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OCCUPATION: Frequently honored portrayer of scrappy gals in movies like Cold Mountain and Chicago...
Some modern atonement theorists maintain that only one answer--theirs--flows inevitably from Scripture. But more agree with Chicago Theological Seminary's Theodore Jennings Jr. "The New Testament is just all over the map" on the question of why Christ died, he says. Its writers "are all persuaded that something really drastic, fundamental and dramatic has happened, and they're pulling together all kinds of ways to understand that...
...father whose moral universe somehow seems to require his death. Even if one ignores literalist claims that substitution espouses divine child abuse, the evidence of hundreds of years suggests that, in the wrong hands, it can deliver the wrong message. Writes the Rev. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, of her experience as a spiritual counselor: "Countless women have told me that their priest or minister had advised them, as 'good Christian women' to accept beatings by their husbands as 'Christ accepted the cross.' An overemphasis on the suffering of Jesus to the exclusion of his teaching...
...strongly does Thistlethwaite feel this that a few weeks ago, she convened a group at Chicago's First United Methodist Church to talk about Gibson's film. It was a war movie, she told about 30 attendees, the most violent she had ever screened. A colleague of hers said the film seemed to assume the theory of substitutionary atonement. "The problems with this classic Christian theology," he pointed out, are the "glorification of death and suffering, the encouragement of scapegoating and making forgiveness the [Christlike] burden of the victim...
...more concern to those interested in the health of American faith was--until last February, at least--the large proportion of Christians who really didn't think of Jesus' death much at all. "In most Protestant churches," says the Chicago Theological Seminary's Jennings, "there's hardly anything of a Cross there. You go straight from Palm Sunday to Easter without passing Go." The omission extends far beyond the historical Protestant aversion to crucifixes featuring Jesus' body. Rather, says Jack Miles, author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, it dates back to the 18th century, when "Americans...