On Jesus - why specifically was suffering and dying required?

Great Debates
161

I am unsurprised that “death” is a reversible state in godly speak.

There are some details about the mechanical process of being dead in heaven that are a bit ambiguous here, mind. Obviously the component parts are still alive and chugging along. Obviously the ‘child’'s soul isn’t off floating around in metaheaven the way theists often imagine mortal souls go to heaven when a mortal dies, to that doesn’t parallel too well either. Sounds to me like the child was just turned off or killed like the materialists think people are killed - his internal processes have stopped working properly so he’s not moving or thinking anymore. He can be tuned up and restarted like a dead car or computer. (We’re assuming that God “has the technology”, in a way that humans don’t except in movies like Robocop.)

You’re missing my point. I can call anything a child, with greater or lesser justification. I’ve written a book. I can call it my child. It has some superficial resemblances to a child (I created it, it’s smaller than me), but it would be a touch presumptuous to assume that it’s going to need a college fund, sheerly based on the fact that I called it a child. Even if there are certain parallels that can be drawn to justify calling it that.

That was my entire point - that analogies don’t provide new information about a thing; they give you another way of looking at the information you have. So I’m disinclined to extrapolate about the Collective just because you call it a child, because for all I know it’s more like a book than a baby.

Note: this just means I won’t extrapolate. You can speculate anything you want; it’s your theology to invent as you please. But I can’t make assumptions about your theology, so I can only go by what you actually say.

Oh, this isn’t about converting me; it’s about me understanding what you’re saying. I have difficulty understanding things that don’t make sense, so I need the details to be explained in a way that is coherent and works. Simple as that.

Um, you can do a google image search for “Death Star Girl” and get images back of girls with a Death Star where their waists should be. (And images of dogs dressed up as AT-AT walkers, oddly enough.) I don’t think that this is definitive proof that the Death Star is female and can have little baby Star Destroyers. And Jesus spoke in metaphor and parables a lot. He’s actually famous for it.

This does not mean that your theology does not include the belief that the planet earth is made of flesh and has a womb and all that. Sure it’s contradicted by, well, digging a hole, but whatever. You can easily still believe it.

But regardless - I’m beginning to think that this ‘mommy earth’ business is a bit of a tangent; what does this have to do with Jesus getting killed, again?

I’m going to assume that this is supposed to be all happening on the spiritual plane, because while people exchange bacteria and viruses and the like (and occasionally sperm), for the most part people don’t physically swap cells and organs and the like, at least not in casual passing.

Also, this feels a bit tangenty too. Even if we’re going to eventually fly into space and have tea with the residents of Alpha Centauri someday, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t happening in Jesus’s day. And I’m pretty sure the only Centurions* which had anything to do with his death were Roman ones.

  • Yes, I know that should be Centaurions. Sue me, it was a joke.

People can find comfort in anything, especially things that tell them they’re loved and special and part of something important. This is not indicitive of a system’s validity or correctness.

But at the moment I’m not interested in validity or correctness - I’m talking about religion. All I want is it to be sensical, self-consistent, and to have the explanatory power to answer my question. That difficult enough to achieve!

Sure, sure; that’s what we look like to us. To this child thing, though, we might not look like that. (Well, presuming it wasn’t dead and could notice us at all.) We’re pretty tiny compared to it, after all. And Satan, who is apparently operating on a comparable size-scale with this child-thing, doesn’t seem to think we’re more important than we consider dandruff, which supports the idea that we’re so insignificant compared to these creatures that we’re less than ants.

But regardless, details details. Since the child is dead at the moment, how we’d look to it if it were alive is unlikely to matter much to the whole Jesus/suffering question

Sounds like lovely fodder for some slash fiction, but other than that I’ll just file it as background info until its relevence to Jesus’s trip to earth becomes clear.

I think we’re too buried in analogies for this to make sense to me anymore. It might be useful to unwind this a bit - how mechanically is Satan causing us suffering? Did he place us on earth? Did he make our bodies mortal? Is he piping the oil out to fuel Hell? Or did God do all this for him? Why? And most importantly - what does this have to do with Jesus’s trip to the cross?

And yes, “satan” is actually a title and only developed into a name due to centuries of misinterpretation of Job. I think there’s a SD column or staff report about that.

Revelations is gibberish to me, and I would be interested in my interpretation of the gibberish anyway. I want to know how you think that sin caused peak oil, or whatever was going on that Jesus’s death was supposed to be either caused by or doing something about.

Seriously, this shouldn’t be all that complicated to explain.

162

If what Jesus said in John 10 was true, then the book of Revelations would be null and void.

163

It works for you…fine! It could never work for me, I want to know the truth,and to me your beliefs show no truth, just your own beliefs that make no sense to me.You don’t seem to want facts, and I say,"if that floats your boat…fine!I have noticed your beliefs seem to change a lot over the first post you put on the Dope!

164

Actually, since The Book of Revelations comes after, wouldn’t that make what Jesus said in John 10 null and void?

165

Well, there’s your problem. :wink:

166

In answer to the thread’s main question, I had been tempted to mention that, though it’s been quite a while since I’ve read it, I remember C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity saying something to the effect that a Christian isn’t obligated to believe in any particular explanation or theory about the Atonement—about how or why Jesus’s suffering and death were necessary for salvation—only that they were. But I declined to mention it because (1) I wasn’t sure how well I could trust my memory and (2) I didn’t think the comment really shed any more light on the question.

Now, however, I happen to have run across a blog post about precisely C.S. Lewis’s view of the Atonement, which had a link to the chapter in question, available online, so that I could go back and re-read it for myself. Here’s the particular paragraph I was remembering:
[QUOTE=C. S. Lewis]
Now before I became a Christian I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I admit that even this theory does not seem to me quite so immoral and so silly as it used to; but that is not the point I want to make. What I came to see later on was that neither this theory nor any other is Christianity. The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.
[/QUOTE]
I confess, I don’t know how helpful or sensible I find Lewis’s explanation in this chapter. I wish he’d said more about how or why “even this theory does not seem to me quite so immoral and so silly as it used to.” But it might be worth looking at what Lewis has to say, if only because Lewis’s explanation may be the one that more people have read than that of any other twentieth-century writer—especially if you count the mid-century Brits who listened to Lewis’s radio talks on which Mere Christianity was based, and especially especially if you count people who have read the allegorical version in his The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (or seen the movie).

Speaking of which, I was unsatisfied with the resolution of that story, for perhaps some of the same reasons you’re unsatisfied with explanations of Jesus’s death. Who made the Rules under which Aslan had to die (the "deep magic from the dawn of time), and why, and why did Aslan have to follow them? It smacks of arbitrary authorial contrivance. But, I think this may have been discussed in a Cafe Society thread at one time.

167

All input is welcome, so long as it’s relatively on topic, which this definitely is.

Based on your posted excerpt, Lewis seems to be saying, “The mechanism doesn’t matter; what matters is that it works.” This is acually a commonly accepted stance in science when the answers seem to be completely unavailable, such as with “Why does gravity happen?” However this approach is generally only held to as long as no information whatsoever is theoretically available on a subject; the minute somebody finds a hook into it, people start theorizing wildly and, reality willing, will eventually settle down on an explanation that everyone seems to agree is plausible. (I’m not sure that this has happened with gravity yet.)

With the Jesus question, though, one doesn’t get the impression that this should be -or is- a subject upon which no data is available. The operating forces seem to be centered around an intelligent diety that people often say they can communicate with. There are canon documents that occasionally endeavor to explain what is going on. Relatively speaking, there are piles of data.

Of course, as best I can tell the available data points to the reasoning I gave in the OP: God accepts sacrifices because they make him happy. They make him happy because they please him on a hunger/flavor level. Therefore he arranged for the Jesus sacrifice because he was hungry and Jesus was very tasty. (I’m not really surprised that this theory hasn’t gained wide traction nowadays.)

Regardless though, even if one doesn’t like that explanation there should still be enough data out there for them to construct an alternate one - and many people have. Lewis, on the other hand, seems to be trying to avoid or dodge the question. Which many people do, but it seems pretty cheap in someone who is supposedly a pre-eminent cristian thinker. And that he may have justified sloppy and lazy thinking in thousands or millions of others is just painful.

