God loves a good BBQ…
That’s the real problem with the God’s wrath theory. According to most Christian belief, Jesus and God are one and the same. So you can’t have Jesus dying on the Cross to appease God’s wrath without trying to figure out the dual role of God/Jesus in the event. Was God watching himself die on the Cross? Did Jesus feel wrath towards mankind? When Jesus called out to God, who was he talking to?
It certainly seems like a more plausible explanation is that God felt bad about some of the decisions he had made and sacrificed himself to humanity to show his regret.
Do I count as a theologian? Ok, I’m not a Christian - in fact I’m a pretty hardcore atheist - but once upon a time, I was actually studying theology in grad school with the expectation of doing ministry in the United Methodist church. I didn’t post much about what I was going through at the time, but I did answer occasional theological questions here on the SDMB. Looking up those old posts to find the ones I wanted and reading through the threads has been a real blast from the past!
Here’s one from shortly after I left religion, in which I quote my own earlier post, from when I still had a foot in the door.
My theology in those posts wasn’t completely original; I got most of it from a book I read for one of my seminary classes. I had hoped that I would have mentioned the title or author in one of those old posts, but I didn’t, and I’ve gotten rid of most my theology books. I can’t tell you who it was, therefore, but there’s at least one other Christian theologian who espoused such an idea. That one might even still be a Christian!
It’s a variation of the Moral-Influence Theory mentioned in Prof. Periwinkle’s link, so you might want to research that for more ideas. The variation I read was by a contemporary theologian, and it brought it much closer to your suggestion than traditional Moral-Influence Theory.
You might think being an atheist would put me beyond correcting other people’s theological misconceptions, but if you think that, you’d be advised not to bring up infant vs. believer’s baptism around me, or the proper form of eucharistic invitation, subjects about which I somehow still manage to hold VERY STRONG OPINIONS despite thinking the whole topic is a bunch of meaningless malarkey. It’s the price of attending seminary, I suppose.
Anyway, it is not the case, according to the Bible or orthodox Christian theology (including Lutheranism), that God split of a part of himself to become human. On the contrary, the Gospel of John starts off with an ode to the pre-existance of Christ the Son (AKA the Word), who was with God the Father before creation. Orthodoxy declares, in fact, that the Trinity is essential to God’s being and is not the result of a decision God made nor an artifact of God’s interaction with humans. In technical terms, it’s an ontological Trinity rather than merely an economic Trinity. (There. I’ve finally done something with my degree. Are you happy, Mom?)
That doesn’t actually support the argument: it references God’s future wrath, not past wrath. Further, it doesn’t say that Jesus sacrificed himself to save us from God’s wrath.
A. I don’t see where Frylock specified whether or not Jesus saved us from God’s future wrath or God’s past wrath; all the OP said was “The traditional idea of course is that Christ was offered as a sacrifice to God to satisfy his wrath etc etc.”
B. There at least a half-dozen major branches of Christianity* and thousands of individual sects and denominations. The quoted passage talks about Christ dying for us and us being saved from “God’s wrath” through Christ. There is simply no GQ answer to the question “What does Romans 5:8-10 really mean?”, but “The traditional idea of course is that Christ was offered as a sacrifice to God to satisfy his wrath etc etc.” is not an utterly absurd statement of Christian theology–I think it would certainly work as a “traditional idea” if not the “traditional idea”. It’s not like Frylock said “The traditional idea of course is that Christ was offered as a sacrifice to Cthulhu to save us from Azathoth” or something completely off the wall like that.
*Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Mormons, “Oriental Orthodox” (Armenians, Copts, Ethiopian Orthodox), and, uh, Nestorians (Assyrian Christians). “Major” in a taxonomic sense, not necessarily demographically.
You forgot Pentecostals! They’re usually lumped in with other Protestants, but some scholars regard them as a separate genus. You included Mormons, so I figured Pentecostals might qualify as well.
The “God’s wrath threory” hinges on what is meant by the “wrath of God.” I suspect it may be misleading to think of the wrath of God as meaning that God is very angry at human beings, and that it might be more like the kind of violent chemical reaction you get when two opposinjg substances (the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity) come into contact. But I’m out of my theological depth here, and I did a little looking online but couldn’t find a good theological definition or explanation of the “wrath of God.”
In the past, your contributions to theological threads have been among the most valuable, at least in my opinion, so when I saw your name on this one, I said “Oh good! I want to see what Alan Smithee has to say about this.”
The Immaculate Conception was when Mary was conceived (through her parents having sex) without original sin. You may mean the virgin birth?
No, I meant the IC.
No problem as I see it. The best expositors on theology would be those who remained in or regained sanity. 
I assume that Mary (IC) proved that He has the ability to just have people born without original sin, the question being why didn’t he just do that with everyone?
Cool, thanks for the clarification. My knee jerks since the error is made so often.
Pentecostalism isn’t really a major “branch” of Christianity in the sense that Mormonism is. The Pentecostals are primarily Wesleyan in their doctrine, the group split from mainline Methodism years ago. Actually the conservative factions among the Methodists split from the main church, then the congregations split again, with one arm morphing into the Nazarines, Free Methodists, Holiness Churches, etc. and the other taking the charismatic doctrine. In fact, charismaticism, glossalalia, “works of the spirit” and so forth were the reason for this second split. While both groups share the same basic doctrine, the evangelical/holiness types frown severely on charismatic practices.
SS
It only begins to make sense when one realizes God has Münchausen syndrome by proxy.
Since I think most of the theological answers have been given, I’m putting my two cents in. The original point of sacrifice was atonement for sins. Not a “God is mad so you have to placate him” action but a “you did something you weren’t supposed to do so you need to do something that is a hardship so that you think twice the next time you do it”.
But I suspect human nature is to eventually forget why you’re supposed to do the sacrifice and start blaming God for requiring you to sacrifice your best sheep, and it must be because God is angry.
I tend to think like the OP does - that sacrifice is not for God’s sake but a part of human psychological need. I’m not surprised though to find that it hasn’t shown up in theological thought because to consider this is to consider that much of religion may be more about what we want out of God, than what God wants out of us.
Moreover, I think that we’ve only learned enough about the world in the past couple of hundred years or so to understand that much of what we would have previously ascribed to a wrathful God is simply the nature of how the world works.
With that view, you could consider that Jesus “died for our sins” more along the lines of God saying “Look, we need to stop with the sacrifices. Here, I’m sacrificing my son and you aren’t going to be able to top that so start looking for better things to do than killing sheep”
Yes, but I didn’t follow up (and this is my last post) because it was pointed out how much of a hijack this is.
Since this is mainly a theological discussion, at this point it’s better off in GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
On the subject of sacrifices, they were commonplace in the religious cultures of primitive peoples, so we expect to see Scripture full of animal sacrifices (and potential human sacrifices … Isaac), but when we get to Jesus, I’m inclined to believe the “sacrifice” involved is more of a ritual display of God letting His Son find out first hand what being human is all about, and then a handy opportunity to show off with some re-animation when He rises after three days.