Author: Jay Parini / Source: Salon
Every year at Easter, my mind turns to Paul. That may seem odd; but Paul was, in effect, the inventor of Christianity, the founding theorist of the new religion. He was a brilliant, quirky and doubtless exasperating man who caught in his mind and passionately held the idea of the Christ as a cosmic figure who would transform history, establishing a new heaven, a new earth.
This fresh creation would become the Kingdom of God, and it would be a timeless and wonderfully inclusive place, where “all of Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26).This is a lot of people. In fact, Paul meant the whole of humanity when he spoke about “all of Israel.” That’s a tricky theological point, but it’s important. Paul, remember, was the author of the letter to the Galatians – possibly the earliest Christian text — where he noted that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Gentile” (Galatians 3:28). A fine Pauline scholar at Duke, Douglas A. Campbell, has commented on this verse with his usual force and clarity in “Paul: An Apostle’s Journey” (2018), suggesting that Paul genuinely means that “all of humanity will be saved.” God, Campbell says, is “committed to us all permanently and irrevocably.”
This idea flies in the face of the usual fundamentalist or evangelical view that God sent Jesus to die on the cross as a kind of substitute for poor and miserable humanity, who without this deed would certainly perish. This unhappy notion turns God into a kind of bizarre and vengeful father figure who didn’t know what he was doing when he created mankind in the first place. Frankly it’s ridiculous that God would require this blood sacrifice to “satisfy” himself – and that we poor creatures just have to say “I believe” and we’re “saved” from eternal flames. In fact Jesus never taught this, the New Testament doesn’t suggest it and certainly Paul the Apostle would have been appalled by this crude extension of his theology, although there are fragments in his letters that, pulled out of context, make it seem as if Paul were promoting some version of what is now called substitutionary theology.
In reality, it wasn’t until the turn of the 11th century – a thousand years after Jesus died – that the theology of substitution found its first full articulation in St. Anselm’s treatise “Cur Deus Homo?” (That is, why did God become man?) Anselm was working on a medieval model here, where fealty to the Lord of the Manor was all. The honor of the master was what mattered, and his honor had to be “satisfied” at any cost. Applying this to human beings, Anselm theorized that we sinful creatures must be roundly punished for our failures. The price for our iniquity must be “paid” in the sacrifice of Jesus, a kind of divine transaction.
I suspect that Anselm’s theory (wonderfully contradicted by Abelard in the 12th century, when he wrote about the death of Jesus on the cross as simply a guide for all of us, a way of acknowledging that all human beings — including Jesus — had to go through suffering to accomplish union with God) has done a great deal of harm, especially as it evolved down the centuries into the theory that Jesus died for our sins so that God could feel “satisfied,” as if the Almighty couldn’t love his creation without this necessary…
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