Word: godly
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...Crossan has called it "the most unfortunately successful idea in the history of Christian thought." He suggests that after the Christian church gained worldly power, Anselm's theory created a sense of debt and a lever for social control. "If I can persuade you that there's a punishing God and that you deserve to be punished but I have some sort of way out for you, then that's a very attractive theology," he says...
...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 tended not to linger on the agony of Jesus. It was more 'friend of my soul, he walks with me and talks with me.'" That phenomenon, which has only accelerated, afflicts conservative Christianity as much as those in mainline churches, says...
...marker in the culture wars. Political scientist John Green of Ohio's Akron University notes that the sense of sin integral to substitution theory informs the religious right's politics of individual morality. Indeed, substitution's top-down nature reaffirms conservatives' scorn of any rights that they feel lack God's biblical imprimatur. "The substitutionary understanding is humbling," says Mohler. "It has the Father in the position of satisfying his righteous demands of us through Christ's atonement. We don't have the authority to define our own existence or to claim rights such as a woman's right...
...abusive culture and taught people how to do that." These Christs, rolled into one Christ, stood by her in her pain, enabled her to see her mother as having died standing up to her abuser and helped Terrell find her place as a person "trying to live unto God." And so, she says, "Jesus is really for us not substitutionary only but also the one who truly identifies with us and goes with us in suffering and can provide us an example of how to live our lives...
...should go. "The Cross is at the center of Christianity, and we know that it was at the center of Jesus' own thinking," says John Stott, an Anglican preacher and the author of The Cross of Christ, who suffered a stroke last year. "I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross." He is almost pleading. "In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune...