I have become a hipster, quite accidentally mind you. Apparently it's cool now to dye hair grey, to grow a big beard, and to wear clothes which were cool in the 90s. I tick all those boxes. Alas, I don't need to dye my hair, had a beard before it was cool (the most hipster thing ever), and I still own clothes from the 90's, although I no longer fit in them.
My wife was showing old holiday photos a while back, naturally aged so no need for Instagram filters, and a friend who was with us couldn't believe that there was a time before I had grey hair. A time before my midriff had drifted to a muffin-top, and when I didn't have to wear glasses to know who it is I'm talking too. I didn't always used to be a hipster, accidental or otherwise.
And this is often how it is with church. We assume that because is a certain way now, that's how it's always been. And today I want to look at something so many churches take for granted and assume has always been: Penal Substitution. It's the belief that Jesus' death on the cross somehow (because I'm not getting into theological semantics) paid a price to God to redeem humankind. This is the go to, default position for many churches the world over, even to the point that there are books on systematic theology published which list this as the only model of God having a closeness to humanity. I've no doubt that many of you are reading this and wondering where I'm going to go next since, according to your church, this IS the only way God can have a relationship with humanity. And then there's the other side of Christianity who are reading this and scratching their head because they've never heard this teaching before.
Models of atonement, the way God can be at one with humanity, is much like the toilet paper debate: Some scrunch, some fold, and it's something no one ever talks about so they assume that everyone does it the same way as they do. And just like my hipster approved grey hair, it didn't always used to be this way.
While today, most (almost all) Evangelical churches teach Penal Substitution, the number of adherents to this idea before 1500 were approximately zero. It just hadn't been invented until after the Reformation. There had been other theologies based on the crucifixion: One was 'ransom', that Satan had somehow captured the souls of humanity and God paid Jesus as a ransom fee to win them back. Of course, this is problematic. It implies that God doesn't have any rights to reclaim humanity.
Another is that Jesus was a great trick, that Satan was allowed to claim the souls of humans and that Jesus being both fully human and fully God meant that Satan overstepped his boundaries by claiming the soul of a God and so God could change the deal and start reclaiming human souls.
These ideas are, of course, problematic, which is why we don't hear much of them these days. Historically, these are the building blocks of Penal Substitution, and it's questionable just how popular they were with the church historically.
What was popular was Moral Influence. That Jesus lived the perfect life, and is the perfect example for God followers to follow.
Today we associate this teaching with Abelard in the tenth century (he of putting his pecker where it didn't belong and having it cut off fame, so maybe penile substitution there), but again, it's much, much older. Abelard says that he read it from Augustine. And it does seem, historically, to be a popular teaching. Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, Iranaeus, Origen, Polycarp, and many many more all seem to agree that this is the model of atonement. As we've already seen, Augustine was a fan. He also taught the Ransom theory mind, and these two ideas seemed to live happily together until about the eleventh century when Anselm of Canterbury came up with an all new idea to replace Ransom: That Jesus was the Satisfactory sacrifice to bring atonement. This is probably the closest idea to Penal Substitution we've had until this point, but we aren't there yet.
So what about all of those Christians who died before hearing the teaching of Penal Substitution? And what about all those churches outside of the Evangelical tradition who still haven't heard it (remember when I said that it's closely linked to the Reformation)? Are they still good Christians? Will God have mercy on their souls? After all, these are the churches and Christians who didn't get on board with the current hipster trends and, instead, kept to the teachings of their ancestors.
All this is to say, just because this is how it is now, that doesn't mean that this is how it's always been. I didn't always have grey hair and a beard, and the church didn't always major on the death of Jesus.
Quite the opposite. Church used to focus far more on life. Jesus Himself said that He is life, and life in abundance. Paul says that the live is Christ. My fear is, that with all of the emphasis church has placed on death, that we are in danger of becoming a death cult. That the whole point to Christianity is that it only offers us a security when we die.
This reduces to life to merely a staging ground until our 'real' life begins once we shuffle off this mortal coil. It can potentially cheapen life and lead us away from social justice issues and towards a heavenly mindedness which is only concerned with the hereafter and not the here and now.
Maybe the church needs to reign it in on being hipsters, maybe we shouldn't always just to the cult of the new. Perhaps it's time we looked beyond what IS and towards what used to be and a new way of living in Jesus, not just hurtling towards our inevitable demise. Because life, that's something special.
This is a huge subject and there's a part two here. Please do come back.
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