Yeah - that’s pretty much a plot weakness, though one that is relatively easy to accept because we’re used to fantasy magic operating on arbitrary and possibly nonsensical rules that are apparently part of the universe itself the way gravity seems to be part of the real universe. Of course the problem with such a notion is that it requires the universe to be aware of what people, sin, death, and scapegoatting are, to that it can decide which of the bactieria occupying itself’s behaviors qualify for this special rule, but again half of magic seems nearly sentent anyway (‘detect evil’? Define ‘evil’!) so it’s generally not hard to give it a pass. (Especially since we actually know who the intelligence behind the magic is -the author- but focusing on that wouldn’t improve our enjoyment of the story.)

In the real world, of course, that doesn’t fly too well; either the universe is uncaring and sentient, or the part making the screwy rules is explicitly sentient and has a name. And that name is either “God”, or somebody that God can’t or won’t oppose - there are no other options that explain why God is following these screwy rules. Which can be problematic for some.

168

Is gravity a screwy rule?

169

In my opinion, yes. Physics provides a very interesting account of how gravity effects systems both large and small and how it came to prominence after the other forces in the universe (from what little I recall from physics, anyway). However, in a universe created by an omniscient being for the purpose of being amenable to human existence, it is positively harmful. Why not have humans capable of traversing space as they please, with no “atmosphere”: instead, boundless inhabitable space?

Edit: “The fall” is the antithesis to the “ontological argument”. One ought to avoid invoking both.

170

Well, it may be that what appear to us to be “screwy rules” are actually logical necessities, or the necessary consequences of not-so-screwy rules. Things that Lewis has written, here and elsewhere, make me suspect he’d support this view. For example:
[QUOTE=C. S. Lewis]
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back.
[/QUOTE]

171

Screwy enough, but at least it lacks omnibenevolent beings arranging for torture and death. Even so, once you factor in all that relativity stuff and what happens to you as you approach a black hole, it is a bit messed up.

Though that’s not the screwyest part of the screwy rule. The Jesus thing appears to be based around a rule that works only on Jesus. Those other two guys on the neighboring cross’s deaths didn’t do squat; all the innocent babies who’ve died stillborn in the womb didn’t do squat; John the Baptist getting beheaded didn’t do squat. This rule only worked on Jesus. And if the rule is a fundamental part of the universe, that means that the universe noticed that Jesus died. And it knew about sin and damnation, in order to know that now that Jesus had died it had to do something about those things too. And it was able to do something about those too. Basically you are forced to accept that your universe is itself aware of the goings-on inside it and has a personal hand in the judgement or lack thereof of mortals. Which is to say, it’s doing all the things God was supposed to be doing, except that if you’re claiming it’s a universal rule and not God’s idea it must be an entity more universal than and superceding God.

Gravity, on the other hand, is no respector of persons. It is aware of mass. All mass, any mass, anywhere. It is aware of mass, and can apply force to mass, following a very straightforward and simple rule. Pulling this off doesn’t require a very intelligent universe at all, especially compared to the Jesus thing.

[/QUOTE]
That could work for repentance, but it gets kind of weird when you try to do it with the Jesus thing. ‘Remember, having his son nailed to a cross is not something God demands before forgiving everyone else: it is simply a description of what being forgiven by God is like’?

172

Of course, because (at least he told us so) he was the son of God.

I guess, but that was then and I am me. Simply, by accepting Him as my savior I receive Grace. It doesn’t really work for everybody, because not everybody will buy the car to find out if the engine runs. I like Lewis, and Christianity has done a lot for many people, but I won’t contend that Jesus was not the Son of God, only that I do not know.

On the other hand, I have never been one to be swayed by the Holy Bible, and especially not by those that quote it ad infinitum. When some offer their ‘truth’ down their noses at me, how do I know they are truthfully repeating the word? Is their word in context? Are they trying to trick me into buying the car without a test drive? For them to take offense is for them to show me that they think they are God, which I do know for certain they are not.

When told that Jesus died for my sins, I am apt to reply that the banana is a quality source of potassium.

But on to gravity. Suppose these dimensions suggested by M-theory are real, and the graviton flows incessantly from other dimensions. With gravitons flowing in all directions a body of a certain mass would be held in place unless shielded from the pressure of these gravitons by the mass of a body in its proximity. I can’t believe everybody doesn’t see that. Then space-time would be warped by varying degrees of pressure from these gravitons depending on the amount of massive shielding in the vicinity of a point in space. So obvious that I am going to get a physics book out and start yelling at cars on the street corner about this. Or maybe I will start my own thread. That will teach them !!!

