Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Transcending Twitter Theology: Mapping Peter's Images of Atonement

MP3 - Coming Soon




I’m intrigued by bumper stickers.  I am always surprised when someone finds the world so simple and tractable that they can articulate their polemical worldview in 3-5 words

But Christians are particularly into this form of ‘drive by debate.’  We loves us some bumper stickers.  But it always leaves me with 2 questions: 1) do you really want your worldview evaluated by the quality of your driving  (I know I don’t, I am one of the 8% of Americans who considers myself a below average driver…yeah, you do the math on that for a minute)…hey I may have just inadvertently cut you off…but ‘my boss is a Jewish carpenter”…but secondly 2) Doesn’t God deserve more than 5 words.  Reality is too complex and beautiful and nuanced to be reduced to a pithy one liner.  Sound bites always lie by omission.

When I was in undergrad there was a promotional graffiti was right next to the Union.  Student organizations could sign up to paint it for a week.  So from time to time if we had a big event coming up the Christian group I was involved in would sign up for it and get a crew out to paint it.

But one time, we signed up for it without a big event coming up.  So about 15 students showed up without a plan…they just wanted to paint something that would be interesting and provocative and would get people thinking about Jesus.  Now, I wasn’t there.  But apparently the process of 15 people trying to distill Christianity into a single image or sound bite was painful.  Of course it was.  Reducing the beauty and complexity of the gospel to a single sentence or image is impossible.  But apparently, they were there for literally hours sitting in the upstate NY cold…trying to come to a consensus on the single image or phrase that captured the essence of what we were about.  Here is what they came up with:



And that is a pretty popular way of thinking about Christian discipleship in our movement.  Last year there was a viral video that took over facebook for a week that essentially boiled Christianity down to this idea.  And while it was provocative and did get people talking…and like most clichés …it is a cliché because it contains real truth…like most clichés it also lies by omission. 

We tend to reduce Relationship = intimacy…but intimacy can’t be maintained out of nothing

Intimacy rests on content[1] and habits.[2]

Marriages that have no content get dull…fast.  Marriages that don’t have practices get hard…fast.

Infatuation can maintain intimacy for a while on the shear force of will and wonder.

But love, love requires finding the loved one fundamentally interesting.  Sustained intimacy requires content.  There has to be “true facts[3]” about the loved one that capture your imagination.[4] 

So, while we (as the teaching team here at CL) work hard to be practical…to focus on the ‘practices’ of maintaining intimacy with God…sometimes we just need to take a step back and say…”But why?  Why is God Awesome?”  “You keep using that word.” And that…is called…theology!

‘God’ is not a self defining word…Because he is infinite and omnipotent does not mean that he is anything we imagine him to be.  He is a particular kind of being with specific characteristics and modes of operation that make him beautiful rather than dull and just rather than indifferent.  HE is Awesome…in the purest form of the word…but for particular reasons.[5]

“Nothing in the Christian system is of greater consequence than the doctrine of atonement.” –John Wesley

In undergrad I was a geophysics major.  Now a geology department which isn’t known for being particularly friendly to spiritual things.  But there was really only one professor that was hostile to Christianity.  But when I heard his objection to Christianity it was surprising:

How can the actions of another person affect my moral destiny?  How does morality accrue across accounts?  If I am cosmically accountable for my  behavior I don’t see how the actions of another person could affect my account.  He essentially saw morality as these cosmic bank accounts that we can make deposits or withdrawals from…but there are no inter-account transfers.  One’s person’s actions cannot accrue or withdraw from anyone else’s.  So the idea that Jesus could somehow affect our moral and eternal destiny seemed odd.

Dan and I work really hard to make talks practical.  But sometimes, you just gots to do some theology.[6]

WE want you to graduate here with as many tools to live well as possible…but we also want you to think carefully.

John Driver: No fewer than 12 motifs



In 1 Peter, we get at least 4 of these…which each kind of a connect with a cultural component of Peter’s cultural life. [7]

 
 
So let’s walk through the ancient world and 1 Peter and see if we can get a little deeper into what we mean when we say ‘Jesus died for our sins’…and see if content doesn’t deepen intimacy.  Let’s start with two verses that make a sandwich out of the passage Dan talked about a couple weeks ago:

1.   Substitution (Temple)

 
1:2 “To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood[8][9][10]

Now there are a lot of words and phrases in that sentence that are confusing…but there is only one that is also weird: “Sprinkling with blood”… “Sprinkling with blood…” sounds like something out of a vampire cook book.[11] 

… and it is not the only time Peter talks about blood[12]:

1:19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.”

The Pentateuch, especially Leviticus, talks about sprinkling blood on things or people no fewer than[13] 15 times…blood is the most common substance sprinkled in the Bible[14][15]

-When I was a skeptic and someone challenged me to read the Bible…I was deeply confused when I hit Leviticus and ran into all kinds of animal sacrifices and what seemed to be an obsession with blood

But why is weird?  We find ‘the blood of Christ’ to be an awkward solution…because we don’t understand the problem.  It seems like someone offering us a lifeboat in the desert…or cliff notes of Madame Bovary to help us with our Chem lab…or (the solution doesn’t match our perception of the problem).  But this is where we have to pause and see if ancient worldviews didn’t understand something about reality that we have lost.

 

Ancient religion both Hebrews and the surrounding religions saw offenses against God as kind of a big deal…in a way that we do not.  In some senses, the sacrifice motif addresses a problem we don’t think we have…it answers a question we have stopped asking.  But it is a problem and a question that was at the front of the ancient conscience…

What do I do about my cosmic guilt…how am I going to pay the moral debt I have wracked up?[16][17][18][19]

Illustration: Final episode of Vikings – Ragnar the great -  Season 1 ends with one of the central characters offering himself as a sacrifice to the gods, with the image of his blood spilling out on the table in an attempt to purchase some favor and good fortune for his people who had displeased the gods.  Now, the Hebrew prophets saw this sort of thing as a broken distortion of a correct impulse.  They were constantly telling the surrounding cultures and the Hebrews to stop sacrificing people to Gods. [20]   But the reality was intrinsic…Ancient cultures had a sense that the gods had to be satisfied with blood…

Ancient customs which betrayed a little desperation about our evil against other humans and against our creator…often ended in blood.  Yahwehism was distinct because the blood wasn’t human blood.

The ancient religious conscience recognized that guilt and justice required penalty for rebellion against.  That there is a moral, cosmic, cause and effect.  And you could either face the penalty yourself or exchange a sacrifice.  And by calling to mind the sacrifices of Hebrew and other religions both in the OT and in Roman society (which is what he’s doing by talking about “sprinkling with blood” and “the blood of a …Peter says, the death and resurrection of Christ was the thing that all of these things were pointing to.  The human impulse to seek to feel grave concern about the debt our injustice and falseness puts us in before God and a kind of desperation make things ok with God is right.[21]

Modern people tend to ask, ‘How could a good God punish humans? 

The authors of the NT asks a completely different question If God is really good and just how God can he refrain from punishing people immediately and fully without becoming morally compromised.  [22][23]

 
We have a problem and the problem is us.  Both 2:4 and 3:18 suggest that the work of Christ is in some sense an exchange…our guilt for his innocence…which is what the OT blood stuff was pointing to all along.[24]
 
And that is where blood and sacrifice came in because ancient religion often looked for a substitute to take the brunt of the justice so they could experience mercy.
This is a question that would not occur to most modern people…but that doesn’t make it a unimportant question…just one we’ve stopped asking.
And essentially, both of these dilemmas get down to the same thing.
We assume God is merciful…but we also want him to be just.
They assume God is just…but also want him to be merciful.
But the interesting thing is that the ancient and modern questions both end up with essentially the same dilemma…they just get to it differently:
Justice and mercy are always at odds, yet God embodies both.
The question is…how can that be?
And you have had this experience.  You hear a news story about something awful…but then you hear about the background of the guilty party and feel something for them…and you are torn.   You want to extend love to the perpetrator but also to the wronged.  Part of you wants mercy for the broken perpetrator and part of you wants justice for the one who was wronged.  But it leaves you will all sorts of cognitive dissonance…because you can’t have both.
Illustration: Let me tell you about my most difficult experience negotiating the irreconcilable nature of justice and mercy.  About 8 years ago my Dad was driving home from visiting my grandmother.  He had recently retired and a couple times a month he made the 2.5 hour drive to see her.  But on that particular day he was driving around a bend on one of the windy country roads that are typical in the finger lakes region of central new York…and a semi was coming in the other direction…when a car came flying down the road and tried zip around the semi and the double yellow line…smashing into my dad’s car head on…and in an instant of reckless judgment…my whole family changed forever…mom was a widow…and our children would never meet their grandfather…and the world suddenly seemed like a much starker and scarier place without my dad standing between me and it. 
Now the young man who did this already had a record, so manslaughter was going to put him in jail.  But there was a strange nuance to the legal process that took me totally by surprise.  Part of the legal process in manslaughter cases I didn’t know about was that during the sentencing process the family of the victim is invited to make an appeal to the judge on how strict the sentence should be.  I remember thinking: Are you kidding me?   What would I say?  I don’t have any background in legal theory or justice.  (I haven’t gotten that degree yet.)  How am I qualified to say have an opinion on sentencing?  But that was mainly a smoke screen.  You know why I didn’t want to do it?  You know why I didn’t know what to tell the judge…really? Because I had these two contradictory impulses inside me: an impulse for mercy…and an impulse for justice.
I honestly felt a lot of compassion for the young man.  He had a kid and probably a rough background.  Jail is not a restorative character building place.  But I felt for my family too.  My mom was devastated.  Her life would never be the same.  Their first grandchild was born 3 days after the funeral.  Real violence had been done to my family…and I knew that that mercy towards my mom meant justice for the one who had done violence to her.  The real reason I didn’t know what to say about sentencing was that I wanted justice…and I wanted mercy…and couldn’t have both. 
 
 
 
In the cross the justice and mercy of God meet.  God’s moral seriousness is displayed and his desire to spare us what our actions deserve even to his own pain is demonstrated.[25][26]

2.   Christus Victor (Military)

 
“…through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” 3:22

We have a problem, and the problem is us…but not just us.

Your personal forgiveness is a very small part of the victory Jesus won over evil…

…angels, authorities, and powers.

It is certainly true to say that ‘Jesus died for your sins’…but it is such a tiny part of the story…that it is almost a caricature

Seeing Jesus as your own personal savior is a pretty small view of both what is wrong with the world and what the Christian story is all about…your personal sin is not the biggest problem with the world…but it’s kind of a big deal to you. 

I was talking with my friend Peter Nittler, one of the CL interns and he said “you know, it is kind of like a super hero movie.”
Think about a climactic battle in a super hero movie…say “The Avengers” (slide) where the avengers are doing cosmic battle for the destiny of our planet against aliens and these terrifying giant flying critters that look like anti-gravity cross between a mosasar and a eurypterid.  Lets call them mosyptarids (Eurypasaours?)


 
When all of a sudden, one of the avengers notices that there is a kid in harm’s way.  So he takes a break from pounding on the flying mosyptarids to scoop up the kid and bring him to safety…and then resumes opening a can on the cosmic villains.  Now getting rescued is kind of a big deal for the kid, but is a very small part of the cosmic conflict underway.

The gospel is not about your sin problem.[27]  It is about God rescuing you from your sin.  It is the story of God rescuing his cosmic creation (including you) from the powers (human and otherwise) that are destroying it…including you.  We are both the enemy and the object of rescue.  And that is the disorientigly sublime nature of the gospel and the reason that the victory is so counter intuitive.  The victory is so counterintuitive because the objective is so counterintuitive.  God is waging a cosmic battle to save his enemy. 

Jesus died and rose from the dead as dramatic, surprising, military victory…a final battle in which he defeated evil and death and the powers[28] that had subjugated his creation because humans…God’s chosen care takers of his creation…gave them access.

 Jesus defeated evil…which includes us…it includes our evil…and while my personal evil (which we call sin) is a pitifully minor part of that…but it is kind of a big deal to me…because it puts me on the losing side of the battle

 Illustration: (I cut this from the talk...and ran it over on my blog)

Triple jump relay – In high school I ran track…badly.  We had state champion sprinters…so I made the team as a freshman because they needed warm bodies to throw at the distance events.  But as bad as I was at track…I was worse at field…in particular my event…the triple jump.  Here’s how bad I was at the triple jump.   I didn’t triple jump quite as far as the best long jumper on my team.  For those of you unfamiliar with track…that is exactly as pathetic as it sounds.   I could not jump quite as far in 3 jumps as Kuan Gladney could in 1.  In my entire 4 year varsity track career I never scored a point in triple jump.  My coach just thought it would be a good idea for me to have something to keep me busy between my two races which were the first and the next to last races on the track.

