Word: godly
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...Adam's disobedience to everybody's transgressions. The 16th century reformer John Calvin replaced Anselm's feudal king with a severe judge furious at a deservedly cursed creation. Hala Saad, a contemporary churchgoer in Texas, recites a milder modern version: "All I had to do was sign up for God's debt-cancellation plan--for Jesus to take my place...
From the 18th century on, however, various thinkers developed a bill of complaints about substitution, although few wanted to abandon it totally. To some Americans, Calvin's angry, all-powerful God was too reminiscent of the arbitrary tyrant by whose overthrow the country had defined itself. In an age when Thomas Jefferson was literally cutting out all references to miracles from his copy of the Bible, substitution's supernatural structure perturbed some Enlightenment rationalists. Its scant room for human volition contradicted a growing 18th and 19th century optimism that the species could perfect itself through its own efforts...
...relief, they turned to a source as old as Anselm. The French theologian Peter Abelard had also worked in the Middle Ages to address Jesus' role in reducing sinful humanity's distance from God, but he did so without recourse to tit-for-tat transaction. His atonement took place less as a compact between God the Father and God the Son and more in the hearts of believers cleaving to the message of Jesus' life--and the love most dramatically expressed in his willingness to die rather than renounce his calling. "Love answers love's appeal," Abelard wrote. With Jesus...
Notes Yale theologian Serene Jones: "In substitution theory, the problem between humanity and God is one of debt. In Abelardian theory, the problem is one of ignorance. We don't have enough information." This fit in nicely with the Enlightenment spirit, and it took wing. The Hartford, Conn., minister Horace Bushnell, its great 19th century proponent, declared that atonement's new location was not in "remote fields of being" but in humanity, as "a moral effect, wrought in the mind of the race." Jesus' death became less central, because it was no longer the price for lifting the burden...
...vigor a few weeks ago by the Rev. Shafer at Rutgers Presbyterian. Shafer, having just seen The Passion of the Christ, felt moved to respond to what he regarded as its assumption that "the central purpose of Jesus' existence [was] to offer himself as a sacrificial ransom to a God made angry by our sin." The pastor disagreed. "The mission and purpose of Jesus' life and ministry," he preached, "was, first, to model for humankind the fullness of mercy and forgiveness that God offers to us sinners and, second, to model for us the perfection of love that God...