173

It’s pretty odd that the surrounding terrain would notice that, though. And I should clarify - I’m not talking about the terrain God created. I’m talking about the terrain God lives in, which necessarily has existed as long as he has and thus presumably predates Jesus, and which is mechanically enforcing the natural laws that God must abide by. Laws which somehow have something to do with sin and death and sons of God, apparently.

Well, that or God is the one doing it all. Which would make everything a lot simpler from an occam’s razor standpoint at least.

To be fair to the people who won’t buy a car to find out if the engine runs, it’s really stupid to buy a car to find out if the engine runs.

In this thread, of course, I’m asking for an explanation of how it runs. Your average car salesman could direct me to a diagram of an internal combustion engine - this would not prove that his car runs, but at least there’s a method by which it theoretically could. Which is a start, at least.

If he directs me to a picture of a hamster wheel, though, I am likely to get suspicious.

Forget truthfully repeating the word, I have a hard time convincing myself that they’re not just flat wrong about everything. But for the moment I’m not interested in truth; I’m interested in internal logic and consitency.

And when I’m told that I’m apt to roll my eyes and grumble about the company I’m keeping, but if I were more creative I might reply that Gollum died for Middle-Earth’s sins. And then wonder just how did destroying that ring kill Sauron, anyway?

Um, okay…

174

Did Jesus have it “easy”? I mean, he knew the horrible events awaiting him.
But he also knew that after this, he would be restored to life.
This seems to be a major difference between (his) sufferings, and those of ordinary humans.

175

It would if Jesus wasn’t God as taught,and if Matthew and Mark hadn’t quoted Jesus as saying he would “RETURN” in his father’s glory with his angels, while some of them standing there listening to him were still alive…that didn’t happen so the second coming would have already happened; and Matthew also quotes Jesus as telling them the world would end in that generation;to make this sound different some churches teach he didn’t mean that generation, but Matthew uses the same word for generation when he says there were 14 generations between David and Jesus.

176

If you read Psalm 82 in KJV, and John 10 you will see that the word ‘god’ didn’t seem to mean the creater of the universe, but a man of power. Jesus starts out (when accused of blasphemy" It says in your law,I said you are gods etc." To me it means not a flesh and blood god as some translate it to mean’Jesus’s connection to God was no different than any other person’.

177

God could not exist if there was no existence first,if he wasn’t in existence then he didn’t exist! Place has to come before a being.

178

Plus his sufferings were for only a few hours, while some people suffer for years with no true knowlege if they will live on after that! Look at what our soldiers go through after trying to make things better for others, so many lose their limbs , have mental problems etc. and much suffering for years,plus they do not have the luxury of knowing they will have an eternal life of joy in a few hours!

179

This actually makes a lot of sense if you’re from the tradition that stresses Faith. In that tradition, Faith is what is required to believe in Jesus and God. To that mindset, there are things that you just are not going to be able to understand, things that God does understand, and thus affect his choices and behavior, but leave us poor mortals confused and wondering - things like the problem of Evil and whatnot. In that tradition, you aren’t going to be able to understand, so what is important is that you have faith that God is good and doing what is best, and you have faith that Jesus is God’s son and thus God. So even when you encounter something that theoretically you could understand - the mechanism of being saved - it isn’t important that you know or understand the mechanism, because by knowing, you defeat the purpose - faith. Once you have faith, then it doesn’t matter the mechanism, and supplying you with answers for parts of it seems to stress finding answers over having faith.

Not that I agree with this sentiment, but at least that has some internal consistency to it.

What if it is a *really big *hamster wheel?

180

What I don’t get is that accoring to what I was taught, Jesus died for our sins. OK but then why do we still have baptism to wash away original sin? Didn’t Jesus do that for us already? And then why do we have confession if Jesus has already served as the scapegoat? Then I heard the theory that Jesus is the Paschal Lamb but I don’t recall the lamb being torured before its sacrifice and Jesus’ crucifiction was not really like the ceremony with the Lamb.

But then the question is: is the OP correct in assuming the crucifiction was required. Let’s assume Jusus knows that his preaching will get him executed but he chooses to continue his preaching despite the eventual outcome. It would be similar to a soldier going into certain death to save his squad. Was his death required? Not really but in a way yes because he needed to take action that he knew would result in his death to save his comrades.