So for the first event of my senior season we went to a ‘relay meet’, which is kind of an exhibitional event where all the races are relays…and since you can’t really do high jump or shot put in ‘relay’ you put up a 3 person team and the added the scores.  Now we had two very good athletes John and Devon who were triple jumping for the first time that year…but neither of them had done it before and I was the only other triple jumper.  They were good sports about it, but you could tell that once they realized my score was going to be added to their they knew that they were just out for a few practice jumps and so I think they kind of decided they’d just compete against each other. 

Anyway, I went out and did my awkward, underwhelming jumps…and then headed out to anchor a ‘distance medly relay’ where I ran a mile at the end of a 2 and a half mile mixed distance relay.  In the last 100 m of that race I caught a guy and moved us up from 6th place to 5th place…which, in my underwhelming track career, counted as a pretty big deal.  I was pretty psyched about it.  And right after I finished I looked up and saw my track coach coming over to me with a huge grin on his face.  He shook my hand proudly and congratulated me.  At first I was like…”Oh yeah, I’m the man…5th place…out of 8” But then when I thought about it, he was actually a little too excited.  I mean, I’d passed one kid and managed not to get passed.  I was proud of it, but it was hardly a big deal.  Then my coach reached out his hand and was holding something I had literally never seen before…it was a blue ribbon. 

Congratulations, he said, you won the triple jump.

It turns out the other two jumpers had gotten into some sort of almost super natural zone.  It was like none of the other jumpers mattered.  They were in their own universe…back and forth, pushing each other…each jump better than the next…they put on a clinic…they had jumped out of their minds…putting up the two top distances…[29]that when added to my silly little jump to the two top distances…we won by a quarter of an inch…

…the only time I ever scored in the triple jump…I won…even though I did not remotely deserve it.[30][31]

That is how this image of the work of Christ ‘works.’  Life is a relay meet…and the dark powers that are marauding this world (both spiritual and institutional) are more than a match for us. 

On our own, we lose…but by aligning with Christ we can join the winning team.

We were made caretakers of creation…but let the enemy in the gates.  The enemy plundered and trashed the land, enslaved us, and convinced us that it was all for our good.  The gospel narratives are God’s unexpected and subversive sneak attach to take it all back.  The good news is that he is taking back creation and will remake it.  The bad news is that, when he comes back to win the sublime victory, we are on the wrong team.

So how do we respond…we surrender.  We lay down arms. 

Illustration: A war where the vanquished surrendered and were restored to citizenship.  When the North defeated the south in the Civil war…a change of allegiance meant a full restoration of citizenship

Oh, and you get to choose a team.  Without the cross…you’d be on the ‘black hat’ team by default.  The cross lets us join the winning team.

Cultural artifact…the spell is broken…the unwitting/unwilling army lays down their arms

Illustration: My middle child's parent teacher conference survey:


Last week I went to a student conference for our middle child, who’s just about one of the most original human beings I have ever met.

Now this kid is 4.  And they had her fill out a survey that we could talk about at the conference. 

Now there are a few details in this survey that are entertaining.

 What I look like.  Dude, my kid can bring it with a pencil.  All of my kids are going to have to consider the sciences because the arts are just not going to be an option.  But on the topic of vocational aspirations…
What does my daughter want to be when she grows up: A beautiful butterfly…That’s encouraging… I hear there’s big job market for that.

But the last one floored me.

She goes to preschool over at University Covenant Church so they asked her what she thought of Jesus




 Her answer - Jesus  is The Strongest King…

Now that isn’t language I’ve ever used with her.  That is her own orriginal 4 year old theology.  But I immediately thought.

“…angels, authorities, and powers have been subjected to him.” 3:22
She may want to be a butterfly when she grows up…but that girl GETS the Christus Victor Model of atonement.  She might think that he is the king of the hexapods…but she knows, when Jesus goes to battle…he wins.  I’ll take it.

