economical and political institutions that want us to be consumers instead of persons. It is the system that tells us that it is more important to buy products than to care about what the production of these products does to the environment or to the well-being of the people that produce them.

Salvation in Christ is to be able to escape from these forces. It is be able to build one's identity, not on material stuff, but on something much more solid. This is not to say that this is all salvation is, but this is how salvation is experienced in this life. And it points us towards the complete salvation in the next life, of which we are not able to say much.

By the way, such a life, "outside the system", is one that will not be much harmed by the decline of our culture, a least not the economical aspects of it. An identity that is to a large degree built on consuming will risk complete destruction when the possibilities of consumption are dramatically reduced. This is something I want to discuss more in another post.

Exactly how this salvation is experienced is something that is already part of the Problem of Meaning, because it is the Spirit that gives us life.

The Problem of Death (Part I)

While the Problem of Identity may be the most important one in our cultural climate, the Problem of Death just may be even more central to the human existence. If it is not felt as pressing in our age, it is not because the problem has diminished, but because death has become such an abstract concept in our time. There are some rather dubious ways our culture has come to deal with the problem, such as the strong notion of "living on" in one's children, no doubt a result of the strong influence of biology on our way of looking at life. On the other hand, the problem of Death cannot be disregarded, because it crops up in other areas of our life instead.

The Problem of Death manifests itself as fear. We can fear many things: to loose a job, to be robbed, to catch a disease. These fears, however, are fairly easily traced back to an underlining fear of death. We fear to loose a job ultimately because we fear we will not be able to survive. Fear of loss of all material things go back on our longing to be safe from harm. We also fear the death of those we are close to. It is not only the thought of no longer being alive that we fear, it is death itself, wherever it manifests itself. We fear the loss of those close to us, because such a loss leaves us vulnerable.

The Christian faith presents the answer to the problem of death in the victory over death of Christ, and in His resurrection, understood as a kind of proof that we too one day will rise from the dead.

Now, what does this mean? I will gladly confess that this, to me, is the most difficult part of the Christian doctrine, and I think it can be no other way. Any theology that avoids to ask this question is betraying its purpose.

I think the above description of fear as a force that is found in all areas of life can be a key to understanding what the talk about Jesus being victorious over death is about. I already pointed out that Jesus, in being "one with the Father" was completely secure in his identity, and the notion that he was without sin indicates that no force alien to himself affected him.

Fear makes us vulnerable to such forces. Take for example the most clearly demonic force in our time, advertising. Few adds these days does not try to trigger our fears: fear of being unacceptable, fear of being ugly, fear of getting old, fear of getting sick. But this is true of almost any force that has power over a person: the boss can influence you only under the (unspoken) threat of firing you. In the end, all the laws of society is upheld, if not by the final threat of death penalty, at least by the threat of removing the right to decide what to do with life by imprisonment.

A person without fear can not be manipulated by any force. This is what we see in the life of Jesus. He is free from fear of death (mind you, this doesn't mean he finds it pleasant) and therefore free from all fears. This is why he can display this complete integrity in the face of all authorities. They have no way to force him to anything.

This means that Jesus has overcome death already before his death. By being free from sin he has overcome fear and death has lost its "sting".

How does this relate to the afterlife, and to us? I will continue this line of thought tomorrow.