Boyd: “By calling on disciples to join Christ’s rebellion against and victory over the ever-present powers, the Christus Victor perspective inspires disciples to live countercultural lives that aggressively resist the demonically seductive pull of nationalism, patriotism, culturally endorsed violence, greed, racism, and a host of other structural evils that arpe part of the spiritually polluted air we all breath.”

CLers in the march against rape[32] and walk for life IJM…fighting evil is a totally legitimate thing for you to get involved in.

3.   Exchange/Ransom (Business/Commercial)




But ransom language moves from the military realm of Roman life to the market place.  Gladiator slave market.[33]

1:18 “…you were ransomed from the futile ways[34] inherited from your forefathers…”

Boyd “Ransom” means paying the “price of release” and was most commonly used of purchasing slaves from the slave market. (A Roman slave market would have had slaves from all over the world…the ransom language suggests that Jesus buys the freedom of a diverse collection of slaves…not unlike the Michael Johansen image)

Rev 5:9-10 “By his blood the Lamb has ‘ransomed’ a people’

Now, some translations will use the word ‘redeemed’ here but the greek word is much more precise…it means paying the “price of release” and first century literature most commonly used of purchasing slaves from the slave market.

And that is what Jesus did.  He paid a price to free us from the things that enslave us.  The price for our freedom…is himself.  And he’s good for it.

Now, ‘ransom’ is kind of a culturally distant word.  We don’t have public slave markets.  So when we talk about someone giving their lives in exchange to free a doomed captive in the last couple years…we  might use a different term:

I don’t know…maybe say…tribute.

“I volunteer as tribute.”


Illustration: This was unquestionably the best scene in the Hunger Games.  For those of you unfamiliar with this story…all three of you…the story centers around two sisters – a younger sister Prim and an older sister Katniss.  In what the call ‘the reaping’ Prim, the younger sister of the protagonist is selected to be shipped off to a gladiator style-to the death- battle where she will certainly die a horrible and public death.  And Katniss, the protagonist, immediately rushes the stage and invokes a rule where anyone in the town can volunteer to take the selected…except it is very dramatic.  

She rushes the stage and yells “I volunteer.  I volunteer as Tribute.”


Now I’d show the clip…but there is a little bit of a technology problem...you see, this scene makes my eyes malfunction.  I actually can’t watch it without them leaking…it’s this clear salty fluid…its weird.  And this is frankly embarrassing, because men in their mid-30’s… are not exactly the target demographic of this story.  So you’ll just have to imagine it with me.

But Katniss offering herself in place of her sister to free her from a dark oppressive slavery and painful public doom…volunteering as tribute…is precisely the kind of image that Peter is trying to leverage in this sound bite:

1:18 “…you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers…”

Or

He volunteered as tribute to free you from the patterns and cultural systems that are holding you captive.

Now the sequel is coming out…and there is a scene in the trailer to the sequel that bridges us to our final sound bite.

I feel like it isn’t a spoiler to tell you that Katniss survives when there is a sequel with her picture on the poster.

Illustration: Prim in the new Hunger games trailer  http://youtu.be/jyPnQw_Lqds?t=1m35s

Prim: “You saved my life, you gave me a chance.”
Katniss: “To live.”
Prim: “No, to do something.” 



What does Prim do?  She joins the liberation movement…she becomes a medic and puts herself repeatedly in harm’s way.  She wants to become a medic in the liberation movement, which terrifies her family.

But her logic is unassailable.  Someone volunteered as tribute to purchase her freedom.  She couldn’t imagine using that freedom just ‘to live.’  She had to ‘do something.’  She had to get involved in the liberation movement even at great risk.

But that’s the thing about people who have been dramatically liberated…they realize that their life is too valuable to waste… become liberators.

And if you get your head around the ransom picture that Peter and others paint…neither will you.

The price for our freedom…is himself.  It is not unlike…the best scene in the Hunger Games.  I’m not going to show it because I honestly can’t watch it without tearing up.[35]  But you know the scene I’m talking about…”I volunteer…I volunteer as tribute”

But the freed slaves…they seek transformation (tie into Dan’s themes) and become part of a liberation movement.    They become a diverse purposeful people.

Prim: “You saved my life, you gave me a chance.”
Katniss: “To live.”
Prim: “No, to do something.”[36] 

What does she do.  She joins the liberation movement.

Which leads to the fourth idea:

4.   Example




2:21 “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.”[37] 

So as we have already seen…to make Christ’s example the only thing the cross was good for…to reduce him into a sentimental martyr that becomes a kind of good example for a heroic life…is to gut the gospel.  And that is exactly what happened in Liberal theology in the early 20th century.  Jesus is like Gandhi or Mother Teresa…his heroic sacrifice inspires us to live lives characterized by heroic sacrifice…it doesn’t even have to be true.  And in this way, they found a way to somehow keep going to church on Sunday…even though they thought that Jesus, Paul, Peter et al were basically mistaken about who Jesus was and what he did (for about a generation)… these churches are unsurprisingly empty now…but that image that Jesus is a good guy…a sapiential prophet…is still the dominant picture in the public consciousness…

But here is the problem with the story of American Christianity in the 19th century.  The Liberal faction of the church took one part of the story and made it the whole game…and so more orthodox factions started to shy away from legitimate implications and application of these portions of our story…which incidentally is how we got entire generations of Christians that weren’t interested in serving the poor and fighting injustice.

Just because it is not the whole story…doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of the story.[38][39]

The sacrificial love that Jesus showed us on the cross is a call to a lifestyle.  But this fits very well with the other pictures.  None of these pictures separate “how you become a Christian” and “How you live as a Christian.”

1.     Our moral failure has been healed by a devastating act of self giving, making us just in God’s sight…a reality we actively ‘live into’ by putting off the old ways and habits and putting on the new ways and habits.

2.     We have surrendered to the irresistible advance of justice and beauty into the cosmos…but it is still and active battle, so we join it on the side of beauty and justice.

3.     We are slaves that have been purchase to freedom…it makes no sense to become anything other than liberators ourselves

Jesus offers himself in exchange for us…but we are saved, rescued, and ransomed…for a life of articulating the gospel, resisting evil, and liberation.

These four metaphors do not exhaust the biblical imagery of atonement.  We haven’t even talked about a couple of the images central to Paul’s writings.[40] 
_____________________________________ 

[1] I remember picking up “Knowing God” and expecting it to be a mystical volume on how to develop relational intimacy with God…and was really disappointed that it was essentially an abbreviated Systematic Theology.  Because I had bought the weird cultural narrative that intimacy is based on experience with no component of content.  It didn’t occur to me that part of ‘knowing God’ relationally would include ‘knowing what he is like’
[2] Mysticism is hard work…it requires diligent inquiries into the truth and consistent spiritual practices.  Mysticism requires theology and disciplines.
[3] I imagine a slide with two opening images from the “true facts” series…and one that is mocked up “true facts about Jesus”
[4] Dorothy Sayers: “The Doctrine is the drama.”
[5] Repeated declarations that “God is so awesome” can only carry you so far.  At some point, you wake up and are 30, with a couple kids and a job, and ‘God is so awesome’ just doesn’t cut it anymore.  You need particulars.  You need to learn to see beauty in detail and complexity of his work and character.  (PN - which is ironic because by truncating it and trivializing it, we miss out on real “awesomeness”)
[6] If you grew up catholic or orthodox…you probably got a little systematic theological training…but if you grew up in an evangelical church or no church at all…you’ve picked up your theology peicemeil…
[7] My idea here is to do something like John Green’s thought bubble animation segments of his history videos…he’d make blood splatter in on the temple and the priest.  Instead of an outline…I’m going to invite them to walk through the ancient world with me to ‘see’ how Peter describes atonement…walking from institution to institution and describing how it illustrates atonement.  I think the handout will be an annotated map rather than an outline.
[8] Amanda’s bit about “it must have been messy to be a priest’s wife”
[9] This reminds me of a recipe of how to get right with God…put in X, Y, and Z…but whatever you do…don’t forget to sprinkle some atoning blood.  You can see my Italian Grandma…’and then…just a sprinkle of blood’…* The Blood of atonement is like yeast…obedience doesn’t work without it…it is the active ingredient though invisible…but obedience is the bulk of what you see and do.
*footnote to the footnote: IF SHE WAS A VAMIPRE…blood illustrations get weird fast…but that isn’t new…the Romans thought that the early church was into cannibalism because of confusion over blood metaphors.
[10] See Leviticus 17:11
[11] I had a bunch of jokes regarding Edward Cullen that were 100% unusable
[12] We are actually a blood obsessed culture…because it can transfer pathogens…in the ancient world…it could transfer life an guilt.
[13] Now, I’m a parent of a 2 year old boy…so I have some experience with inappropriate sprinkling.
[14] Others include hyssop, dust, salt, and water
[15] Grudem “Sprinkle blood in the OT was a visual reminder to God and to his people that a life had been given, a sacrifice had been paid” p56…in only three places was blood ceremonially sprinkled on the people themselves. (the initiation of the covenant, establishment of the priesthood, and purification from leprosy
[16]  “The Father, because of his love for human beings, sent his Son (who offered himself willingly and gladly) to satisfy God’s justice, so that Christ took the place of sinners.” Thomas Schreiner
[17] My early church experiences revolved around a small, rural church which was dominated by a giant statue of Christ dead on the cross, suspended in the front.  I didn’t get it.  Why does a weekly celebration of God’s love revolve around such a grisly and depressing image.  I asked someone and was told…Jesus’ death ‘opened the gates of heaven.’  So, I thought, well, I guess that’s pretty bad ass.  There is a causal connection between his death and me getting to be with God forever.  I can see why that is a big deal.  But as I got older, the details began to seem fuzzy.  Questions like: How? And Why? And even WHAT?!? Begin to creep up.
[18] The OT is bloody…but not just in the fighty parts…also in its religion. A debt and an exchange.   A blood debt requiring a violent exchange.
[19] “For many of us the sacrifice of animals remains abstract.  (Not if you grew up on a farm…but I digress…the Palin turkey clip could be interesting here) But reflect on the violence of the activity: the blood, the entrails and the goriness of it all.  The death of the animals shows the penalty for sin is death.”
[20] A decent amount of the OT is not about God’s people doing too little religion…but too much, and getting involved in human sacrifices.  The Hebrew prophets are always telling the neighboring peoples…’Hey stop sacrificing people…especially children…to your gods.  And occasionally, they had to tell the Hebrews the same thing.  But from Mesopotamia to North America to Scandinavia to Peru…ancient people had a spiritual impulse that we have lost…there is something in the fabric of reality that takes rebellion seriously.  Both explicitly, in the Hebrew Scriptures and implicitly in the human impulse to placate the forces and cosmic personalities of the universe with animal and human sacrifices.
[21] Add to the list of Ice and Fire illustrations I can’t use…the special power of the blood of a king.
[22] Paraphrased from Thomas Schreiner - 88
[23] Cam and the Lamb sandwich – I brought a lamb sandwich to work after Easter and my friend Cam said  “I just can’t figure out why Easter is this like, kid holiday (something I hear a lot and it really bugs me) with candy eggs and chocolate bunnies and lawn games…and then for dinner we have this dead baby sheep.”  It struck him as incongruous.  A flash of brutality in a sea of pastel fun.  Yes.  Exactly.  On Easter, we celebrate an atonement that is beautiful but not pretty.  That is cleansing but not clean.
[24] Sin as Lawbreaking is impersonal à um, sin is very personal…it is rebellion…or spiritual adultery as the OT prophets were want to describe it
[25] ot sacrifices – uncashed check
[26] I’d like to find a good substitutionary atonement illustration: Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis in Armageddon might work, Jack at the end of Lost, I feel like there is something better.
Someone who is saved for a purpose…Prim in the Catching Fire trailer
[27] (PN: It’s almost like in a Superhero movie in one of those big battle scenes where civilians are in danger and the hero rescues one in the midst of the battle… that need to be saved was very real for that no-name character… but it’s a blip in the movie, it’s 12 seconds of a 2:45 movie… it would be foolish for that character to say that Superman or Batman or Spiderman exists or existed to save them…  They are savers and restorers by nature and along the way to SAVING THE DAY, their nature allowed them to save a life…)
[28] You know how we said that Christian community has ‘emerging properties’ where the beauty and utility of the whole is qualitatively different than the sum of its parts…well the same is true of human evil.  Human evil transcends the individual badness of humans participating in evil.  It has feedbacks and magnifying effects.  It is goaded and fed by cosmic evil.  And this web of injustice and greed and destruction, it takes on something of a personality of its own…which both Peter and Paul refer to as ‘the powers’.  So Jesus came to disarm the powers…he is facing off against cosmic evil…and human sin…but also structures of injustice…patters of degradation…evil systems that are bigger than the evil of any one individual.
[29] We were made caretakers…and abdicated, choosing the rebellion…and when the land is liberated…instead of being treated like rebels, we can be reinstated as caretakers…but the human story is just a small part of   “Jesus died to save you from your sins makes the story a little too small.”
What are ‘Rebels’ – the good guys
[30] I picked the wrong team…I feel like there is a cultural artifact that delivers this line
[31] (PN: I also think the curious case of Bengie Molina is interesting… Bengie was the Giants catcher before Buster Posey and he got traded to the Rangers the year Buster came into the league… Interestingly, Bengie’s Rangers played Buster’s Giants in the World Series… I’m not going to tell you who won J But what was interesting is that Bengie still got a ring… even though he lost, even though he was the enemy, he had inherent value after the Giants’ victory because he was part of it.. . even though he went to a different team for a while and lost with that team, he still gets the World Series win and a share of the spoils…  Not quite perfect maybe because he doesn’t come back to the team, but interesting…)
[32] I was sitting in Pete’s one day and suddenly about 40 students march by chanting and holding signs.  It immediately caught my attention.  But upon closer inspection, 2 things drew my attention.  First, they were all men.  And Second, they were holding signs about how its up to men to stop rape.  I was sitting with a couple friends and we nodded our heads at each other and said ‘that there is all right’.  ‘Rape culture’ is a thing and men bear responsibility in trying to change it.  But then I saw a couple dudes from CL in the mix…and it, frankly, made me really proud of them.  I was glad that Jesus was in that mix…
[33] Ransom language is connected to the Christus Victor language…because in defeating the devil he frees us
[34] Grudem: Lotroo – distinct sense “to purchase someone’s freedom by praying a ransom’ and was used in secular contexts of purchasing freedom for a slave or a hostage held by an enemy*.”   It is a very specific verb with a narrow semantic range.  “saved” or “redeemed” doesn’t quite do it.  “Ransomed” is more of the thing
*this ties it to the military image…slave markets are filled by military campaigns…you probably could tell how well the Germanic campaigns were doing by the ‘stock’ at the slave market…but unlike the roman campaigns…God’s victory empties the slave markets instead of fills them
Grudem points out that you were ransomed from your slavery to ‘ways’ (“pattern of life”)…to patterns that you got from your family or cultural…generational, hereditary habits that hold you bound “an influence made by the accumulation of generations of tradition in a society that valued such ancestral wisdom.”  p88
[35] Which is emberassing, because men in their mid-30’s…ok…late 30s…are not the target demographic of this film.
[36] The “Exchange” in the first hunger games seems like it would work for #1 but the question of ‘who is the ransom paid to’ is a problem.  (I literally tear up every time I watch the “I volunteer as tribute” scene) In the first it cuts the wrong way, because God is in the position of the oppressive regime.  This gets at the weirdness of the debate.  Did Jesus take our place to satisfy the justice of God or to take the brunt of the Devil’s offensive.  Well, yes.
But under the Ransom metaphor, the protagonist gives herself in place of someone she desperately loves…lives…and then they battle the oppressive forces together (spoiler alert: even to the point of huge cost).  The clip is a little weird because Katniss is reluctant to let Prim face the risks of joining the resistance (where Jesus calls us to it), but I think the whole thing works under this heading.
[37] “The example theory of atonement rightly sees that Jesus functions paradigmatically for Christians.” Schreiner p69
[38] Evangelicals do this all the time.  Liberals distorted things and focused too narrowly on one corner of the story.  But in response to this, we reject whatever corner of the story they focused on, instead of give it its proper weight.
[39] We tend to shy away from this because it became unduly central to Liberal thought, but in its place as “a” component of the work of Christ, it is really important.
[40] Not sure where to put this, but I want to tip my hat to the fact that by looking at Peter’s categories, we are leaving out some big ideas.